With an aim to help warship crews make quick decisions and process data efficiently, the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense recently announced contracts to use AI-based (artificial intelligence) technology in warships. According to a source, Defense and Security Accelerator (DASA) will be funding £1 million (around US$1.3 million) for AI contracts as part of its "Intelligent Ship – The Next Generation" competition, which is aimed at using innovative approaches for Human-AI and AI-AI teaming for various defense platforms like warships, aircraft, and land vehicles. James Heappey, U.K.'s Defense Minister, said, "The astonishing pace at which global threats are evolving requires new approaches and fresh thinking to the way we develop our ideas and technology. The funding will research pioneering projects into how AI and automation can support our armed forces in their essential day-to-day work." DASA's warship competition, in alliance with the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), is intended to enhance the designs of future defense platforms by using advances in automation, autonomy, machine learning, and AI.

Written for Daily Hive by Steve Astorino, vice president of Development, Cognos, and Planning Analytics at Hybrid Data Management and Director of IBM Canada Labs, the largest software development organization in Canada. He is the co-author of "Artificial Intelligence: Evolution and Revolution" Harvard Business Review once called Data Scientists "the sexiest job of the 21st century." So what exactly is a data scientist, and what makes it such a hot job in today's market? Despite its rise across Canadian and global business sectors, data science is still largely unknown or misunderstood by the public at large. In one sentence, a data scientist understands how to collect, use, and analyze data using a machine learning model to solve real-world problems.

Artificial intelligence burst onto Wall Street several years ago, to fanfare and hope. Unfortunately, AI-based investing strategies have struggled to live up to some of the more inflated expectations for their performance. There is no denying these strategies' theoretical promise. By being able to sift through otherwise prohibitively large amounts of data, and then "learn" from it, AI is supposed to be able to discover profitable patterns that were previously invisible to mere mortals.

In 1985 the US pulled the plug on a computer-controlled anti-aircraft tank after a series of debacles in which its electronic brain locked guns onto a stand packed with top generals reviewing the device. Mercifully it didn't fire, but did subsequently attack a portable toilet instead of a target drone. The M247 Sergeant York (pictured above) may have been an embarrassing failure, but digital technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have changed the game since then. Today defence contractors around the world are competing to introduce small unmanned tracked vehicles into military service. Just like an army on the move, there are contrasting views about how far and how fast this technology will advance.

Despite its commitment to'trustworthy' artificial intelligence, the EU is bankrolling AI projects that are questionable, write Fieke Jansen and Daniel Leufer. Fieke Jansen is a PhD candidate at the Data Justice Lab and Mozilla Foundation Fellow 2019-2020. Daniel Leufer, PhD, is a Mozilla Foundation Fellow 2019-2020 hosted by Access Now and member of the Working Group on Philosophy of Technology at KU Leuven, Belgium. Discussions on the negative impact of Artificial Intelligence in society include horror stories plucked from either China's high-tech surveillance state and its use of the controversial social credit system, or from the US and its use of recidivism algorithms and predictive policing. Typically, Europe is excluded from these stories, due to the perception that EU citizens are protected from such AI-fueled nightmares through the legal protection offered by the GDPR, or because there is simply no horror-inducing AI deployed across the continent. In contrast to this perception, journalists and NGOs have shown that imperfect and ethically questionable AI systems such as facial recognition, fraud detection and smart (a.k.a surveillance) cities, are also in use across Europe.

ANA Holdings Inc., the operator of All Nippon Airways Co., said Wednesday it has started testing a semi-autonomous bus that will transport passengers and staff working at Tokyo's Haneda Airport. The company will conduct the test with the electric bus capable of carrying 57 passengers on a 1.9-kilometer route through the end of this month, aiming to start trial operation later in the year. The vehicle, with level-3 automation, allows drivers to turn their attention away from driving and engage in different tasks. "As the Tokyo Olympics are approaching, we hope more passengers from around the world will see our latest technology," ANA Senior Executive Vice President Shinzo Shimizu said in a ceremony at the airport. In 2018, the number of passengers who arrived at and departed from the airport increased 2.1 percent to 85 million, according to Japan Airport Terminal Co. which manages the Haneda Airport facilities.

Fully self-driving cars are still a thing of the future. But in today's laboratories, the technology ranges from commonly used cruise control systems to so much automation that humans don't need to get into a car at all. In Taiwan, a startup is developing a driver's cockpit that's comfortable and packed with artificial intelligence features that transfers control of the vehicle to the computer whenever the system senses that the human driver is sick, tired, distracted or just sloppy. The 3-year-old Taipei-based Mindtronic AI developed this cockpit, called DMX, last year with luxuries like easy-to-use entertainment for the driver. But what if the driver gets mesmerized by a soccer match?

New technologies are poised to challenge assumptions that AI and robotics will be used to perform only low-level and highly repetitive tasks. Over the past decade, U.S. tech firms have made significant advancements in artificial intelligence and robotics, making it far easier and more efficient to automate tasks and functions across industries. Artificial intelligence (AI) affects all types of risks and lines of insurance, and the workers' compensation market has a particularly large stake in the developments. Although the U.S. has experienced technological change and disruption during prior periods of industrial revolution, the pace and scope of the fourth industrial Revolution positions it to have a far greater impact on the U.S. and global economies. The recent advancements in AI and robotics are some of the most significant computer science advancements of our generations.

Snyk, a cybersecurity platform that helps developers find vulnerabilities in their open source applications, has raised $150 million in a round of funding led by New York-based private equity firm Stripes, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Coatue, Tiger Global, BoldStart, Trend Forward, and Amity. This takes Snyk's total funding to $250 million from backers including Alphabet's GV and Accel, including a $22 million series B round in 2018 and a $70 million follow-on round just a few months ago. A Snyk spokesperson said that the company is now worth more than $1 billion, which is at least double the $500 million it was valued at back in September. Founded in 2015, London-based Snyk targets developers -- rather than cybersecurity personnel -- to help them find and fix flaws in their source code, as well as their containers and Kubernetes applications. The developer connects Snyk to a code repository in the likes of GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, and Snyk then scans for vulnerabilities (or license violations), providing a description of the problem, noting where the flaw lies in the code, issuing a severity rating, and even suggesting a fix.

The American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC), the premier public-private partnership dedicated to advancing government through the application of information technology, today officially announced the release of the "Artificial Intelligence (AI) Playbook for the U.S. Federal Government." It was produced through a collaborative, volunteer effort by a working group of 133 leaders from government and industry plus academia and associations, hosted by the ACT-IAC Emerging Technology Community of Interest (COI). "The AI Playbook is designed to help the United States Federal Government achieve successful outcomes and reduce risk in its understanding and application of AI technologies," said David Wennergren, CEO of ACT-IAC, "and this important work directly supports the President's Management Agenda (PMA), Cross Agency Priority (CAP) Goal 6 - Shifting from Low-Value to High-Value Work." The Playbook also follows the General Service Administration's Office of Government-wide Policy Modernization and Migration Management (M3) framework used for Shared Services. AI has the power to accelerate government services in fields as diverse as medical research and disaster recovery to help save lives and improve quality of service in impactful ways.