"Bias" in AI is often treated as a dirty word. But to Dr. Andreas Tolias at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, bias may also be the solution to smarter, more human-like AI. I'm not talking about societal biases--racial or gender, for example--that are passed onto our machine creations. Rather, it's a type of "beneficial" bias present in the structure of a neural network and how it learns. Similar to genetic rules that help initialize our brains well before birth, "inductive bias" may help narrow down the infinite ways artificial minds develop; for example, guiding them down a "developmental" path that eventually makes them more flexible.

Demi Lovato deactivates her Twitter account after getting backlash for mocking 21 Savage following his ICE arrest. Demi Lovato is apologizing after some characterized her recent trip to Israel, during which she was baptized in the Jordan River, as a political statement. Lovato, 27, traveled to the Middle East after she "accepted a free trip to Israel in exchange for a few [social media] posts." But her trip apparently sparked backlash, as the singer saw the need to explain the reasoning for her experience in a follow-up Instagram Story. "I'm extremely frustrated," she wrote. "No one told me there would be anything wrong with going or that I could possibly be offending anyone.

Neural networks have helped scientists monitor the Sun's extreme ultraviolet outbursts after an instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory suffered an electrical malfunction, making it difficult for scientists to monitor a portion of extreme ultraviolet energy (EUV) being spewed by our star. EUV rays ejected from solar flares are particularly worrisome. The surge of highly energetic particles bombarding Earth can cause radio communication blackouts, knock satellites out of place, and disturb GPS signals. Space agencies around the world keep a close eye on the Sun's activity in an attempt to study and predict these outbursts. NASA's SDO is just one of the many spacecrafts currently orbiting our planet's star.

We, and our customers, have long understood that networks are most valuable when they do more than support their own weight. They become assets only when they enable the growth of business strategies. To get networks to work at this level, we have to get a higher level of performance and agility from them. That's why we launched a series of products and services based on intent-based networking two years ago. Our goal was to reinvent access networking to serve business needs.

The AI for Services network brings together Data and Artificial Intelligence businesses and academics with professionals working in the high value service sectors of legal, accountancy insurance and finance. This initiative is part of the Industrial Strategy Next Generation Services Challenge fund programme. Contact Astrid Ayel if you would like more information on the network or to discuss collaboration opportunities; you can also get in touch with her via LinkedIn or Twitter. About us: What is the AI for Services Network? Find out more information about the Industrial Strategy Next Generation Services Challenge fund here.

There is currently keen interest amongst tech companies, investors, and research institutes in both artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies. The buzz has reached corporations and financial institutions looking to tailor these technologies for their own businesses in order to keep pace in our increasingly digitized economy. This excitement has implications for securing patent protection – Canada and the United States (as well as many other countries) operate on a "first to file" basis. That means you will want to file a patent application before other inventors monopolize protection for the technology in your area, potentially curtailing your competitive business advantage. The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued revised guidelines on what constitutes subject-matter that is eligible for patent protection (under 35 U.S.C. § 101), effective January 7, 2019. These guidelines will likely have the largest impact in the area of computer-implemented inventions, including artificial intelligence and blockchain technologies, and may make it easier to patent some of these inventions.

Pedro Cruz didn't just live through the wreckage that Hurricane Maria left in its path in Puerto Rico back in 2017. He watched the commotion in his hometown of San Juan by flying his drone overhead. Maria made landfall on the southeast part of the island around 8 p.m., Cruz recalls in an interview with Popular Mechanics. Once the storm subsided about 20 hours later, he began his mission to find his grandmother. Since the infrastructure was completely decimated, he had no cell phone service to check in on her.

A well known fashion company for which I shot catalogs a few years ago, today no longer uses photographers. Our job is now done by employees who operate robots using iPads. A photographer is unnecessary: the lights are selected from pre-configured lighting schemes and when the photo is taken it's automatically post-produced following the pre-set guidelines. Everything is integrated into the robot's structure. The costs are initially high, but they become small for a company that has a large amount of images to produce.

Artificial Intelligence does not just mean just robots, it is going far beyond that.

It's estimated that over 17,500 new spinal cord injuries occur each year in the U.S., meaning 54 people out of every million Americans experience one. Patients regain the majority of function within the first six months after the injury, but any remaining loss present after a year is much more likely to become permanent. That's why engineers and neurosurgeons at Brown University, Rhode Island Hospital, Intel, and Micro-Leads Medical have committed to spending the next two years designing and building an Intelligent Spine Interface (ISI), which they say will record motor and sensory signals from spinal cord neurons and learn to stimulate those neurons using AI. Now, with a $6.3 million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), they're preparing to implant electrodes in a test to see if severed nerves can be made to communicate. Their work expands on that of teams in Switzerland and at the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center at the University of Louisville, which found that spinal cord stimulation can help restore voluntary muscle control post-injury.