The U.S. Department of Commerce's Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is asking for the help of experts and the broader public to determine the impact AI will have on intellectual property and "whether new forms of intellectual property protection are needed." A call for public comment was published in the Federal Registrar by the USPTO today in search of answers about such issues as how AI is reshaping perceptions of inventions or whether additional information should be required to claim a deep learning system as an invention since they can have a large number of hidden layers and weights that evolve. To help solicit responses, the notice in the federal registrar comes along with a series of questions such as "what is an AI invention and what does it contain?" "What are the different ways that a natural person can contribute to conception of an AI invention and be eligible to be a named inventor? Structuring data in order to train a model?

Science fiction has long imagined a future in which humans constantly interact with robots and intelligent machines. This future is already happening in warehouses and manufacturing businesses. Other workers use virtual or augmented reality as part of their employment training, to assist them in performing their job or to interact with clients. And lots of workers are under automated surveillance from their employers. All that automation yields data that can be used to analyze workers' performance.

WeChat opted on Monday to block content shared from Zao, the new deepfake app that lets users swap their faces with celebrities in movie and TV clips, amid an online backlash over possible excessive data collection. Why it matters: As data breaches become more prevalent in China, mobile internet users are becoming increasingly wary of possible privacy protection issues when using apps. Details: Zao, developed by a majority-owned unit of dating platform Momo, stormed to the top of free mobile app rankings after its August 31 release. On Monday, Tencent's WeChat blocked links shared from Zao citing security risks after many users reported the app. Context: Momo's lax protection of user privacy came under fire last December when a Weibo user spotted a package for sale on the dark web containing the phone numbers and account passwords of 30 million Momo users.

Facebook researchers have chosen Minecraft as the training ground for the development of the next stage of artificial intelligence, as the technology looks to conquer a major challenge. A.I. systems have been learning to carry out specific tasks, including playing soccer and filling in gaps in images, and have proven to be better at some of them than humans, such as in games such as in Texas Hold'em poker and Quake III's Capture the Flag mode. One of the biggest limitations of the current forms of A.I. is that, while they may excel at a specific activity, they are unable to deal with multiple tasks. Facebook Research's Arthur Szlam and his colleagues, who have started working on an A.I. assistant that can perform a variety of tasks, have decided to break through the limitation with the help of Minecraft. Minecraft, possibly the best-selling video game of all time, allows players to move around a 3D environment, exploring and building in a limitless world.

Disruptive technologies and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are making their way into classrooms as humanoid robots to teach students and interact with them as teachers do, at a school in Bengaluru. Though the 5 foot 7 inch robots, dressed in formal female attire, do not replace real teachers, they complement them in teaching lessons in the subjects and reply to FAQs (frequently asked questions) from students. "We have programmed the interactive robots to answer questions students frequently ask on the subjects and related to them. With AI in play, the robots are able to respond to questions and doubts of our wards after a lesson is taught," said Mr Rao. The private international day-cum-boarding school has 25 co-ed students in each of the four sections for Classes 7-9.

CHENNAI: Two startups incubated at Indian Institute of Technology Madras have joined hands with a mission to create one Lakh experts in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning by the year 2020. GUVI, which offers a platform for students in Tier 2,3 cities to learn in vernacular languages, is now collaborating with One Fourth Labs, a startup founded by IIT Madras Faculty which offers advanced AI courses. AI is one of the dominant technologies of this generation, which has helped machines reach human-level performance on specific tasks such as identifying faces, classifying images, playing complex strategy games, detecting anomalies in medical images and so on. There is a huge demand for AI talent in India, but the supply is limited due to a shortage of affordable courses which take students from basics to advanced topics. GUVI will be the platform partner and One Fourth Labs will be the content partner for this joint initiative.

MIT computer scientists are hoping to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence to improve medical decision-making, by automating a key step that's usually done by hand -- and that's becoming more laborious as certain datasets grow ever-larger. The field of predictive analytics holds increasing promise for helping clinicians diagnose and treat patients. Machine-learning models can be trained to find patterns in patient data to aid in sepsis care, design safer chemotherapy regimens, and predict a patient's risk of having breast cancer or dying in the ICU, to name just a few examples. Typically, training datasets consist of many sick and healthy subjects, but with relatively little data for each subject. Experts must then find just those aspects -- or "features" -- in the datasets that will be important for making predictions.

Perhaps you've driven by a field and seen a flock of tens of thousands of starlings pulsing and whipping through the air, a relatively common sight, especially in Europe. Perhaps you've been swimming in the ocean and have seen a "fish ball" doing basically the same thing in the water. Different animals use a type of distributed behavior, often defensive, that cannot be traced to the movements of a "leader." This behavior, called scale-free correlation, murmuration, or swarming, may provide an answer to what to do with the geometric increase in data collected at the edge. Data has proliferated, in part, because sensors have proliferated writ large, gathering info from all over, such as from assembly lines, smartphones, people, medical devices, and vehicles.

AI can now flag people based on their clothing, behaviour or race, log an individual's emotions, understand their actions and predict their next move. It can detect when luggage is left unattended, or if someone is loitering; it can even recognise when an individual is acting'unusual' based on others around them. AI is everywhere and getting more advanced every day. Facial recognition technology, in particular, has made leaps and bounds, partially thanks to tagged photographs on Facebook and Instagram as well as government-collected images such as drivers licenses and ID cards. The quality of cameras has also drastically improved, so much so that they no longer just record, they can'see' in real-time.

In what could be a significant finding to understand the development of the human brain, a group of scientists has created miniature brains from stem cells that developed a functional neural network. These lab-grown brains are the first observed to produce brain waves that resemble those of preterm babies, despite being a million times smaller than human brains, according to the study, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell. "The level of neural activity we are seeing is unprecedented in vitro," says Alysson Muotri, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego. "We are one step closer to have a model that can actually generate these early stages of a sophisticated neural network." The pea-sized brains, called organoids, are derived from human pluripotent stem cells.