The concept of AI has been around for many decades. British mathematician Alan Turing proposed in 1950 that it might be possible for machines to use information to reason, solve problems, and make decisions. His framework is the basis of the Turing Test, which says an AI system learns until indistinguishable from a human being in its ability to hold a conversation. In 1956, a team presented proof of concept on AI at the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. Also in the 1950s, a group of researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) began work that would become the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The aging adage, "there's an app for that," is evolving into, "there's a robot for that." More and more automation is finding its way to the market for household chores like cleaning floors, and now that innovation is in farmer's fields with Odd.Bot, an automatic weeding robot. Odd.Bot made an appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last month with an informational booth and the weed-plucking device on display. Martijn Lukaart, Founder and CEO, explains that Odd.Bot is currently intended for use in organic farming fields to make the weed-pulling process easier for large farms who currently do all the work by hand. Many large-scale farmers have already invested in a platform that allows workers to lay face down on a bed as they are propelled through the rows of crops.

Clearview AI was founded in 2017 by Richard Schwartz and now-CEO Hoan Ton-That. The company counts Peter Thiel and AngelList founder Naval Ravikant among its investors. Clearview's technology is actually quite simple: Its facial recognition algorithm compares the image of a person's face from security camera footage to an existing database of potential matches. Marketed primarily to law enforcement agencies, the Clearview app allows users to take and upload a picture of a person then view all of the public images of that person as well as links to where those photos were published. Basically, if you're caught on camera anywhere in public, local law enforcement can use that image to mine your entire online presence for information about you, effectively ending any semblance of personal privacy.

That's troubling not only because these fakes might be used to sway opinions during an election or implicate a person in a crime, but because they've already been abused to generate pornographic material of actors and defraud a major energy producer. In anticipation of this new reality, a coalition of academic institutions, tech firms, and nonprofits are developing ways to spot misleading AI-generated media. Their work suggests that detection tools are a viable short-term solution but that the deepfake arms race is just beginning. The best AI-produced prose used to be closer to Mad Libs than The Grapes of Wrath, but cutting-edge language models can now write with humanlike pith and cogency. San Francisco research firm OpenAI's GPT-2 takes seconds to craft passages in the style of a New Yorker article or brainstorm game scenarios.

In 2019, smart speaker ownership in the U.S. surpassed 76 million, according to CIRP (Consumer Intelligence Research Partners), up from 66 million at the end of 2018. As voice-assistant technologies continue to advance in smartphones, smart speakers, and in vehicles, more consumers and businesses are exploring the benefits of using this technology to make tasks simpler. Tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are all chomping at the bit, hoping customers will turn to their voice assistants for increasingly complex tasks. CIRP's research suggests Amazon is the current leader in smart speakers, with about 70% of the installed base being Amazon Echo devices, 25% being made up of Google Home devices, and 5% being made up of Apple HomePods. This remains relatively unchanged from the firm's previous year's research, with the exception of slight percentage growth from both Google and Apple in 2019 compared to 2018.

If a poisonous gas were released in a bioterrorism attack, the ability to predict the path of its molecules -- through turbulent winds, temperature changes and unstable buoyancies -- could mean life or death. Understanding how a city will grow and change over a 20-year period could lead to more sustainable planning and affordable housing. Deriving equations to solve such problems -- adding up all of the relevant forces -- is, at best, difficult to the point of near-impossibility and, at worst, actually impossible. But machine learning can help. Using the motion of aerosol particles through a system in flux, researchers from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have devised a new model, based on a deep learning method, that can help researchers predict the behavior of chaotic systems, whether those systems are in the lab, in the pasture or anywhere else.

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Two Democratic U.S. Senators today proposed legislation that requires a moratorium on facial recognition use by federal agencies, government employees, and law enforcement until a Congressional commission can act to recommend guidelines and place limits on use of the technology. The bill, named the Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence Act, is being introduced today by Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). It would establish a 13-member Congressional Commission made up of people appointed by the president, members of Congress, federal immigration and law enforcement officers, and privacy and tech experts. Six committee members come from communities most impacted by use of facial recognition. That Commission's goal would be to ensure facial recognition does not produce bias or inaccurate results, stand in the way of law enforcement's efforts to identify missing and exploited children, or "create a constant state of surveillance of individuals in the United States that does not allow for a level of reasonable anonymity."

The collection of web-based software that Google offers to businesses and consumers is officially known as G Suite. Most people are familiar with Gmail and Google Docs, but quite a few do not realize that they offer a whole range of productivity and collaboration tools via your computer or mobile device. HONG KONG, HONG KONG - November 27: A woman using an Macbook Pro as she uses Google G Suite on ... [ ] November 27, 2017 in Hong Kong, Hong Kong. I have been working on another post about consumer-level uses of artificial intelligence (AI), not the media-hyped creepiness, but the practical, useful ways that AI is helping us do more and be more. Google started me thinking about this as I have watched it add various "smart" functions (think AI) to email as well as increasing ways to help me complete or enhance a document, spreadsheet, or presentation with the Explore function.

C. Light Technologies, a Berkeley, CA-based neurotech and AI company participating in UC Berkeley's premier accelerator SkyDeck, is introducing the world's first retinal eye-tracking technology paired with machine learning to assess and predict neurological health. The technology is fast (10 seconds), non-invasive and objective. Eye motion has been used for decades to quickly triage brain health. Now C. Light Technologies, a Berkeley SkyDeck neurotech, and AI company is measuring it down to the cellular level to monitor and track neurological diseases in seconds and determine how well medications are working. Neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), concussions, etc. affect millions of lives around the world.