I recently had the pleasure of attending the first AI Tech event to take place in the North of England, something that set a powerful and thought provoking precedent or the future. As part of the Leeds Digital Festival, AI Tech North, was sold out and featured a good mixture of students, programmers and small businesses coming together to hear some of the leading experts in their field share their wealth of knowledge. Anthony Cohn, a Professor in Automated Reasoning at the University of Leeds opened up the event with a lively introduction that gave all in attendance a solid overview of the components of AI, breaking things down into five major categories; perception, language/speech recognition, planning, reasoning (inferring new facts from a basis of existing facts and coming sense) and learning. He stressed that "intelligence can be manifested in different ways" and that "the most successful parts of AI is where there has been little human interaction e.g. The point he made that stuck with me the most however was that the biggest threat to AI and its progress for the foreseeable future is that "the public overestimates the capabilities of AI", something which shows clearly the need for better awareness of exactly what AI is, away from the constraints of science fiction and fantasy.

North Korea is reforming education at universities to place greater emphasis on artificial intelligence, according to state media. Pyongyang's Workers' Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun reported Sunday Pyongyang University of Computer Science is changing its computer-programming department into a department for the study of AI. The goal is to improve the quality of school courses so classes on AI are more readily available in the department, according to the report. PyongyangUniversity of Computer Science has decided to improve artificial intelligence education because AI is a "key technology in the information industry," the Rodong article said. The university is developing the new program following directives from Kim Jong Un, issued at the fourth plenum of the seventh party central committee meeting in April, state media said.

It could be that Richard Socher's operating system just runs with more energy than other people's. He has just flown in from California and his body clock is telling him it's still 4 a.m. Already, though, he has delivered a keynote address, participated in a panel and held a question-and-answer session at the START Summit in St. Gallen, Switzerland, an important innovation conference. Despite all that, he's in a good mood as he poses for the ZEIT ONLINE photographer and later helps carry her flash equipment. He then sits down in a drafty corner of the congress hall for the following three-hour interview. After an hour, he remembers that he hasn't yet eaten today.

President Trump's last-minute decision to pull back from a retaliatory strike on Iran underscored the absence of appealing options available to him as Tehran races toward its next big challenge to the United States: building up and further enriching its stockpile of nuclear fuel. Two weeks of flare-ups over the attacks on oil tankers and the downing of an American surveillance drone, administration officials said, have overshadowed a larger, more complex and fast-intensifying showdown over containing Iran's nuclear program. In meetings in the White House Situation Room in recent days, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo contended that the potential for Iran to move closer to being able to build a nuclear weapon was the primary threat from Tehran, one participant said, a position echoed by Mr. Trump on Twitter on Friday. Left unsaid was that Iran's moves to bolster its nuclear fuel program stemmed in substantial part from the president's decision last year to pull out of the 2015 international accord, while insisting that Tehran abide by the strict limits that agreement imposed on its nuclear activities. Mr. Trump has long asserted that the deal would eventually let Iran restart its nuclear program and did too little to curb its support for terrorism.

Seated on the floor of a villa in northeast Tehran around a tablecloth spread with platters of saffron chicken and rice with barberries, about 30 officials of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and guests gathered Thursday night for a prayerful celebration. "A special blessing for the commander who ordered the attack on the American drone and for the fighters who carried it out," a preacher declared, as recalled by one of the guests present, who said a raucous chorus of "amen" arose from the room. Their success earlier that day at shooting down an unmanned American Global Hawk surveillance drone (list price $131 million) surprised even some leaders of the Revolutionary Guards. They had wondered themselves whether they could hit an American target so high in the sky, according to the guest. In fact, the Revolutionary Guards sought to take out the drone in large part to prove they could do it, according to that guest and four other Iranians, including two senior current members.

Mary Scott Hodgin/WBHM 90.3 hide caption Across the country, surgeons are learning to use more than just scalpels and forceps. In the past decade, a growing number of medical institutions have invested in the da Vinci robot, the most common device used to perform robot-assisted, or robotic, surgery. Compared to traditional open surgery, robotic surgery is minimally invasive and recovery time is often shorter, making the technology attractive to patients and doctors. But the da Vinci surgical system is expensive, costing as much as $2 million, and recent studies show that for certain procedures it can sometimes lead to worse long-term outcomes than other types of surgery. Even so, the robot has become common practice in some specialties, such as urology and gynecology, and that growth is expected to continue, which means more surgeons are learning to use the device.

To create awareness among the machine learning community, especially the NLP community about the effects of training deep neural networks on the environment, Emma Strubell and her team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, trained a variety of popular off-the-shelf NLP models, which can be converted to approximate carbon emissions and electricity costs.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but the answer probably isn't a surge in employee training or hiring of cybersecurity talent. That's because humans will always make errors, and humans can't cope with the scale and stealth of today's cyberattacks. To best protect information systems, including data, applications, networks, and mobile devices, look to more automation and artificial intelligence-based software to give the defense-in-depth required to reduce risk and stop attacks. That's one of the key conclusions of a new report conducted by Oracle, "Security in the Age of AI," released in May. The report draws on a survey of 775 respondents based in the US, including 341 CISOs, CSOs, and other CXOs at firms with at least $100 million in annual revenue; 110 federal or state government policy influencers; and 324 technology-engaged workers in non-managerial roles.

Washington: Scientists have developed a new artificial intelligence (AI) system to monitor people for cardiac arrest while they are asleep without touching them. People experiencing cardiac arrest will suddenly become unresponsive and either stop breathing or gasp for air, a sign known as agonal breathing, said rese-archers at the University of Washington (UW) in the US. A new skill for a smart speaker -- like Google Home and Amazon Alexa -- or smartphone lets the device detect the gasping sound of agonal breathing and call for help. Immediate Cardiop-ulmonary resuscitation (CPR) can double or triple someone's chance of survival, but that requires a bystander to be present. CPR is an emergency procedure that combines chest compressions often with artificial ventilation in an effort to manually preserve intact brain function. Recent research suggests that one of the most common locations for an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is in a patient's bedroom, where no one is likely around or awake to respond and provide care.

A tiny robotic capsule that can be guided through the colon to take micro-ultrasound images of the gut is being developed by a UK-led consortium. The Sonopill, being developed by researchers at Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Heriot-Watt and Dundee Universities, alongside Vanderbilt University in the US, could ultimately replace the need for patients to undergo a potentially painful endoscopic examination, in which a long, semi-rigid scope is passed into the bowel. The robotic device, which has successfully completed feasibility studies and is described in the journal Science Robotics, is based on a technique called intelligent magnetic manipulation, according to Pietro Valdastri, chair in robotics and autonomous systems at Leeds University. A robotic arm equipped with a series of magnets is passed over the patient. "We are trying to create a system that could replace colonoscopy with a painless alternative," Valdastri said.