I came to a shocking conclusion while writing about diversity for my book on machine learning: diversity in Artificial Intelligence is not your problem, it's hers. I mean, of course, that the problem is with the English pronoun "hers". There is a bias against "hers" in most major AI systems today, and the source of the bias is the perfect metaphor for bias in AI more broadly. Like you might remember from high school, "hers" is a pronoun. Each word in a sentence belongs to one of a small number of categories: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc. One common building block in many AI applications is to identify the right category in raw text. Today, "hers" is not recognized as a pronoun by the most widely used technologies for Natural Language Processing (NLP), including (alphabetically) Amazon Comprehend, Google Natural Language API, and the Stanford Parser. The video shows that in the sentence "the car is hers", Amazon and Google classify "hers" as a noun and the Stanford parser classifies "hers" as an adjective. They don't make the same mistake with the sentence "the car is his", correctly identifying "his" as a pronoun.

According to the CDC, the suicide rate for individuals 10-24 years old has increased 56% between 2007 and 2017. In comparison to the general population, more than half of people experiencing homelessness have had thoughts of suicide or have attempted suicide, the National Health Care for the Homeless Council reported. Phebe Vayanos, assistant professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering has been enlisting the help of a powerful ally -artificial intelligence- to help mitigate the risk of suicide. "In this research, we wanted to find ways to mitigate suicidal ideation and death among youth. Our idea was to leverage real-life social network information to build a support network of strategically positioned individuals that can'watch-out' for their friends and refer them to help as needed," Vayanos said.

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Blood tests tell doctors about the function of key organs, and can reveal countless medical conditions, including heart disease, anemia and cancer. At major hospitals, the number of blood cell images awaiting analysis can be overwhelming. With over 10,000 beds and more than 8 million outpatient visits annually, Taiwan's Chang Gung Memorial Hospital collects at least a million blood cell images each year. Its clinicians must be on hand 24/7, since blood analysis is key in the emergency department. To improve its efficiency and accuracy, the health care network -- with seven hospitals across the island -- is adopting deep learning tools developed on AI-Ready Infrastructure, or AIRI.

At NeurIPS this week in Vancouver, Canada more than 1,400 pieces of AI research are being examined for their novel approaches or breakthroughs -- but one of these papers is unlike all the rest. Microsoft Research's Lin Xiao was named winner of the Test of Time award this week, a title granted to AI research that's made important and lasting contributions to the AI field over the last 10 years. A specially made committee is convened to look back at papers published at NeurIPS 10 years ago and narrows the list down to 18 papers that have had a lasting influence on machine learning, measured in part by which papers garnered the most citations in the past decade. To date, Xiao's paper has been cited more than 600 times by other researchers. NeurIPS organizers announced Xiao's work as the winner Sunday, and he detailed the results and progress made since then in a conference hall with 1,000 of the conference's 13,000 attendees.

China is planning to upgrade its naval power with unmanned AI submarines that aim to provide an edge over the fleets of their global counterparts. A report by the South China Post on Sunday revealed Beijing's plans to build the automated subs by the early 2020s in response to unmanned weapons being developed in the US. The subs will be able to patrol areas in the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean that are home to disputed military bases. While the expected cost of the submarines has not been disclosed, they're likely to be cheaper than conventional submarines as they do not require life-supporting apparatus for humans. However, without a human crew, they'll also need to be resilient enough to be at sea without onboard repairs possible. The XLUUVs (Extra-Large Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) are much bigger than current underwater vehicles, will be able to dock as any other conventional submarine, and will carry a large amount of weaponry and equipment.

Thousands of scientists have signed a pledge not to have any role in building AIs which have the ability to kill without human oversight. When many think of AI, they at least give some passing thought of rogue AIs seen in sci-fi movies such as the infamous Skynet in Terminator. In an ideal world, AI would never be used in any military capacity. However, it was almost certainly be developed one way or another because of the advantage it would provide to an adversary without similar capabilities. Russian President Vladimir Putin, when asked his thoughts on AI, recently said: "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world."

Artificial intelligence could aid in the search for life on alien planets and detection of nearby asteroids, according to NASA officials. NASA hopes to use artificial intelligence, or A.I., technologies such as machine learning to interpret data that will be collected by future telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope or the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, according to a statement from the space agency. "These technologies are very important, especially for big data sets and especially in the exoplanet field," Giada Arney, an astrobiologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in the statement. "Because the data we're going to get from future observations is going to be sparse and noisy. It's going to be really hard to understand. So using these kinds of tools has so much potential to help us."

As a national health system, the VA has amassed a significant amount of data--possibly giving it a leg up because lack of trustworthy and accessible data has traditionally been one of the major roadblocks to AI development. In other health technology news: a website helps patients with rare diseases find more information about them. Modern Healthcare: VA Dives Into Artificial Intelligence R&D The Department of Veterans Affairs has opened a new artificial intelligence institute to pursue research and inform national strategy. The National Artificial Intelligence Institute, a joint initiative of the VA's office of research and development and the VA secretary's center for strategic partnerships, will work with public and private partners to carry out AI research and development projects, including efforts to apply AI to identify veterans at high risk for suicide or to help reduce patient wait times. The Washington Post: Rare Diseases Lack Data But This Website Aims To Help Achondrogenesis, Noonan syndrome and sialadenitis aren't household names.

An expert on artificial intelligence has called for all algorithms that make life-changing decisions – in areas from job applications to immigration into the UK – to be halted immediately. Prof Noel Sharkey, who is also a leading figure in a global campaign against "killer robots", said algorithms were so "infected with biases" that their decision-making processes could not be fair or trusted. A moratorium must be imposed on all "life-changing decision-making algorithms" in Britain, he said. Sharkey has suggested testing AI decision-making machines in the same way as new pharmaceutical drugs are vigorously checked before they are allowed on to the market. In an interview with the Guardian, the Sheffield University robotics/AI pioneer said he was deeply concerned over a series of examples of machine-learning systems being loaded with bias.