Science needs to understand and predict how climate change--and the growing onslaught of hurricanes, fires, and floods it's bringing--affects tropical forests. Will the forests respond to the assault with shorter trees? Will they store less carbon, or support less tree and plant diversity and fewer wildlife species? To better understand the effects a changing climate will have on tropical forests, Maria Uriarte, Columbia University professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology, needs to analyze images of forests. These bird's-eye view images are the size of a postage stamp.

Modern cars bear little resemblance to their early ancestors, but the basic action of steering a vehicle has always remained the same. Whether you're behind the wheel of a Tesla or a vintage Model T, turning the wheel dictates the direction of movement. This simple premise, which places humans at the center of control, may be ripe for disruption as tech giants and car companies race toward a future that would render human-controlled vehicles obsolete. How does this next generation of self-driving cars "see" the road? Today's video from TED-Ed explains one of the mind-bending innovations making autonomous vehicles a reality.

Vivienne Ming, a theoretical neuroscientist and cofounder of Socos Labs in Berkeley, California, defines artificial intelligence (AI) as "any autonomous and artificial system that can make a decision under uncertainty and make expert human judgements cheaper, faster, and increasingly, in some domains, better than a human can." AI has already been widely applied across business, social, and government sectors. But if it's not applied carefully, AI can lead to distorted results or decisions and potentially exclude historically marginalized or underrepresented populations. On a recent episode of the Urban Institute's podcast, Critical Value, Ming discusses three approaches to minimize the risk of AI supporting problematic or biased outcomes. If AI is trained on biased data and learns from biased samples, the system can reproduce bias that originated from discriminatory human decisions and practices.

The nation's thought leaders in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will discuss innovation and share insight into the application of AI in all aspects of life, society and medicine at the eighth annual SINAInnovations festival on October 15-16 at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. A Health Hackathon challenge will kick-off the festival on October 11-13, and will focus on creating novel solutions using AI that expands the limits of human performance. Topic areas for the health hackathon include: E-Sports, Mobility, and Adaptive Sports; Memory and Mental Agility; Social Connectivity and Communication; and Professional Performance in Medicine. "Artificial intelligence is reshaping our world and promises to transform the science and practice of medicine. We are delighted to host an event that captures the promise of this field through a range of presentations by thought leaders and innovators. It will be an event to remember."

This month, the NHS signed its first deals with Google. Five NHS trusts have agreed contracts with Google Health, after it swallowed up its UK sister firm DeepMind Health, nearly a year after signalling its intention to do so. New Scientist first revealed the extent of DeepMind's access to the sensitive data of more than a million National Health Service patients back in 2016, in a deal that the UK's data watchdog later found breached the law. The partnership has yielded interesting research, including using artificial intelligence to detect eye disease from scans with an accuracy that matches or exceeds human experts. But is there a material difference now the deals are with the US tech giant rather than DeepMind, and should people who use the NHS be concerned at the change?

Will your next doctor be a human being―or a machine? Will you have a choice? If you do, what should you know before making it? This book introduces the reader to the pitfalls and promises of artificial intelligence (AI) in its modern incarnation and the growing trend of systems to "reach off the Web" into the real world. The convergence of AI, social networking, and modern computing is creating an historic inflection point in the partnership between human beings and machines with potentially profound impacts on the future not only of computing but of our world and species.

A programmer at an internet-search company, Caleb Smith, wins a competition to spend a week at the CEO's estate, tucked away in the mountains. But he learns that he was chosen to be the human half of a Turing Test, a method of determining if a computer is capable of thinking like a real person. Tasked with evaluating Ava, a beautiful cutting-edge robot, they soon find that she is capable of more than they could have conceived. Her - Oct. 14, 7 p.m. Set in a near future in sunny Los Angeles, 2013's Her -- Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay -- follows Theodore Twombly, a recently-divorced man who writes personal letters for other people for a living. Lonely and mourning his relationship, he begins using an advanced operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) -- think Amazon's Alexa or Google Home -- to which he forms a strong bond.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, the large accounting and management consulting firm, released a startling report indicating that workers will be highly impacted by the fast-growing rise of artificial intelligence, robots and related technologies. Banking and financial services employees, factory workers and office staff will seemingly face the loss of their jobs--or need to find a way to reinvent themselves in this brave new world. The term "artificial intelligence" is loosely used to describe the ability of a machine to mimic human behavior. AI includes well-known applications, such as Siri, GPS, Spotify, self-driving vehicles and the larger-than-life robots made by Boston Robotics that perform incredible feats. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, speaks about Siri during an ... [ ] announcement of new products at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference Monday, June 4, 2018, in San Jose, Calif.

The new TX-GAIA (Green AI Accelerator) computing system at the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC) has been ranked as the most powerful artificial intelligence supercomputer at any university in the world. The ranking comes from TOP500, which publishes a list of the top supercomputers in various categories biannually. The system, which was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, combines traditional high-performance computing hardware -- nearly 900 Intel processors -- with hardware optimized for AI applications -- 900 Nvidia graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators. "We are thrilled by the opportunity to enable researchers across Lincoln and MIT to achieve incredible scientific and engineering breakthroughs," says Jeremy Kepner, a Lincoln Laboratory fellow who heads the LLSC. "TX-GAIA will play a large role in supporting AI, physical simulation, and data analysis across all laboratory missions." TOP500 rankings are based on a LINPACK Benchmark, which is a measure of a system's floating-point computing power, or how fast a computer solves a dense system of linear equations.

A) Reliable workers who carry out orders precisely, quickly, and efficiently. B) Unreliable workers who may or may not feel like doing what they're told. If you think this is a no-brainer and reliable option (A) is the obvious answer, think again. It really depends on the skills of whoever's giving the workers their instructions. Reliable workers will efficiently scale up the intelligent decision-making of a good leader, but they will unfortunately also amplify a foolish decision-maker.