August 23, 2019: SATS, a Singapore-based ground handler and Singaporean research platform TUMCREATE will be working together to explore commercialisation opportunities for their artificial intelligence (AI) powered robotic air cargo system, SPEEDCARGO. SPEEDCARGO is a system comprised of three of the companies' products – CARGO EYE, CARGO MIND, and CARGO ARM. CARGO EYE produces a digital fingerprint for incoming cargo by dimensioning accepted cargo in real-time using a 3D camera system. The companies are currently working to enhance CARGO MIND and CARGO ARM, which work to optimise cargo palletisation through intelligent unit load device (ULD) planning and automatic ULD packing, respectively, with the aim of commercialising each product in phases. The timeline for the completed project has not been released, but the integrated SPEEDCARGO system will run on an AI-powered operating system enabling them to connect data for end-to-end optimisation of cargo operations.

The UK government has developed a voracious appetite for artificial intelligence (AI), based on a promise of its apparently transformative power across myriad industries. From prime minister Boris Johnson's pledge to fund a £250m AI lab for the NHS, to the Department for Education's recently launched'AI horizon scanning group', AI is being lauded as a panacea to some of the most pressing issues society faces. Education is just one of the sectors that is meeting AI with open arms. As Matthew Jones at Perlego argued for this title, the opportunities being presented for AI to close educational accessibility gaps is exciting. In fact, educators, policymakers and investors are all being bombarded with messages related to AI's seemingly endless benefits in the classroom.

There are more than 1.9 billion users logged in to YouTube every single month who watch over a billion hours of video every day. With this number of users, activity, and content, it makes sense for YouTube to take advantage of the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help operations. Here are a few ways YouTube, owned by Google, uses artificial intelligence today. In the first quarter of this year, 8.3 million videos were removed from YouTube, and 76% were automatically identified and flagged by artificial intelligence classifiers. More than 70% of these were identified before there were any views by users.

The project, which began in July 2016, aimed to integrate a data-capturing device into maintenance vehicles for railway lines and feed a database with a corresponding system of geographical information. That way, it can update an automatic or semi-automatic inventory of railway assets, at the same time as it reviews and evaluates parts of the railway, thereby optimizing maintenance operations. Its development has drawn on technology related to Industry 4.0, including big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence and artificial vision, models and simulations, European GNSS, and satellites. The prototype's validation tests, which were done in April 2018 on the high-speed Amussafes – Javea line and then in November of the same year on the high-speed Madrid – Chamartín y Torrejón de Velasco line which is currently under construction, consisted in integrating Lidar systems (which obtain 3D maps and images of the railway though dynamic scans by using technology called mobile mapping systems), GPS, cameras, and high-precision recorders, lighting… All this allowed digitalizing this new infrastructure at a traveling speed of 80 km/h on a maintenance vehicle equipped for the tests.

The app can detect Fusarium wilt, Xanthomonas wilt, bunchy top disease, black sigatoka, yellow sigatoka, and corm weevil. Fusarium Tropical race 4 fungus (TR4) has decimated banana plantations and smallholders' crops in Asia and Africa and has now spread to Latin America. Last week, Colombian officials officially confirmed the presence of TR4 in La Guajira province, declaring a state of national emergency as a result. Developed with support from Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the AI-powered tool is built into an app called Tumaini – Swahili for'hope' – that allows farmers to take action quickly, thus preventing a widespread outbreak. The information is also uploaded to a global system that allows for large-scale monitoring.

Perspecta Inc. announced that its innovative applied research arm, Perspecta Labs, was awarded a prime contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to provide Photonic Edge AI Compact Hardware (PEACH) research under DARPA's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Exploration program. The contract, which represents new work for the company, has a total value of $1 million and work will be performed over 18 months. The goal of the PEACH program is to research and develop novel AI processing architectures in combination with innovative photonic hardware to enable breakthrough AI functionality with significant reduction in hardware complexity, latency and power consumption. Perspecta Labs will create a novel multiple-loop, delay-line reservoir computing architecture, an algorithm for specific emitter identification, and a scalable prototype hardware design in combination with innovative photonic hardware. "Perspecta Labs will draw on its rich portfolio of research and development in AI, photonics, radio frequency (RF) analytics, and systems engineering to deliver this work," said Petros Mouchtaris, Ph.D., president of Perspecta Labs.

We are swimming in writing. Our lives have become, in the words of the author and academic Shoshana Zuboff, an "electronic text". Social media platforms have created a machine for us to write to. The bait is that we are interacting with other people: our friends, colleagues, celebrities, politicians, royals, terrorists, porn actors – anyone we like. We are not interacting with them, however, but with the machine. We write to it, and it passes on the message for us after keeping a record of the data. The machine benefits from the "network effect": the more people write to it, the more benefits it can offer, until it becomes a disadvantage not to be part of it. The world's first ever public, live, collective, open-ended writing project. An addiction machine, which deploys crude techniques of manipulation redolent of the Skinner Box created by behaviourist BF Skinner to control the behaviour of pigeons and rats with rewards and punishments. We are users, much as cocaine addicts are users.

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A Palestinian man uses a biometric gate as he crosses into Israel at the Qalandia crossing in Jerusalem in July. Israel's military has invested tens of millions of dollars to upgrade West Bank crossings and ease entry for Palestinian workers. But critics slam the military's use of facial recognition technology as problematic. A Palestinian man uses a biometric gate as he crosses into Israel at the Qalandia crossing in Jerusalem in July. Israel's military has invested tens of millions of dollars to upgrade West Bank crossings and ease entry for Palestinian workers.

Belief propagation (BP) can do exact inference in loop-free graphs, but its performance could be poor in graphs with loops, and the understanding of its solution is limited. This work gives an interpretable belief propagation rule that is actually minimization of a localized $\alpha$-divergence. We term this algorithm as $\alpha$ belief propagation ($\alpha$-BP). The performance of $\alpha$-BP is tested in MAP (maximum a posterior) inference problems, where $\alpha$-BP can outperform (loopy) BP by a significant margin even in fully-connected graphs.