"I work on making robots better teammates," Julie Shah told attendees at 2019 AI World Conference & Expo in Boston. The MIT Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics described her work in a keynote talk entitled "Enhancing Human Capability with Intelligent Machine Teammates." She said, "We're trying to enhance human capability rather than replace humans." Also Associate Dean of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing at MIT, Shah directs the Interactive Robotics Group, which designs collaborative robot teammates that aim to enhance human capability. Prior to joining the MIT faculty, she worked at Boeing Research and Technology on robotics applications for aerospace manufacturing.

What's your plan for steel?" is a question Bill Gates always uses whenever someone pitches him an idea of how to stop global warming [1]. Agriculture and the industry are responsible for almost half of the gas emissions worldwide and the steel industry is a major contributor. We encounter steel everywhere in life. I guess most of you are reading this article sitting on a steel chair – and for a good reason. The adaptability and durability of steel are unique and it is used to construct cars, buildings, gas pipelines, electrical transmission towers, and tools that we use on a daily basis.

Part of the UK Government's aim to give people five years of longer, healthier life, it has announced a £34 million investment to develop robots capable of providing support for Britons and making caring responsibilities easier. With one in seven people in the UK now expected to be over 75 years old by 2040, care robots could help provide the UK's dedicated adult social care sector with more assistance for those who need it most. The Government has launched the UK's biggest research programme entirely dedicated to making autonomous systems safe and trustworthy for public use with investment that could help develop robots to one day fulfil tasks such as helping an elderly person up after a fall and raising the alarm, delivering food to an older person at mealtimes, and ensuring they take crucial medication at the correct time. This cutting-edge programme will undertake research into their design, for example ensuring robots are better protected against cyber-attacks and that they demonstrate principles like respect, fairness and equality, enabling them to eventually be used in environments like care homes and hospitals. In the healthcare sector, this dedicated programme could enable care robots work alongside professionals to assist and complement their work, and help relieve pressures.

Two doctors are using data analysis and predictive algorithms to stretch healthcare resources in South Africa and help millions of people live with HIV. Dr. John Sargent and Dr. Ernest Darkoh co-founded BroadReach in 2003 to make the healthcare system more efficient and treat more patients. In 2010, the two developed Vantage, a data analysis platform and recommendation engine that runs on Microsoft Azure. The initial idea was to use the platform to manage and improve the public-private partnerships that support many healthcare services in Africa. The two realized that the analytic work could also improve access to healthcare in countries where there are many more people than doctors.

Welcome to the first article in TNW's guide to the AI apocalypse. In this series we'll examine some of the most popular doomsday scenarios prognosticated by modern AI experts. You can't have a discussion about killer robots without invoking the Terminator movies. The franchise's iconic T-800 robot has become the symbol for our existential fears concerning today's artificial intelligence breakthroughs. What's often lost in the mix however, is why the Terminator robots are so hellbent on destroying humanity: because we accidentally told them to.

AlphaGo, the Go-playing artificial intelligence program developed by Google's DeepMind, defeated ... [ ] legendary human Go player Lee Sedol in a 2016 match in Seoul, South Korea. No asset is more prized in today's digital economy than data. It has become widespread to the point of cliche to refer to data as "the new oil." As one recent Economist headline put it, data is "the world's most valuable resource." Data is so highly valued today because of the essential role it plays in powering machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions. Training an AI system to function effectively--from Netflix's recommendation engine to Google's self-driving cars--requires massive troves of data.

Google's latest smart display is larger and can recognise your face for proactively showing you personalised information making it just that little bit smarter than competitors. The £219 Nest Hub Max is Google's second own-brand smart display and is essentially a super-sized version of the excellent original Home Hub (now renamed Nest Hub). But where the Nest Hub is a veritable bargain at £119 or frequently much less, the Nest Hub Max is a different proposition at a little under twice the price. A bigger screen is definitely better for viewing from across a room. The 10in 720p HD screen is bright, crisp enough at normal viewing distances and has Google's ambient EQ colour tone system so that photos on it look very much like printed photos, not displayed on an overly white and clinical LCD screen.

The sentence you just read wasn't written by me, the author of this article, nor was it written by the editor. No. What you just read was written entirely by OpenAI's GPT-2 language model, prompted only with the word "Today". Apart from another fancy acronym, GPT-2 brought along somewhat coherent (semantically, at least) language generation capabilities, some semblance of hope for zero-shot transfer learning, and a transformer network trained with approximately 1.5 billion parameters on a text corpus with over 40 gigabytes of internet wisdom. In this post, I'm not going to talk about better language models and their implications. As the great Stan Lee once said, "nuff said" about that.

In 2014, scientists at MIT began working to develop an artificial intelligence-powered security system. Atlanta-based company Liberty Defense licensed that technology, called Hexwave, and is now making it commercially available for sports stadiums and other venues. Hexwave uses AI to search for potentially dangerous metallic and non-metallic objects. The system uses radar to scan an individual, then creates a digital 3D image from which it can determine whether the person is carrying a possible threat such as a weapon or a bottle of alcohol. The entire scanning and decision process takes less than 0.2 seconds, reducing the amount of time that is usually taken for fans to file through security scanners when entering sports stadiums.

One of the key areas that needs to be deeply explored from a Human/AI and anthropological perspective is trust. There are a lot of unknowns and misinformation about AI, which has contributed to the fear that you see and hear in the news. This is further fuelled by the way machines and AI are portrayed in movies like Terminator, iRobot, and Transcendence. As such, in order to build trust, we need to address the underlaying concerns that people have about AI. Last month, I gave a talk on Human AI Interactions to a group of Canadian regulators, lawyers, and entrepreneurs in Montréal.