From self-driving cars to virtual travel agents, artificial intelligence has quickly transformed the landscape for nearly every industry. The technology is also employed in healthcare to help with clinical decision support, imaging and triage. However, using AI in a healthcare setting poses a unique set of ethical and logistical challenges. MobiHealthNews asked health tech vet Muhammad Babur, a program manager at the Mayo Clinic, about the potential challenges and ethics behind using AI in healthcare ahead of his upcoming discussion at HIMSS22. MobiHealthNews: What are some of the challenges to using AI in healthcare? Babur: The challenges that we face in healthcare are unique and more consequential.

On Jan. 11, the Air Force concluded the first department-wide, secret classification innovation hackathon at Nellis Air Force Base inside the Threat Training Center's hangar following six days of 24-hour operations. Working beneath the wings of MiG jets strewn with duct-taped network and power cables, over 80 hackers – product managers, engineers, pilots, and data and visualization scientists – of experience ranging from E-3 to general officer and with contributions from 12 industry partners – developed capabilities leveraging Air Force weapons, sensor, health and maintenance data. These new capabilities were demonstrated during a science fair-style exhibition. The approximately 200 hackers, support staff, attendees and judges came from Air Force software engineering groups, software factories, and flight and frontline units. The group included 15 general officer-level attendees and judges including the Air Force's vice chief of staff, chief data officer, chief experience officer, chief science officer, and additional senior members from Air Combat Command.

Under a new contract awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Northrop Grumman will develop a prototype artificial intelligence assistant. The contract is part of DARPA's Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance program. The prototype will be embedded in an augmented reality (AR) headset to help rotary pilots perform expected and unexpected tasks. Northrop Grumman, in partnership with the University of Central Florida, will develop an Operator and Context Adaptive Reasoning Intuitive Assistant that will support UH-60 Blackhawk pilots, who fly with both visual and instrumented flight, which varies with weather, time of day, and other environmental factors. "The goal of this prototype is to broaden a pilot's skillset," said Erin Cherry, senior autonomy program manager, Northrop Grumman.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology brought on Mark Latonero as senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence, a spokesperson confirmed Thursday. Latonero will coordinate with international policymakers and standards organizations to advise on the risks and impacts of AI. The White House launched both the National AI Research Resource Task Force and National AI Advisory Committee in 2021 to strengthen the U.S.'s competitive position globally, but less attention has been paid to the problems with the technology. "Engaging with social technical experts along with diverse stakeholders will be central to this work," Latonero wrote, in a LinkedIn post. Latonero is also a research professor at Georgetown University and previously worked as a senior consultant to the U.N. Executive Office of the Secretary General, developing policy guidance on human rights due diligence for digital technology use.

The problem of determining if a military unit has correctly understood an order and is properly executing on it is one that has bedeviled military planners throughout history. The advent of advanced language models such as OpenAI's GPT-series offers new possibilities for addressing this problem. This paper presents a mechanism to harness the narrative output of large language models and produce diagrams or "maps" of the relationships that are latent in the weights of such models as the GPT-3. The resulting "Neural Narrative Maps" (NNMs), are intended to provide insight into the organization of information, opinion, and belief in the model, which in turn provide means to understand intent and response in the context of physical distance. This paper discusses the problem of mapping information spaces in general, and then presents a concrete implementation of this concept in the context of OpenAI's GPT-3 language model for determining if a subordinate is following a commander's intent in a high-risk situation. The subordinate's locations within the NNM allow a novel capability to evaluate the intent of the subordinate with respect to the commander. We show that is is possible not only to determine if they are nearby in narrative space, but also how they are oriented, and what "trajectory" they are on. Our results show that our method is able to produce high-quality maps, and demonstrate new ways of evaluating intent more generally. N the 1979 motion picture Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen) is sent on a mission to assassinate Colonel Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), a highly decorated officer who, in the words of the general authorizing the mission, has gone from "one of the most outstanding officers this country has ever produced" to someone "out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct." The movie explores the paradoxes in war, where some illegal acts are embraced by the command structure, some tolerated, and some are to be terminated, "with extreme prejudice." Willard has to navigate these conflicts as he moves towards Kurtz' compound deep in Cambodia. Apocalypse Now provides an example of the difficulty that any intent-aware system must face in a military context [1]. Not only does the system need to determine if an order is being followed, it should also determine if the order itself is valid, so that the warriors implementing the order are not placed in ethical dilemmas. This is the goal that we attempt to address in this paper, with the concept of Neural Narrative Mapping (NNM). By placing narrative elements at coordinates in a virtual space, we can determine sophisticated relationships between concepts that go well beyond textual comparison.

"Moonfall," Roland Emmerich's latest exercise in fantasy destruction, is the second major movie to come out recently in which a huge space body is hurtling toward Earth and risks destroying all human life. In the other, "Don't Look Up," the menace is a comet, but the real story is the corruption of American politics and culture that prevents a rational response and leads to catastrophe. Whether the comet represents climate change (as the makers of "Don't Look Up" assert) or the COVID-19 pandemic (as fits the movie best), the celestial body is nonetheless only a MacGuffin, a pretext to expose the human follies that are the movie's subject. But, in "Moonfall," Emmerich is interested--really, really interested--in the moon. His obvious enthusiasm for the gloriously absurd science-fiction reconception of the moon drives the directorial pleasure principle, and it's infectious.

France will help with the United Arab Emirates' air defence system after a series of ballistic missile and drone attacks launched from Yemen by the Houthi rebels on the Gulf country, its defence minister said on Friday. Paris has close economic and political ties with Abu Dhabi and has a permanent military base in the Emirati capital. It sealed a deal in December to sell 80 Rafale fighter jets to the UAE, the largest ever overseas sale of the French warplane. "The United Arab Emirates was victim of serious attacks on its territory in January," Defence Minister Florence Parly tweeted. "In order to show our solidarity with this friendly country, France has decided to provide military support, in particular to protect their airspace against any intrusion."

The drone attack by a little-known armed group in Iraq on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) this week has raised questions about Baghdad's involvement in regional tensions between Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen and the Saudi-led coalition. Alwiyat al-Waad al-Haq (AWH), or the True Promise Brigades, claimed responsibility for the strike on the UAE on Wednesday, saying in a statement it launched "four drones targeting vital facilities in Abu Dhabi" in retaliation for the Emirates' policies in Iraq and Yemen. Several analysts linked the strikes to a shadowy militia Kataib Hezbollah (KH), a powerful Iran-backed Shia armed group in Iraq that has been listed by the United States as a "terrorist organisation". The incident brought to light that the UAE was now being targeted from its north and south, after three recent attacks launched by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Following the drone strikes, Iraqi Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr condemned the attack in a statement, saying some "terrorist outlaws" have dragged Iraq into a "dangerous regional war" by targeting a Gulf state.

The "race" for dominance in AI is far from fair: Not only do a few developed economies possess certain material advantages right from the start, they also set the rules. They have an advantage in research and development, and possess a skilled workforce as well as wealth to invest in AI. We can also look at the state of inequity in AI in terms of governance: How "tech fluent" are policymakers in developing and underdeveloped countries? What barriers do they face in crafting regulations and industrial policy? Are they sufficiently represented and empowered at the international bodies that set rules and standards on AI?

For technology professionals, business leaders and observers, the news is hardly surprising. Back in April 2020, as the pandemic raged on, Microsoft's SEO, Satya Nadella, presciently noted, "We've seen two years' worth of digital transformation in two months." A big part of this digital transformation was led by artificial intelligence. The pandemic has only accelerated this growth, as the walls around artificial intelligence research and development are rapidly starting to drop everywhere. AI is getting a renewed push by the government, private corporations and public sector organizations, all of which are trying to capitalize on its capabilities in every way possible.