Killer robots may remain a dystopian vision of the future for now, but another military deployment of AI could be sooner to arrive on the battlefield. Known as the Aided Threat Recognition from Mobile Cooperative and Autonomous Sensors (ATR-MCAS), the system is being developed by the US Army to transform how the military plans and conducts operations. It's comprised of a network of air and ground vehicles equipped with sensors that identify potential threats and autonomously notify soldiers. The information collected would then be analysed by an AI-enabled decision support agent that can recommend responses -- such as which threats to prioritize. The system was developed by the Army's Artificial Intelligence Task Force (AITF), which was activated last year to improve the Army's connections with the broader AI community.

Underwater photography is hard to get right. Special filters, artificial lights, and top-of-the-line underwater cameras can help, but there's still a lot of water between the camera and the object in the photo. We've become accustomed to the blue-green tint of underwater photography. How would the ocean look without water? What are the true colors of a coral reef?

Artificial Intelligence technology can today automatically mine through news reports and online content from around the world, helping experts recognize anomalies that could lead to a potential epidemic or, worse, a pandemic. In other words, our new AI overlords might actually help us survive the next plague. These new AI capabilities are on full display with the recent coronavirus outbreak, which was identified early by a Canadian firm called BlueDot, which is one of a number of companies that use data to evaluate public health risks. The company, which says it conducts "automated infectious disease surveillance," notified its customers about the new form of coronavirus at the end of December, days before both the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) sent out official notices, as reported by Wired. Now nearing the end of January, the respiratory virus that's been linked to the city of Wuhan in China has already claimed the lives of more than 100 people.

At HIMSS20 next month, Nuance Communications, an AI-based clinician information systems vendor, will introduce new systems to the Nuance AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging designed to provide a one-stop shop for radiologists to review and purchase AI models to improve their workflow. The AI Marketplace is similar to the idea of an app store – a digital marketplace that enables subscribers to purchase applications, or, in the case of Nuance, AI models. The goal is to connect developers to radiologists, creating a direct line of communication to help build and improve AI models to meet their evolving needs and improve functionality of algorithms from development to practice. The AI Marketplace provides radiologists with tools for reading and reporting efficiencies, giving radiologists a unique opportunity to integrate AI models from various developers, collaborate on AI development and improvement, and ease administrative burdens of physicians overall, said Karen Holzberger, senior vice president and general manager, diagnostics, at Nuance Communications. "The solutions available in our AI Marketplace automate routine reporting and image analysis, aid in diagnosis, and help uncover incidental findings," Holzberger explained.

Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That tells CBS correspondent Errol Barnett that the First Amendment allows his company to scrape the internet for people's photos. Google and YouTube have sent a cease-and-desist letter to Clearview AI, the facial recognition company that has been scraping billions of photos off the internet and using it to help more than 600 police departments identify people within seconds. That follows a similar action by Twitter, which sent Clearview AI a cease-and-desist letter for its data scraping in January. The letter from Google-owned YouTube was first seen by CBS News. (Note: CBS News and CNET share the same parent company, ViacomCBS.) The CEO of Clearview AI, a controversial and secretive facial recognition startup, is defending his company's massive database of searchable faces, saying in an interview on CBS This Morning Wednesday that it's his First Amendment right to collect public photos.

The document, which was prepared by chief economic adviser Krishnamurthy Subramanian and tabled by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Parliament on Friday, said the banking sector must scale up in tandem with the size of the Indian economy to support growth and development. The growth and efficiency of state-owned lenders, which account for over two-thirds of the banking space, is imperative for India to become a $5-trillion economy in the next five years, survey added. However, inefficient public sector banks can severely handicap the country's ability to make use of the unique available opportunities, and this could impact growth. "The state of the banking sector in India, therefore, needs urgent attention," it said. The survey said banks should also introduce employee stock ownership (ESOP) scheme and link it to the performance of employees. "Ownership by motivated, capable employees across all levels in the organization could give such employees tangible financial rewards for value enhancement, align their incentives with what is beneficial to the public sector banks, and create a mindset of enterprise ownership for employees," it added.

Isaac Asimov, roboticist and science fiction writer, predicted in his novel I, Robot in 1950 that robots and artificial intelligence were going to be banned from Earth in the year 2030. Instead, we are seeing huge advances in AI and this is likely to continue within the next decade. The UK's investment in AI recently reached a record high for 2019, rising from $1.02 billion for the whole of 2018 to $1.06 billion in the first six months of 2019. What's more, the European Commission's new president, Ursula von der Leyen recently made calls for a GDPR-style regulation for the use of AI to be put in place, signaling the predicted mass uptake of the technology amongst businesses across different industries. There are multiple facets of AI, all with varied uses and capabilities, and one area in particular that is attracting a lot of attention is Intelligent Automation.

A Dutch court has ordered the immediate halt of an automated surveillance system for detecting welfare fraud because it violates human rights, in a judgment likely to resonate well beyond the Netherlands. The case was seen as an important legal challenge to the controversial but growing use by governments around the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and risk modelling in administering welfare benefits and other core services. Campaigners say such "digital welfare states" – developed often without consultation, and operated secretively and without adequate oversight – amount to spying on the poor, breaching privacy and human rights norms and unfairly penalising the most vulnerable. The UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, applauded the verdict and said it was "a clear victory for all those who are justifiably concerned about the serious threats digital welfare systems pose for human rights". The decision "sets a strong legal precedent for other courts to follow", he added.

Relx today said it has inked a deal to buy US startup Emailage for roughly $480m (£368m) as the publishing and analytics giant looks to boost its fraud prevention capabilities. Emailage, which uses machine learning technology to help clients spot fraud, is one of a number of businesses cashing in on a booming demand for cybersecurity software. Relx did not disclose the value of the deal, which was struck with its Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions division, but a source close to the company said it was roughly $480m. It is the latest in a string of acquisitions for the firm, which last month agreed to buy ID Analytics from Norton Life Lock in a deal worth $375m. Both firms are set to be integrated into Relx's Risk and Business Analytics -- its fastest-growing division.

Mobile developers are often asked to implement the latest available features for their platforms, and demand for ML models in production application has increased dramatically over the last couple of years. The creation of production-ready Neural Networks requires a big dataset and lots of time, so our models in this course will have some reasonable limitations. But you will be able to train Semantic Segmentation Neural Network fast and understand critical concepts of how these models are trained and how they can be integrated into your apps. In this tutorial, we will look at the "Wanna Nails" case, and we will show you how to train a model that will detect nails in a couple of hours. "Wanna Nails" is an app that uses Object Segmentation to detect nails and try on different polish colors.