Pepper the robot is taking early retirement. The humanoid's maker, Japan's SoftBank Group, has reportedly stopped producing Pepper due to weak demand. Pepper had been touted as the harbinger of a robotics revolution, but the droid's early demise show it couldn't quite live up to the hype. Attend the tech festival of the year and get your super early bird ticket now! Pepper nonetheless made a mark on the public during the android's six-year run.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has implemented a new policy that will require car companies to report incidents involving semi- and fully autonomous driving systems within one day of learning of an accident. In an order spotted by The Washington Post, NHTSA mandates automakers fill out an electronic incident form and submit it to the agency when one of their systems was active either during a crash or immediately before it. They must report an accident anytime there's a death, an injury that requires hospital treatment, a vehicle that's towed away, an airbag deployment or when a pedestrian and or cyclist is involved. The order covers Level 2 advanced driver-assistance systems to Level 5 fully autonomous vehicles, meaning it includes the gamut of everything from Tesla cars with Autopilot to Waymo taxis. "This action will enable NHTSA to collect information necessary for the agency to play its role in keeping Americans safe on the roadways, even as the technology deployed on the nation's roads continues to evolve," the regulator said.

Federal regulators are tightening their oversight of car crashes that involve advanced driver-assistance or automated-driving features, a shift that follows growing concern over the role that systems such as Tesla Inc.'s Autopilot have had in crashes. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a new order on Tuesday that companies must report serious crashes involving driver-assistance and automated-driving systems to authorities within a day of learning about them. Manufacturers and operators will also have to issue broader monthly reports about their vehicles' safety. "Gathering data will help instill public confidence that the federal government is closely overseeing the safety of automated vehicles," NHTSA Acting Administrator Steven Cliff said. The data will help investigators track patterns in automated-driving crashes, the agency said.

"We just know it's the right thing to do for our customers and--I say this from years of doing risk management-- it's good, basic risk management," says Shannon Carroll, director of global environmental sustainability at AT&T. "If all indications are that something is going to happen in the future, it's our responsibility to be prepared for that." Globally, leaders from government, business, and academia see the urgency. When citing risks with the highest impact, those surveyed listed climate action failure and other environmental risks second only to infectious diseases. AT&T is taking action with its Climate Resilience Project, using spatial data analysis and location information to tackle the complex problem of how increasingly powerful storms could affect infrastructure such as cell towers and the telecom's ability to deliver service to its customers. "Spatial analysis is this way of going beyond what we visually see," explains Lauren Bennett, head of spatial analysis and data science at Esri, a geographic information systems (GIS) company.

An actual space laser is cruising 300 miles above your head right now. Launched in 2018, NASA's ICESat-2 satellite packs a lidar instrument, the same kind of technology that allows self-driving cars to see in three dimensions by spraying lasers around themselves as they roll down the street and analyzing the light that bounces back. But instead of mapping a road, ICESat-2 measures the elevation of Earth's surface with extreme accuracy. Although this space laser means you no harm, it does portend catastrophe. Today in the journal Nature Communications, scientists describe how they used ICESat-2's new lidar data to map the planet's land that's less than 2 meters above sea level, which makes it vulnerable to the creep of sea level rise.

By mandating crash reporting, the agency will have access to critical data that will help quickly identify safety issues that could emerge in these automated systems,

) installed an artificial intelligence (AI) enabled high-end CCTV network for surveillance at its five units here, an official said here on Tuesday. The state- …

Thousands of patients and NHS staff will benefit from dozens of new pioneering projects awarded a share of £36 million to test state-of-the-art AI technology. The projects will help the NHS to transform the quality of care and the speed of diagnoses for conditions such as lung cancer. At CogX Festival today (16 June), the Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock announced the winners of the second wave of the NHS AI Lab's AI in Health and Care Award. Already over 17,000 stroke patients and over 25,000 patients with diabetes or high blood pressure have benefited from the first round of the AI in Health and Care Award since September, where £50 million was given to 42 AI technologies. AI has the potential to completely revolutionise every part of how we approach healthcare, from how we diagnose diseases and the speed at which our doctors and nurses deliver treatments to how we support people's mental health.

The rise of artificial intelligence heralds a new era, one where a web of algorithms rather than a network of people performs both complex and rudimentary tasks. Thailand plans to capitalize on this new technology to address important social and developmental challenges. The possibilities of artificial intelligence in Thailand could usher in the vision of Thailand 4.0: a Thailand with a value-based economy driven by innovation, technology and creativity. The Asian Development Bank published a report about how artificial intelligence and machine learning software could revolutionize the way countries track poverty. The bank coordinated a research collaboration between the World Data Lab and the governments of the Philippines and Thailand.

The pandemic taught us a lesson that we needed to learn again, says Alondra Nelson: Science and technology have everything to do with issues of society, inequality, and social life. After a year in which science became politicized amid a pandemic and a presidential campaign, in January president-elect Joe Biden appointed Nelson deputy director of science and society in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a new position. Nelson will build a science and society division within the OSTP aimed at addressing issues ranging from data and democracy to STEM education. In another first, Biden made his science adviser Eric Lander, who is also director of OSTP, part of his cabinet. Nelson has spent her career at the intersection of race, tech, and society, writing about topics like how Afrofuturism can make the world better and how the Black Panthers used health care as a form of activism, leading the organization to develop an early interest in genetics.