They were given six weeks to accomplish the task, and that is what they did. A couple of weeks ago, members of the Red River Rage, which is what the students from Fargo North, Fargo South and Davies High School call themselves, were among the winners of a regional tournament held in Grand Forks. Now, they are heading to the 2019 FIRST Robotics Championship tournament in Detroit, which will be held April 24-27. FIRST Robotics is an international high school robotics competition that gives students real-world engineering experience. There are about 4,800 teams around the world and about 600 will compete in Detroit, according to Ellen Shafer, one of several mentors of the local high school team, which includes her son, Ethan Shafer, a junior at North High.

Christoph Mertz, the principal project scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, started taking pictures of the hills overlooking Pittsburgh's West End on his smartphone. "Every day, for months, I was collecting images of these hillsides," Mertz said. "I wanted to see if I could use these pictures as a way to predict the next landslide." Landslides are natural phenomena, but many of the conditions that can increase their likelihood are caused by human activity, such as directing surface runoff to an area or altering natural slopes for the construction of buildings and roads. Combined with increased rainfall rates related to climate change, landslides in the United States have become more common and more severe.

As concerns grow over the threat of AI-generated'deepfakes' videos, some of the top names in tech have revealed a plan to fight fire with fire. Deepfakes can, quite literally, put words in a person's mouth; in recent examples, footage of celebrities and politicians have been altered to convincingly show them doing or saying they never really did. Facebook, Microsoft, and the Partnership on AI have now teamed up with researchers from a slew of US universities to launch the Deepfake Detection Challenge, which seeks to create a dataset of such videos in order to improve the identification process in the real world. Facebook is commissioning consenting actors for the effort, and says it has set aside $10 million for related research and prizes. As concerns grow over the threat of AI-generated'deepfakes' videos, some of the top names in tech have revealed a plan to fight fire with fire Deepfakes have rapidly grown more realistic in the short time since they first sprung into existence.

Automation is not likely to eliminate millions of jobs any time soon--but the U.S. still needs vastly improved policies if Americans are to build better careers and share prosperity as technological changes occur, according to a new MIT report about the workplace. The report, which represents the initial findings of MIT's Task Force on the Work of the Future, punctures some conventional wisdom and builds a nuanced picture of the evolution of technology and jobs, the subject of much fraught public discussion. The likelihood of robots, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) wiping out huge sectors of the workforce in the near future is exaggerated, the task force concludes--but there is reason for concern about the impact of new technology on the labor market. In recent decades, technology has contributed to the polarization of employment, disproportionately helping high-skilled professionals while reducing opportunities for many other workers, and new technologies could exacerbate this trend. Moreover, the report emphasizes, at a time of historic income inequality, a critical challenge is not necessarily a lack of jobs, but the low quality of many jobs and the resulting lack of viable careers for many people, particularly workers without college degrees.

Raytheon has deployed artificial intelligence technology to support training programs for the U.S. Army and envisions AI and machine learning tools integrated with virtual and augmented reality to help improve the skills of warfighters. The company said Wednesday it is developing intelligent bots designed to handle lower-level logistics functions at the Army's Multinational Readiness Center in Germany and intends to use data from the bots to provide training aids, gear equipment for the Army's virtual training programs. Malachi Lawson, technical director for global training solutions at Raytheon, said that VR and AR-driven environments integrated with AI result in less dangerous mission exercises compared to live training. Corey Hendricks, the company's senior solutions architect, noted that AI and ML capabilities can also be used to develop hyper-engagement tools that work to inform warfighters' decision-making by analyzing data such as routines and daily habits. He added that such emerging technologies may support efforts to improve soldiers' cultural awareness and help commanders in battlefield operations through the implementation of combat doctrine data.

Origami robots can be formed by tightly integrating multiple functions of actuation, sensing and communication. But the task is challenging as conventional materials including plastics and paper used for such robotic designs impose constraints to limit add-on functionalities. To install multifunctionalities to the system scientists must typically include external electronics that increase the weight of the robot. In a recent study now published on Science Robotics, Haitao Yang and colleagues at the interdisciplinary departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering in the U.S. and Singapore developed a graphene oxide (GO)-enabled templating synthesis process to produce reconfigurable, compliant and multifunctional metallic backbones. The backbones formed the basis for origami robots coupled with built-in strain sensing and wireless communication capabilities.

China designed and executed a policy that shrank the industrialization process in a mere 25 years -- something that many economies took at least a century to do. That redesign has brought immense dislocation in global commerce and industry, enabling China to become one of the world's leading economies. China's success has led many African capitals to pursue the country's same industrialization trajectory. Over the last few years, African leaders have been pursuing policies designed to mimic the path China took. Some of these policies include creating special economic zones after China's Shenzhen and positioning the manufacturing sector as a fulcrum to attract investments and create new jobs.

In my most recent blog "Design Thinking Humanizes Data Science", I discussed how Design Thinking and Data Science complement each other. They are not just two sides of the same coin, but the same side of the same coin in their objectives to "diverge before converging" in driving business stakeholder collaboration with respect to identifying, brainstorming and envisioning the variables and metrics that might be better predictors of performance (see Figure 1). Maybe the most important cultural similarity between Data Science and Design Thinking is the mentality that if you don't have enough "might" ideas, you'll never have any "breakthrough" ideas. In this blog, I want to combine the value creation focus of Economics with Data Science and Design Thinking. I want to use Economics as the Digital Business Model Transformation guide in leveraging Data Science and Design Thinking to drive cultural change and business model disruption. A recent article from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business titled "Why Artificial Intelligence Isn't Boosting the Economy--Yet" highlights a common problem with new disruptive technologies – there are substantial upfront investments in these disruptive technologies, resulting in a negative short-term Return on Investment (ROI).

These days, we've become all but desensitized to the miraculous convenience of AI. We're not surprised when we open Netflix to find feeds immediately and perfectly tailored to our tastes, and we're not taken aback when Facebook's facial recognition tech picks our face out of a group-picture lineup. Ten years ago, we might have made a polite excuse and beat a quick retreat if we heard a friend asking an invisible person to dim the lights or report the weather. Now, we barely blink -- and perhaps wonder if we should get an Echo Dot, too. We have become so accustomed to AI quietly incorporating itself into almost every aspect of our day-to-day lives that we've stopped having hard walls on our perception of possibility.

The Darktrace Cyber AI Analyst is a new technology that emulates human thought processes to continuously investigate cyber threats at machine speed. With transformational implications for the security industry, early adopters of the Cyber AI Analyst reported a 92% reduction in the time required to investigate threats and provide conclusions to executives. This innovation is the culmination of over three years of research at the Darktrace R&D Centre in Cambridge, UK. Using various forms of machine learning, including unsupervised, supervised and deep learning, the technology learned human intuition and trade craft from more than 100 world-class cyber analysts across thousands of customer deployments. Mike Beck, global head of Threat Analysis at Darktrace, told Information Age: "This is the latest evolution of the Darktrace Cyber AI platform, which started with autonomous identification of threats in 2013 and moved to autonomously reacting to attacks in 2016. Today we are transforming the human factor in cyber security, with autonomous expert investigation."