Military leaders recognize AI's potentially seismic impact on their mission and operations, and they expect practical applications to proliferate, from threat monitoring to asset tracking to predictive maintenance. The accelerated delivery of AI-enabled capabilities and the cultivation of a much-needed tech workforce in the US evolved as result of both the Department of Defense's AI strategy launched in February followed by the White House's executive order on "Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence". Russia, China and other countries make substantial investments in AI capabilities, posing threats to US capabilities in this field. The traditional US military decision-making cycle OODA (observe, orient, decide, and act) paired with AI can provide commanders and executives a practical, high-level framework to consider potential military and national security applications for the technology, according to defensesystems.com. Observing (sensing) – Every soldier is a potential sensor for internet-of-things application.

Researchers at U.S.-based WuXi NextCODE and the Yale School of Medicine published two new studies in the Journal of Experimental Medicine and Nature Metabolism on novel, artificial intelligence (A.I.) approaches that breathe new life into big data for complex diseases. A deep dive into these publications demonstrates breakthrough, biologically-validated A.I. approaches with the potential to understand virtually any disease in much greater detail using cost-effective designs of therapeutics. With precision medicine poised to transform patient care, the big data revolution in healthcare and drug development has taken center stage. Yet, the promise of precision medicine hinges on the ability to reduce the complex interconnections of large, multi-omic data sets into useful biological information. One of the long-term promises of precision medicine is to understand underlying disease mechanisms to ultimately improve our ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent a diverse array of conditions.

TUM has been studying the complex interactions of science, technology and society since 2012 through the work of the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), which was established under the 2012 Excellence Initiative. As part of the MCTS, the TUM Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (IEAI) will focus on ethical implications of artificial intelligence. The US company Facebook is supporting this TUM initiative by a 6.5 million euro donation not subject to any conditions or expectations. At today's opening symposium for the Institute for Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (IEAI) at TUM, Dorothee Bär, the Federal Government Commissioner for Digital Affairs, said: "To some extent, machine learning algorithms are already playing a role in choosing the news articles we read. But the possible applications extend far beyond that, for example into such areas as medical diagnostics. These far-reaching technological changes raise many ethical issues. It is a good thing that TUM is getting involved in addressing these issues."

Researchers used artificial intelligence to analyze adjectives used to describe men and women in 3.5 million books written in English between 1900 and 2008. They contained around 11 billion words. The results from this large data set confirmed what we already knew. "We are clearly able to see that the words used for women refer much more to their appearances than the words used to describe men. Thus, we have been able to confirm a widespread perception, only now at a statistical level," says computer scientist and assistant professor Isabelle Augenstein of the University of Copenhagen's computer science department.

San Francisco (CNN)Deepfake videos are quickly becoming a problem, but there has been much debate about just how big the problem really is. One company is now trying to put a number on it. There are at least 14,678 deepfake videos -- and counting -- on the internet, according to a recent tally by a startup that builds technology to spot this kind of AI-manipulated content. And nearly all of them are porn. The number of deepfake videos is 84% higher than it was last December when Amsterdam-based Deeptrace found 7,964 deepfake videos during its first online count.

Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha., Ltd. (hereinafter, "K" Line) has reached an agreement with Hiroshima University, the National Institute of Maritime, Port and Aviation Technology (hereinafter, "MPAT") and Marubeni Corporation (hereinafter, "Marubeni") to jointly work on research and analysis on maritime logistics and shipping market conditions using AI (hereinafter "The Research"). In recent years, it has become possible to use comprehensive, chronologically ordered ship movement and static data, such as position (coordinate information), speed, direction, port of call and drafts, for ships with over 300 gross tonnage traveling internationally. This data is being applied in a variety of ways. Additionally, AI is making remarkable progress with improving machine learning and deep learning technology, and there is much research and practical application of this technology that is being used to find patterns hidden in big data and to make predictions. The purpose of The Research is to estimate maritime logistics by combining data and technology, and to explore the possibility of developing predictive models with high accuracy.

Over the past decade or so, advances in machine learning have paved the way for the development of increasingly advanced speech recognition tools. By analyzing audio files of human speech, these tools can learn to identify words and phrases in different languages, converting them into a machine-readable format. While several machine learning-based models have achieved promising results on speech recognition tasks, they do not always perform well in all languages. For instance, when a language has a vocabulary with many similar-sounding words, the performance of speech recognition systems can decline considerably. Researchers at Mahatma Gandhi Mission's College of Engineering & Technology and Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, in India, have developed a speech recognition system to tackle this problem.

The United States is blacklisting a group of Chinese tech companies that develop facial recognition and other artificial intelligence technology that the U.S. says is being used to repress China's Muslim minority groups. A move Monday by the U.S. Commerce Department seeks to put the companies on a so-called Entity List for acting contrary to American foreign policy interests. The blacklist effectively bars U.S. firms from selling technology to the Chinese companies without government approval. The blacklisted companies include Hikvision, a global provider of video surveillance technology. Prominent Chinese AI firms such as Sense Time, Megvii and iFlytek are also on the list.

Humanoid robots have come a long, long way since Honda's Asimo took a nasty tumble down the stairs. But why should robots be limited by their legs, even if that's their primary propulsion? That's a question Caltech is toying with on its new LEONARDO robot, short for "LEgs ONboARD drOne," and this is the first real video of it in action (via BoingBoing). Simply put, it's a relatively lightweight walking robot that balances more like a drone than a typical bipedal bot -- because it's literally got a set of drone propellers instead of arms. Perhaps it's not as impressive as Disney's flying robotic stuntmen, but how often do you see a robot ballerina stand on one leg and twirl? You can read more about the bot in stories at IEEE Spectrum and Wired from earlier this year, including how the researchers expect those thrusters might eventually help it do a whole bunch of jumping -- perhaps even on Mars.

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