Reach, the Daily Mirror and Daily Express publisher, has launched a brand-safety platform created by IBM that will hope to curb articles being unnecessarily blacklisted from advertising. The platform, called Mantis, uses IBM Watson's artificial-intelligence engine and machine learning to check whether content is appropriate. Reach began looking for a tech solution last year in response to a signficicant proportion of news content being blacklisted due to "less intuitive and less sophisticated solutions" currently on the market. The main four players offering third-party brand-safety solutions for publishers are ADmantX (which was hired by newspaper sales joint venture The Ozone Project earlier this year), DoubleVerify, Grapeshot and Integral Ad Science. Like ADmantX, Mantis uses natural language processing to decipher context in language.

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Assistant Director for Artificial Intelligence offered fresh details Wednesday into a memo being developed to help foster public trust and build agencies' confidence in regulating artificial intelligence technologies. "This is a memo directed to agencies that suggests regulatory and non-regulatory principles for how you oversee the use of AI in the private sector," Lynne Parker, OSTP's assistant director for artificial intelligence, said. "So these will establish some common principles [and] some predictability across agencies in terms of how they think about regulatory and non-regulatory approaches to the use of AI." In February, President Trump issued an executive order to accelerate American advancements in AI. One of the key priorities of the order, Parker noted, is to "foster public trust and confidence in AI technologies and protect civil liberties, privacy, and American values in their application in order to fully realize the potential of AI technologies for the American people."

There used to be a time in the not-too-distant past when we feared the oncoming hordes of robots in the workplace. That time is no longer. People now have more trust in robots than their managers, according to the second annual AI at Work study conducted by Oracle and research firm Future Workplace. The study of 8,370 employees, managers and HR leaders across 10 countries, found that AI has changed the relationship between people and technology at work and is reshaping the role HR teams and managers need to play in attracting, retaining and developing talent. The latest advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence are rapidly reaching mainstream, resulting in a massive shift in the way people across the world interact with technology and their teams, says Emily He, senior vice president, human capital management for Oracle's cloud business group.

James Collins, Ph.D. is on a mission to end antibiotic resistance with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning. James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Bioengineering in the Department of Biological Engineering and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has founded several companies based on research in synthetic biology. According to Collins, "the generic principles that apply to physical systems don't extend so well to living organic systems." Collins explains that synthetic biology starts by looking at living systems from an engineering perspective. Rather than simply understanding how everything works, synthetic biologists must determine whether it's possible to reverse-engineer cells to create desirable outcomes.

Yale University researchers have developed a way to leverage neural networks to reveal patterns of activity of individual cells from multiple individuals. Researchers at Yale University have developed a method of leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) neural networks to reveal larger patterns of activity of individual cells that come from several individuals. The AI neural network, called SAUCIE (Sparse Autoencoder for Clustering, Imputation, and Embedding), can reveal minute cellular differences within individuals, as well as broader patterns that describe how the body functions. The new method will allow researchers to identify larger clusters of cellular activity that could shed light on the basis of a host's pathogens. For example, the team used SAUCIE to analyze 20 million cells from 60 patients and identify rare Gamma-Delta T cell types that regulate how the body responds to the virus that causes Dengue fever.

Researchers from USC and the University of Denver created a simulation in which a three-person team was supported by a virtual agent avatar on screen in a mission that was designed to ensure failure and elicit conflict. The study was designed to look at virtual agents as potential mediators to improve team collaboration during conflict mediation. But in the heat of the moment, will we listen to virtual agents? While some of researchers (Gale Lucas and Jonathan Gratch of the USC Viterbi School Engineering and the USC Institute for Creative Technologies who contributed to this study), had previously found that one-on-one human interactions with a virtual agent therapist yielded more confessions, in this study "Conflict Mediation in Human-Machine Teaming: Using a Virtual Agent to Support Mission Planning and Debriefing," team members were less likely to engage with a male virtual agent named "Chris" when conflict arose. Participating members of the team did not physically accost the device (as we have seen humans attack robots in viral social media posts), but rather were less engaged and less likely to listen to the virtual agent's input once failure ensued and conflict arose among team members. The study was conducted in a military academy environment in which 27 scenarios were engineered to test how the team that included a virtual agent would react to failure and the ensuring conflict.

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Syte, which uses visual AI technology to aid retailers, landed an investment of $21.5 million the company announced Monday. Syte plans to grow its reach across the United States, Europe and Asia; open a new office in San Francisco and expand its New York space; and hire about 70 new employees in Israel and the U.S. The funding will enable the visual product discovery company to invest in visual AI research and development, and introduce its latest product, visual AI personalization. The funding round was led by Viola Ventures with assistance from Storm Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Axess Ventures and Lyra Ventures. The fresh investment pushes the company's total funding to date to $30 million. Syte plans to quadruple its user base in 2020 by "focusing on enterprise and SMEs, strengthening current relationships, and building new ones," it stated in a company blog post.

One of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's autonomous Astrobee robots is operating on the International Space Station. A National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astrobee robot is now up and running on the International Space Station (ISS). The goal of the robot, named Bumble, for its first autonomous mission was to undock itself, follow a flight plan consisting of a list of waypoints and objectives uploaded to the robot from the ground, and then return to its dock in the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM) on the ISS. So far, the biggest hurdle to the robot accomplishing its goals has been getting its localization to work in a robust way. The robot navigates visually, but it is dependent on preexisting maps rather than doing simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

Artificial intelligence is seen as the emerging technology with the most potential by state chief information officers, yet basically none say AI is widely deployed in their state, according to a new report. The findings detailed in a report from the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, Center for Digital Government and IBM underscore the lengths states have to go to realize the potential of artificial intelligence in state government. Only 1% of state CIOs said the technology is "widely used" in their state while another 19% said they are piloting artificial intelligence, 13% are using but not in "core lines of business," 31% are engaged in demonstrations or proofs of concept, and 24% are evaluating proposals. "A lot of activity is in the very early stages of development," said Joe Morris, vice president of research at e.Republic, as he spoke about the report's findings at NASCIO's annual conference in Nashville this week. Forty-five states provided responses to survey questions analyzed for the report.