In early April, the European Commission published guidelines intended to keep any artificial intelligence technology used on the EU's 500 million citizens trustworthy. The bloc's commissioner for digital economy and society, Bulgaria's Mariya Gabriel, called them "a solid foundation based on EU values." One of the 52 experts who worked on the guidelines argues that foundation is flawed--thanks to the tech industry. Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher from the University of Mainz, in Germany, says too many of the experts who created the guidelines came from or were aligned with industry interests. Metzinger says he and another member of the group were asked to draft a list of AI uses that should be prohibited.

A recent analysis on the future of warfare indicates that countries that continue to develop AI for military use risk losing control of the battlefield. Here's what that means, according to a trio of experts. Researchers from ASRC Federal, a private company that provides support for the intelligence and defense communities, and the University of Maryland recently published a paper on pre-print server ArXiv discussing the potential ramifications of integrating AI systems into modern warfare. Get 50% off tickets if you buy now. The paper – read here – focuses on the near-future consequences for the AI arms race under the assumption that AI will not somehow run amok or takeover.

Fixed term contract until 1 March 2021 The Royal College of Art is the UK's only entirely postgraduate art and design university. In 2018/19 the College will have some 2,300 students registered for MA, MRes, MPhil and PhD degrees and over 450 permanent academic, technical and administrative staff, with more than 1,000 visiting lecturers and professors. The RCA Robotics Laboratory, recently established and directed by RCA's Academic Leader in Robotics, Dr Sina Sareh, develops new bioinspired technologies for robot mobility, manipulation and attachment in unstructured and extreme environments through funded projects by EPSRC, Innovate UK and industrial partners. Following the Royal College of Art's Strategic Plan 2016-2021, the lab is intended to create significant research and education capacity in robotics by 2020, to support the RCA's ambitious expansion plans in Battersea South including a new robotics facility and new research centres - the most radical transformation of the institution's campus in its 181-year history. Through the Innovate UK's "Robotics and AI: Inspect, Maintain and Repair in Extreme Environments" funding scheme, a research project grant entitled Multi-Platform Inspection, Maintenance & Repair in Extreme Environments (MIMRee) has been awarded to the RCA.

The process, known as deep learning, is already being used in many applications, like enabling computers to understand speech and identify objects so that a self-driving car will recognize a stop sign and distinguish a pedestrian from a telephone pole. In medicine, Google has already created systems to help pathologists read microscope slides to diagnose cancer, and to help ophthalmologists detect eye disease in people with diabetes. "We have some of the biggest computers in the world," said Dr. Daniel Tse, a project manager at Google and an author of the journal article. "We started wanting to push the boundaries of basic science to find interesting and cool applications to work on." In the new study, the researchers applied artificial intelligence to CT scans used to screen people for lung cancer, which caused 160,000 deaths in the United States last year, and 1.7 million worldwide.

The guidelines also call on governments to boost AI funding and establish frameworks that help turn research into real-world applications. There could be "deregulated environments" to test AI before unleashing it in the wild, as an example. The guidelines should be released on May 22nd and come from 50 experts in the public and private sectors, including governments and tech companies. President Trump pushed for regulations in his executive order prioritizing AI. American companies and institutions have pressed for positive uses of AI, too.

Natural disasters aren't just threats to people and buildings, they can also erase history -- by destroying rare archival documents. As a safeguard, scholars in Japan are digitizing the country's centuries-old paper records, typically by taking a scan or photo of each page. But while this method preserves the content in digital form, it doesn't mean researchers will be able to read it. Millions of physical books and documents were written in an obsolete script called Kuzushiji, legible to fewer than 10 percent of Japanese humanities professors. "We end up with billions of images which will take researchers hundreds of years to look through," said Tarin Clanuwat, researcher at Japan's ROIS-DS Center for Open Data in the Humanities.

It's the best and worst time to be in semiconductors right now. Silicon Valley investors are once again owning up to their namesakes and taking a deep interest in next-generation silicon, with leading lights like Graphcore in the United Kingdom hitting unicorn status while weirdly named and stealthy startups like Groq in the Bay Area grow up. Growth in chips capable of processing artificial intelligence workflows is expected to swell phenomenally over the coming years. As Asa Fitch at the Wall Street Journal noted yesterday, "Demand for chips specialized for AI is growing at such a pace the industry can barely keep up. Sales of such chips are expected to double this year to around $8 billion and reach more than $34 billion by 2023, according to Gartner projections."

DETROIT - Ford revealed details of its long-awaited restructuring plan Monday as it prepared for a future of electric and autonomous vehicles by parting ways with 7,000 white-collar workers worldwide, about 10 percent of its global salaried workforce. The major revamp, which had been underway since last year, will save about $600 million per year by eliminating bureaucracy and increasing the number of workers reporting to each manager. In the U.S. about 2,300 jobs will be cut through buyouts and layoffs. About 1,500 have left voluntarily or with buyouts, while another 300 have already been laid off. About 500 workers will be let go starting this week, largely in and around the company's headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit.

Another sign that esports has become big business: One of its biggest star athletes, Turner "Tfue" Tenney is suing his pro team, FaZe Clan, over what he calls a contract that is "oppressive, onerous, and one-sided." In the complaint filed in California Superior Court in Los Angeles, Tenney, 21, charges that FaZe Clan, an esports organization with professional teams that compete in video games such as "Call of Duty, "Fortnite Battle Royale" and "Counter-Strike," has players sign gamer agreements so that the team will "essentially'own' Tenney and other content creator/streamers and professional gamers." A popular streamer on YouTube and Twitch, Tenney signed an agreement with FaZe Clan when he was 20. He says in the suit that FaZe Clan takes up to 80% of revenue paid by third parties for Tenney's services such as sponsored online videos. 'Minecraft' update: Video game gets new blocks, better villages, and pillagers with crossbows Cloud gaming: Microsoft and Sony team up for video games in the cloud, but what's it mean for gamers? Esports star Turner "Tfue" Tenney, shown here on his Twitch channel, is suing his team FaZe Clan, saying its contract is "oppressive" and takes up to 80% of his earnings. Tfue, who recently qualified for the $30-million Fortnite World Cup Finals in July in New York, has more than 10.7 million followers on YouTube, more than 6 million followers on Twitch, and 5.5 million Instagram followers. "Anti-competitive provisions" in the agreement prevent Tenney from pursuing other deals, the suit charges. FaZe Clan violates state law because it acts as a talent agency but does not have "the requisite talent agency license," the complaint charges. The esports organization also forced Tenney to drink alcohol at parties before he turned 21, the suit charges. Tenney wants the court to void the contract with FaZe Clan and award any suitable damages. "Until now, FaZe Clan has enjoyed the fruits of this illegal business model with impunity because no one could or was willing to stand up to Faze Clan," the suit says. Through this action, Tenney seeks to shift the balance of power to the gamers and content creators/streamers, those who are actually creating value and driving the industry. As a result of this action, others will hopefully take notice of what is going on and help to clean up esports."

When proving theorems from large sets of logical assertions, it can be helpful to restrict the search for a proof to those assertions that are relevant, that is, closely related to the theorem in some sense. For example, in the Watson system, a large knowledge base must rapidly be searched for relevant facts. It is possible to define formal concepts of relevance for propositional and first-order logic. Various concepts of relevance have been defined for this, and some have yielded good results on large problems. We consider here in particular a concept based on alternating paths.We present efficient graph-based methods for computing alternating path relevance and give some results indicating its effectiveness. We also propose an alternating path based extension of this relevance method to DPLL with an improved time bound, and give other extensions to alternating path relevance intended to improve its performance.