Earlier this year Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the future is now. By the middle of 2020, he said at an event for investors, Tesla's autonomous system will have improved to the point where drivers will not have to pay attention to the road. He revealed that Tesla has plans to roll out Level 5 autonomous taxis next year in some parts of the United States, which means they will be capable of driving themselves anywhere on the planet, under all possible conditions, with no limitations. That's compelling, but is it really possible within such a short timeframe? In May, a month after Musk's speech, Consumer Reports said that the new lane-changing feature on Tesla's updated Navigate on Autopilot software lags far behind a human driver's skills.

Our NodeXL #ddj mapping from November 25 to December 1 finds The New York Times profiling Bellingcat and its use of OSINT techniques; the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and Stanford University collaborating to employ artificial intelligence to solve a journalistic problem; and the Science Communication Lab creating a beautiful interactive scientific poster to explore the world's oceans. Open source journalism might just be the best antidote to spin: the transparency of its authors showing their work during each step of the investigative process helps earn readers' trust. The New York Times profiles Bellingcat, an investigative news site that uses open source techniques. The collaborative Implant Files investigation exposed the lax regulation of the $400 billion medical device industry worldwide. But when the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists wanted to know if women suffered disproportionately from faulty medical devices, it hit a data roadblock. The journalists then turned to artificial intelligence to help their reporting.

Generative AI language models like OpenAI's GPT-2 produce impressively coherent and grammatical text, but controlling the attributes of this text -- such as the topic or sentiment -- requires architecture modification or tailoring to specific data. That's why a team of scientists at Uber, Caltech, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology devised what they call the Plug and Play Language Model (PPLM), which combines a pretrained language model with one or more attribute classifiers that guide novel text generation. Preliminary results in a preprint paper show that PPLM is able to control a "range" of topics and sentiment styles, importantly without sacrificing fluency and while retaining flexibility that in any combination of differentiable models steers text generation. Their research builds on that published by Google and the University of Michigan late last year, which investigated an architecture that could generate sentences from a given sample and change the mood, complexity, tense, or even voice while preserving the original text's meaning meaning. And it could inform work on Plato, Uber's platform for developing and testing conversational AI, which was released in July with connectors that integrate with existing machine learning and model-tuning frameworks.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers acceleration in the treatment process of patients as it can estimate and analyze data quickly when symptoms occur, according to an expert. Misdiagnoses experienced during examinations performed in diagnosis stages of diseases will significantly drop with AI, a social media specialist told Anadolu Agency. Deniz Unay said the process will take place when thousands of similar cases with patient history are analyzed in seconds and physician errors will be minimized. "According to a study conducted in the U.S., 20% of the medical errors occurred during the initial examination due to insufficient time for the patient-physician interviews, and these errors caused wrong treatment processes," Unay said. "Considering an estimated annual figure of around 87,000 cases around the world, the fact that artificial intelligence can estimate and analyze data quickly reveals that it can accelerate treatment processes," the expert opined.

More women and minorities must work in tech, or else they risk being left behind in every industry. This grim future was painted by Artificial Intelligence (AI) equality experts who spoke at a conference Thursday hosted by LivePerson, an AI company that connects brands and consumers. In that future, if AI goes unchecked, workplaces will be completely homogenous, hiring only white, nondisabled men. "In this bleak depiction of our future, decades of fights for civil rights and equality have been unwritten in a few lines of code," said EqualAI executive director Miriam Vogel at the conference in Brooklyn, N.Y., called "Boundary Breakers: Women Driving The Future of Tech." Women and minorities are not building AI, and therefore, they are not being represented in popular algorithm-based products, according to Vogel.

Friction has its presence everywhere, from Earth to the Vacuum of outer space. Fremont, CA: Friction on Earth is claimed to create a mess of commerce as well as payments, which is mostly due to the excited customers, who are ready to spend their time and money on the things they desire to have. Artificial intelligence, coupled with robotics, is anticipated to develop a weapon to fight against friction, that defines payment and commerce actions. Although being in the early stage, Artificial intelligence and Robotics are likely to have a dynamic impact in a number of cases, owing to their fast paced growth. One of the key players in tech funding, SoftBank, has invested 30 million dollars in the Series A funding on the five-year-old Accel Robotics.

The University of Tokyo and SoftBank will set up an artificial intelligence (AI) research base to develop bright minds and start-up ambitions for Japan. Called the Beyond AI Institute, it aims to be an organisation that brings together researchers from the University of Tokyo and universities abroad. The bank will spend $184 million over the next ten years for this institute. Specific initiatives include work in quantum physics and the combination of AI and biofunctions. The Tokyo-based institute will also look at areas such as "health and medical," "public works and social infrastructure" and "manufacturing."

When it comes to competitive games, AI systems have already shown they can easily mop the floor with the best humanity has to offer. But life in the real world isn't a zero sum game like poker or Starcraft and we need AI to work with us, not against us. That's why a research team from Facebook taught an AI how to play the cooperative card game Hanabi (the Japanese word for fireworks), to gain a better understanding of how humans think. Specifically, the Facebook team set out to instill upon its AI system the theory of mind. "Theory of mind is this idea of understanding the beliefs and intentions of other agents or other players or humans," Noam Brown, a researcher at Facebook AI, told Engadget.

The reality of human-level artificial intelligence is still a dream. Even with all of the recent advancements in state-of-the-art AI, its ability to understand the world around us is only at the level of a one-year-old child. We don't yet know how to build a robot to match a two-year-old's ability to empathize or her ability to define new goals to help others. The software industry has entered a race to apply AI in every vertical possible. While AI technology adoption is accelerating, our ability to understand its potential impact isn't keeping up.

Industries are adopting artificial intelligence and machine learning on a grand scale. Tech companies both big and small are working on artificial intelligence projects that will shape the future of industries such as healthcare, banking, business, education and more. We're not quite at the point where everything is automated and machine-run, but we're getting there. These technologies are all around us, quietly running in the background and keeping operations chugging along. AI is silently reshaping our society by affecting how we get things done, how we vote, how we purchase goods, and the choices we make.