Wherever that will lead is, at the time of the writing of this article, still not certain, but regardless of the direction, it's clear that advancing progress with artificial intelligence is a key strategic element for both major parties. Over the course of the past few years, governments around the world have taken strong positions on advancing their strategies around AI adoption. Certainly heading into the new year it seems that the pace of adoption won't be slowing any time soon. At the recent Data for AI conference, we had an opportunity to get insights into how the government plans to continue and accelerate its adoption of AI in an interview with Ellery Taylor, Acting Director of the Office of Acquisition Management and Innovation Division, at the US General Services Administration (GSA). In this article he shares his outlook for the future of AI and how it is being adopted in the government.

Cyber threats continue to escalate in both sophistication and volume. Traditional approaches to threat detection, however, are no longer sufficient to ensure protection. Correspondingly, machine learning (ML) has proven highly effective at identifying and warding off cyber attacks. Machine learning's power is the result of three factors: data, compute power and algorithms. Due to its very nature, the cyber field produces substantial amounts of data.

Public trust in artificial intelligence becomes increasingly crucial as machine-learning companies move from the conceptual to the commercial stage, she …

Nearly 30 local governments across Japan are planning to or interested in introducing an artificial intelligence system designed to assess the seriousness of school bullying cases in hopes of better responding to them, a source close to the matter said Thursday. Otsu city government, which came under fire for the way it handled a high-profile bullying case in 2011, has teamed up with information technology services provider Hitachi Systems Ltd, to develop the AI system, which predicts how serious a case of bullying has the potential to become based on an analysis of past cases. School bullying has long been a concern in Japan, with the education ministry data showing that elementary, junior and senior high as well as special-needs schools nationwide reported 612,496 cases in the year through March, up 68,563 from a year earlier. When a new case of bullying is reported, information on the incident, such as time, place and perpetrator, is fed into the system, which then searches its database to come up with an estimate of how serious the case is, expressed as a percentage. In all, about 50 pieces of data are used for analysis.

Scientists affiliated with the University of Melbourne and Synchron, Inc. published earlier this week in the Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery the first-in-human study of Stentrode, a wireless neuroprosthesis that uses machine learning and a stent. What makes the Stentrode technology unique is that it is a stent that records brain activity inside a blood vessel in the brain. It is implanted through the jugular vein so there is no need for open brain surgery. The technology platform originated from the University of Melbourne, in a collaborative effort with the Royal Melbourne Hospital, the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, Monash University, and Synchron, Inc.. A brain-computer interface (BCI) enables two-way communications between the biological brain and a machine.

At the outset of World War II, you'd have a better chance of finding a needle in a haystack with a camel stuck in its eye than you did shooting down an enemy aircraft in your first dozen or so shots. This is because anti-aircraft shells at the time used manual fuses that had to be dialed in for specific lengths of time to delay their explosion. The idea was that you'd estimate where the targeted plane would be in, say five seconds, based on its currently flight path, then time the shell for that length, fire the shell at the plane and hope that the timing and location were close enough that shrapnel from the exploding shell hits the plane. If your calculations were off by even a hair, the shell would miss by thousands of feet. And if shooting down piloted aircraft was this hard, intercepting Germany's terrifyingly fast V1 and V2 rockets required far more luck than skill. But that's exactly what the team at Section T set out to do.

AI Has Cracked a Key Mathematical Puzzle for Understanding Our World Karen Hao MIT Technology Review "Partial differential equations can describe everything from planetary motion to plate tectonics, but they're notoriously hard to solve. Physicists 3D Print a Boat That Could Sail Down a Human Hair John Biggs Gizmodo "Researchers at Leiden University have 3D printed the smallest boat in the world: a 30-micrometer copy of Benchy the tug boat, a well-known 3D printer test object. This boat is so small, it could float down the interior of a human hair. The 3D-printed boat is part of an exploration of microswimmers, microscopic organisms or objects that can move through liquids." Record-Smashing Hybrid Drone Stays Airborne for a Crazy 10 Hours, 14 Minutes Luke Dormehl Digital Trends "i'HYBRiX is an innovation, inspired by hybrid cars, that combines the best of both technologies,' a spokesperson for Quaternium told Digital Trends, referring to the drone's clever gasoline and battery-electric hybrid power system.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called DrugCell, developed by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center can reportedly match tumors to the best drug combinations, in a way that has not bee possible previously. "That's because right now we can't match the right combination of drugs to the right patients in a smart way," said Trey Ideker, PhD, professor at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Moores Cancer Center. "And especially for cancer, where we can't always predict which drugs will work best given the unique, complex inner workings of a person's tumor cells." Currently, Only four percent of all cancer therapeutic drugs under development earn final approval by the FDA. In a paper "Predicting Drug Response and Synergy Using a Deep Learning Model of Human Cancer Cells" published in Cancer Cell, Ideker, Brent Kuenzi, PhD, and Jisoo Park, PhD, postdoctoral researchers in his lab, published a paper on their work.

Kay Firth-Butterfield is Head of AI & ML at World Economic Forum, and a humanitarian with a strong sense of social justice. Kay talks to us about why AI Ethics matter during her presentation at the RE•WORK Applied AI Virtual Summit. Read the full transcript below and watch the video here. It's really great to be with you, and thanks to RE.WORK for making it happen. My title is, Does AI Ethics Matter?

Canada is an engineering powerhouse. Beyond designing, building and maintaining our vital infrastructure, engineering industries form the backbone of the country's economy. Given its power in shaping our environmental, virtual and social landscapes, it's worth asking how the profession can evolve to meet the current moment of compounded health and environmental crises. Like medicine and law, engineering is a regulated profession in Canada. Each province or territory has an official organization responsible for granting P.Eng. These requirements are in place to ensure the safety of both workers and the public when an engineering project is executed, but also to ensure that there is a clear line of accountability if things go wrong.