Advances in AI are making their way across all products and services we interact with. Our cars are outfitted with tools that trigger automatic breaking, platforms such as Netflix proactively suggest recommendations for viewing, Alexa and Google can predict our search needs, and Spotify can recommend songs and curate listening lists much better than you or I can. Although the advantages of AI in our daily lives are undeniable, people are concerned about its dangers. Inadequate physical security, economic losses, and ethical issues are just a few examples of the damage AI could cause. In response to AI dangers, the European Union is working on a legal framework to regulate artificial intelligence.

NASA's Perseverance rover has switched from photographing the Ingenuity helicopter's test flights, to searching for signs of long gone Martian life. The US space agency confirmed that the SUV-sized rover has started to test the ancient lakebed in the Jezero crater by focusing its science instruments on rocks. A camera called WATSON on the end of the rover's robotic arm has taken detailed shots of the rocks, with extra data coming from a pair of zoomable cameras. The Perseverance team tweeted: 'The time has come: I'm switching from on-scene photographer to science investigator. Did this ancient lakebed ever have life? The tools I brought will help begin the hunt.

When sea snakes swim, they wind their way through the water by flicking their flattened tails, which is super graceful but requires a whole lot of coordination. So when roboticists at Carnegie Mellon University decided that it was time for their landlubbing robot snake to take to the water, they took a shortcut. They approximated the wildly complex biomechanics of a serpent--and then loaded the machine with propellers. The result is a sort of wiggling torpedo, sans warhead: the Hardened Underwater Modular Robot Snake. As you can see in the video below, it manages some impressive swimming by combining an aft thruster to produce forward movement with lateral thrusters along its body for stability control, plus it uses some bending joints (actuators, in the parlance) to position the lateral thrusters.

Automating tasks has long been a goal of large workforces, and none is larger than the Department of Defense. With financial management systems that process a more than $700 billion budget annually, getting a helping (digital) hand can reduce wasted labor hours and costly mistakes. But simple automation sometimes is not enough to help solve more complex challenges, like pairing unmatched transactions in databases. That's why the Defense Innovation Unit teamed up with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to inject a boost of machine learning so that robotic process automation (RPA) can approach more complex tasks, like finding mislabeled and unmatched transactions. "The DOD has been using RPAs for several years to help fix [unmatched transactions], but RPAs are based on simple'if-then-else' cases where most of the [unmatched transactions] require more sophisticated analysis, which up to now have required manual intervention," said Eric Dorsey, a DIU program manager in the AI portfolio.

Japan's parliament on Wednesday enacted a set of laws to establish a new government agency in September as the country aims to speed up digitalization. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga's government hopes to accelerate digitalization in the central and local governments to improve the quality of services after the novel coronavirus pandemic exposed challenges caused by a delay in the initiatives. Under the digitalization legislation that was enacted in the Upper House plenary session, Japan will revamp computer systems for central and local governments and introduce common nationwide rules to protect personal information. It will also be tasked with taking privacy protection measures as the legislation will boost the exchange of personal information, in a move that could cause data leakage and other risks. The Suga government has, since its launch last September, placed a high priority on digital reforms, as Japan has long been struggling to promote administrative reforms by utilizing information technology, despite having aimed at improvements since around 2000.

Scientists have developed software that can look minutes into the future. Gravity in this galaxy [even outside our solar system] behaves as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, confirming the theory's validity on galactic scales. FYI: Our Sun is just ONE STAR among the hundreds of billions of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy. The technology is being built into the official postal system in countries like Mongolia, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, and Mercedes, an investor, is incorporating "What3Words" navigation into its cars. FYI: Each 10-foot-square patch of Planet Earth is labeled with three words -- 57 trillion squares altogether.

Enterprises and investors are increasing their use of natural language APIs to assist processing in tasks like data mining for sales intelligence, tracking how marketing campaigns change over time, and better defending against phishing and ransomware attacks. Still, AI products that use natural language engines to analyze text have a long way to go to capture more than a fraction of the nuance humans use to communicate with each other. The company this week announced new advanced features for its cloud-based natural language API designed to help AI developers "[extract] emotions in large-scale texts and [identify] stylometric data driving a complete fingerprint of content," Expert.ai said in a statement. Based in Modena, Italy and with U.S. headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, Expert.ai The company's customers include media outlets like the Associated Press, which uses NL software for content classification and enrichment; business intelligence consultants like L'Argus de la Presse, which conducts brand reputation analysis with NL processing; and financial services firms like Zurich Insurance, which uses Expert.ai's

The death of a Sri Lankan woman detained at a central Japan immigration facility has been in the spotlight as the Diet debates a controversial bill to revise the immigration law, with critics fearing the revision will worsen conditions for asylum-seekers in Japan. While ruling parties aim to pass the bill during the current Diet session through mid-June to resolve the long-term detention of foreign nationals facing deportation orders, opposition forces have called for its abolishment as the government has yet to figure out the circumstances surrounding the Sri Lankan's death. Ratnayake Liyanage Wishma Sandamali, 33, who had been detained since August last year at the Nagoya Regional Immigration Services Bureau in Aichi Prefecture for overstaying her visa, died on March 6 after complaining of a stomach ache and other symptoms from mid-January. In an interim report over the incident released on April 9, the Justice Ministry did not determine the cause of her death, while her supporters allege the tragedy was caused by the insufficient medical treatment provided by the immigration facility. Opposition lawmakers have argued the bill currently being deliberated at the Diet is meant to expand the immigration authority's power and discretion and that similar problems could happen again as long as the cause of the Sri Lankan woman's death remains a mystery.

Smart Cities and Communities (SCC) constitute a new paradigm in urban development. SCC ideates on a data-centered society aiming at improving efficiency by automating and optimizing activities and utilities. Information and communication technology along with internet of things enables data collection and with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) situation awareness can be obtained to feed the SCC actors with enriched knowledge. This paper describes AI perspectives in SCC and gives an overview of AI-based technologies used in traffic to enable road vehicle automation and smart traffic control. Perception, Smart Traffic Control and Driver Modelling are described along with open research challenges and standardization to help introduce advanced driver assistance systems and automated vehicle functionality in traffic. To fully realize the potential of SCC, to create a holistic view on a city level, the availability of data from different stakeholders is need. Further, though AI technologies provide accurate predictions and classifications there is an ambiguity regarding the correctness of their outputs. This can make it difficult for the human operator to trust the system. Today there are no methods that can be used to match function requirements with the level of detail in data annotation in order to train an accurate model. Another challenge related to trust is explainability, while the models have difficulties explaining how they come to a certain conclusion it is difficult for humans to trust it.

Bell's theorem is typically understood as the proof that quantum theory is incompatible with local hidden variable models. More generally, we can see the violation of a Bell inequality as witnessing the impossibility of explaining quantum correlations with classical causal models. The violation of a Bell inequality, however, does not exclude classical models where some level of measurement dependence is allowed, that is, the choice made by observers can be correlated with the source generating the systems to be measured. Here we show that the level of measurement dependence can be quantitatively upper bounded if we arrange the Bell test within a network. Furthermore, we also prove that these results can be adapted in order to derive non-linear Bell inequalities for a large class of causal networks and to identify quantumly realizable correlations which violate them.