For more than 30 years, Geoffrey Hinton hovered at the edges of artificial intelligence research, an outsider clinging to a simple proposition: that computers could think like humans do--using intuition rather than rules. The idea had taken root in Hinton as a teenager when a friend described how a hologram works: innumerable beams of light bouncing off an object are recorded, and then those many representations are scattered over a huge database. Hinton, who comes from a somewhat eccentric, generations-deep family of overachieving scientists, immediately understood that the human brain worked like that, too--information in our brains is spread across a vast network of cells, linked by an endless map of neurons, firing and connecting and transmitting along a billion paths. He wondered: could a computer behave the same way? The answer, according to the academic mainstream, was a deafening no. Computers learned best by rules and logic, they said. And besides, Hinton's notion, called neural networks--which later became the groundwork for "deep learning" or "machine learning"--had already been disproven. In the late '50s, a Cornell scientist named Frank Rosenblatt had proposed the world's first neural network machine. It was called the Perceptron, and it had a simple objective--to recognize images. The goal was to show it a picture of an apple, and it would, at least in theory, spit out "apple." The Perceptron ran on an IBM mainframe, and it was ugly.

Developers from Unity are calling for more transparency after discovering their AI work is being sold to the military. Video games have pioneered AI developments since Nim was released in 1951. In the decades since, game developers have worked to improve AIs to provide a more enjoyable experience for a growing number of people around the world. Just imagine the horror if those developers found out their work was instead being used for real military purposes without their knowledge. That's exactly what developers behind the popular Unity game engine discovered.

As a boy, Eric Plosky '99, MCP '00, rode the New York subway with his grandmother to every city attraction on the map. "Whenever anyone asks me how I got into transportation, I always ask them, 'How did you get out of it?'" he says. "Every little kid seems to love trains and subways and buses and cars and planes, and for some reason they'grow out of it.' Now, as chief of transportation planning at the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Kendall Square, Plosky and his team put their imaginations to work reenvisioning what transportation can be. It's people, it's decision-making, it's history and culture," he says.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted an outlandish tweet on Monday in which he references the novel The Guns of August, a 500-page book about the early stages of World War I. Musk, 50, captioned the tweet with the name of the book, written by Barbara Tuchman in 1962, along with the entire first paragraph of the book. Barbara Tuchman's 1962 novel was centered on the first month of the Great War and the opening events of WWI, along with the decisions that led to it. Tuchman's book was an immediate bestseller and earned her a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction'The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again,' so ends the paragraph. Tuchman's book, centered on the first month of the Great War, was an immediate bestseller and earned her a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. President John F. Kennedy was so impressed with it that he gave a copy to each member of his cabinet and some of his top military advisors and told them to read it.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will seek input on whether digital customer engagement innovations used by financial firms should be governed by existing rules or may need new ones, commission chair Gary Gensler told Reuters. While the SEC's thinking on the subject is at an "early stage," its rules may need updating to account for an artificial intelligence-led revolution in predictive analytics, differential marketing and behavioral prompts designed to optimize customer engagement, he said. The SEC plans to launch a sweeping consultation in coming days that could have major ramifications for retail brokers, wealth managers and robo-advisers, which increasingly use such tools to drive customers to higher-revenue products. I really believe data analytics and AI can bring a lot of positives, but it means we should look back and think about what does this mean for user interface, user engagement, fairness and bias," said Gensler. "What does it mean about rules written ...

According to research into the UK cyber security labor market, carried out on behalf of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), approximately 680,000 businesses (50%) have a basic skills gap. The people in charge of cybersecurity in those businesses lack the confidence to carry out the basic tasks laid out in the government-endorsed Cyber Essentials scheme and are not getting support from external cybersecurity providers to plug that gap. It seems to be a problem that we cannot get away from, but part of the answer may lay in the way in which new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can support the fight through the automation of some tasks and relieve already stretched cybersecurity staff to focus on higher-value tasks within their role. AI and ML have had several false dawns over their history, usually due to unrealistic expectations and misrepresentation in the mainstream media. But these technologies have advanced immensely and are a part of our everyday lives.

The federal government wants to invest five billion euros by 2025 as part of its AI strategy. The aim is to make Germany "a leading location for the development and application of AI technologies". This market is already developing very dynamically: According to IDC, over 50 billion US dollars were spent on artificial intelligence systems last year. The 100 billion mark is to be cracked by 2024, according to the infographic from Statista and Technology Review shows. In relation to this, the public investments make a rather clear impression.

Artificial intelligence is one of several hot technologies that have the potential to transform the face of combat in the next years. The Joint Artificial intelligence Center was established by the Department of Defense to win the artificial intelligence war. AI might enable autonomous systems to execute missions, achieve sensor fusion, automate activities, and make better, faster judgments than people, according to some visions. AI is quickly developing, and those objectives may be met shortly. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence will influence the more routine, boring, and monotonous duties that military personnel undertake in uncontested situations.

A U.S.-led coalition aircraft shot down an unmanned drone in Eastern Syria's Deir al-Zour province Saturday, months after the U.S. Central Command expressed concern over the use of weaponized drones to attack U.S. forces in the region. "Coalition aircraft successfully engaged and defeated a UAS through air to air engagement in the vicinity of Mission Support Site Green Village," Reuters quoted coalition spokesperson U.S. Army Colonel Wayne Marotto. While the coalition refused to reveal the type of aircraft used or other details citing security issues, a report by Aviation Week said a U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle used an AIM-9X Sidewinder missile to hit the UAS. The report added that Brig. Gen. Christopher Sage, commander of the 332nd Air Expeditionary Wing, was piloting the F-15E that fired the missile.

Forty-seven government entities and privacy companies, including Microsoft, exposed 38 million sensitive data records online by misconfiguring the Windows giant's Power Apps, a low-code service that promises an easy way to build professional applications. Security biz UpGuard said that in May one of its analysts found that the OData API for a Power Apps portal offered anonymously accessible database records that included personal details. That led the security shop to look at other Power Apps portals and its researchers found over one thousand apps configured to make data available to anyone who asked. Among the entities identified by UpGuard are: state and municipal government bodies in Indiana, Maryland, and New York City, and private enterprises like American Airlines, Ford, JB Hunt, and Microsoft. There's no indication so far that information has been misused.