As wildfire season raged in California this fall, a startup a few states away used artificial intelligence to pinpoint the location of blazes there within minutes -- in some cases far faster than these fires might otherwise be noticed by firefighters or civilians. Santa Fe-based Descartes Labs, which uses AI to analyze satellite imagery, launched its U.S. wildfire detector in July. The company's AI software pores over images coming in roughly every few minutes from two different U.S. government weather satellites, in search of any changes -- the presence of smoke, a shift in thermal infrared data showing hot spots -- that could indicate a fire has ignited. Descartes is testing its detector by sending alerts to select forestry officials in its home state of New Mexico and told CNN Business its wildfire detector has spotted about 6,200 total thus far. The company says it can often detect these fires when they're just about 10 acres in size.

SpaceX launched a 3-ton cargo payload to the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday, which included barley grains for a beer experiment, mice for muscle-building research and a robot designed to show empathy. The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the recycled Dragon capsule filled with the goodies lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., around 12:30 p.m. The capsule is expected to arrive at the station housing six astronauts -- three Americans, two Russians and one Italian -- on Sunday. SpaceX recovered the new booster on a barge just off the coast in the Atlantic several minutes following liftoff so that it could be reused. SpaceX employees in Southern California cheered when the booster landed, and again a few minutes later when the capsule reached orbit.

A new study suggest that ability to convey kindness through facial expressions may have been a key factor in human evolution. The study was conducted by Matteo Zanella and a team of researchers at the University of Milan, and published this week in Science Advances. The team compared genetic data from human stem cells with samples from the remains of two Neanderthals and one Denisovan, a sister species to Neanderthals found in central Asia. They specifically focused on the BAZ1B gene, which has been connected to Williams-Beuren syndrome, a condition that causes people to develop wide mouths and small noses that give a generally kind and welcoming impression. The BAZ1B gene has also been associated with the evolution of two extra muscles in dogs that allow them to widen and narrow their eyes in expressive ways, something wolves aren't able to do.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA – SpaceX launched a 3-ton shipment to the International Space Station on Thursday, including "mighty mice" for a muscle study, a robot sensitive to astronauts' emotions and a miniature version of a brewery's malt house. The Dragon capsule also is delivering holiday goodies for the six station residents. NASA's Kenny Todd isn't giving any hints, but said, "Santa's sleigh, I think, is certified for the vacuum of space." The recycled capsule should arrive Sunday. The Falcon rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral a day late because of high winds.

Amazon today announced half a dozen new features and tools for AWS SageMaker, a toolkit for training and deploying machine learning models to help developers better manage projects, experiments, and model accuracy. AWS SageMaker Studio is a model training and workflow management tool that collects all the code, notebooks, and project folders for machine learning into one place, while SageMaker Notebooks lets you quickly spin up a Jupyter notebook for machine learning projects. CPU usage with SageMaker Notebooks can be managed by AWS and quickly transfer content from notebooks. There's also SageMaker Autopilot, which automates the creation of machine learning models and automatically chooses algorithms and tunes models. "With AutoML, here's what happens: You send us your CSV file with the data that you want a model for where you can just point to the S3 location and Autopilot does all the transformation of the model to put in a format so we can do machine learning; it selects the right algorithm, and then it trains 50 unique models with a little bit different configurations of the various variables because you don't know which ones are going to lead to the highest accuracy," CEO Andy Jassy said onstage today at re:Invent in Las Vegas.

In 2018, the number of Australian households with rooftop solar passed 2 million – that's one in five.¹ Tomorrow's smart grid will be a constellation of many generation sources working together, shifting from the traditional one-way power flows from generation through grids to consumers to two-way flows including from the customers back into the grid. As we move towards decentralisation, there is an urgent need for new business models and the technology to support it. A new wave of innovative technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT), Edge and Fog computing, blockchain, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will become key enablers for such a transformation. Cisco in partnership with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and SAS embarked on a trial where the feasibility and economic benefits of DER aggregation and a real-time energy brokerage in a residential framework were successfully designed, tested and verified.

Artificial intelligence is coming for America's high-paid professions as it creates winners and losers across the labor market like never before. White-collar jobs and better-educated occupations along with production workers are among the most susceptible to AI's spread into the economy, according to a Brookings Institution report Wednesday that draws on a new analysis of patent data by a Stanford University economist. "Just as the impacts of robotics and software tend to be sizable and negative on exposed middle- and low-skill occupations, so AI's inroads are projected to negatively impact higher-skill occupations," researchers Mark Muro, Jacob Whiton and Robert Maxim wrote. Workers with graduate or professional degrees will be almost four times as exposed to AI as workers with just a high school degree, the report showed. The researchers also concluded that AI appears most likely to affect men, prime-age and white and Asian American workers.

Like it or not, AI will soon infiltrate every aspect of our society from our refrigerators to autonomous cars and everything in between. Combined with data and data science, AI offers new, smart ways to solve existing problems and create fresh and exciting opportunities. But how do you determine the importance of an AI initiative for your organization and how do you ensure you derive the maximum benefit from implementing such projects? By identifying business needs and viewing AI and data science as a means to fulfilling those needs, IT professionals and data scientists can communicate the value and transformational affect AI can bring to the organization. To begin, think of AI as an experiment rather than a pilot project.

January 1, 2020, organizations that employ individuals based in Illinois will need to keep in mind the Artificial Intelligence Video Interview Act. This Act sets forth new requirements for video-recorded interviews using AI to analyze such recordings. The law is not limited to just Illinois residents. It applies to applicants for positions based in Illinois. While brief, and without any definitions, the Act requires three things before using AI technology in video interviews. First, businesses using AI technology in this way must notify the applicant before the interview that AI may be used.

The use of robots in U.S. workplaces has more than doubled since the Great Recession, but the impact has hit certain areas of the country -- and segments of workers -- more than others. A recent report from The Century Foundation found Midwestern states such as Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin saw the sharpest growth in robots being used in the workplace from 2009 to 2017, and these areas now have the highest levels of "robot intensity" in the country. Robot intensity refers to the number of industrial robots per 1,000 human workers. The higher the number, the more robots there are in the workplace alongside humans. Areas with the highest robot intensity are home to some of the of the biggest manufacturing industries in the country.