A new bipartisan congressional report calls for the Defense Department to get a lot more serious about the race to acquire artificial intelligence and autonomous capabilities, modeling efforts to become dominant in these spheres after the "Manhattan Project" initiative to test and develop nuclear weapons in the 1940s. On Tuesday, the House Armed Services Committee released the results of a yearlong review, co-led by Reps. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., and Jim Banks, R-Ind., aimed at assessing U.S. military capabilities and preparedness to meet current threats. The 87-page Future of Defense Task Force Report contains some expected findings -- China and Russia are identified as the top security threats to the U.S. and modernization is described as an urgent need -- but there are surprising points of emphasis. The report leans hard into technological development and growth, particularly in the fields of machine learning and autonomy, going so far as to call for the Defense Department to evaluate an AI or autonomous alternative prior to every major future defense buy.

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. It's not hard to tell that the image below shows three different things: a bird, a dog, and a horse. This example portrays one of the dangerous characteristics of machine learning models, which can be exploited to force them into misclassifying data. This is an example of data poisoning, a special type of adversarial attack, a series of techniques that target the behavior of machine learning and deep learning models. If applied successfully, data poisoning can provide malicious actors backdoor access to machine learning models and enable them to bypass systems controlled by artificial intelligence algorithms.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today released a report titled "Public Views on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property Policy." The new report represents the agency's firm commitment to keeping pace with this rapidly changing and critical technology in order to accelerate American innovation. "On February 11, 2019, President Trump signed Executive Order 13859 announcing the American Artificial Intelligence Initiative, our nation's strategy on artificial intelligence," said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. "As artificial intelligence technologies continue to advance, the United States will not cede leadership in global innovation. The Department of Commerce recognizes the importance of harnessing American ingenuity to advance and protect our economic security." "The USPTO has long been committed to ensuring our nation maintains its leadership in all areas of innovation, especially in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence," said Andrei Iancu, Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO.

Take, for example, attacking a Star Destroyer. Sure, you can just point your ship at it and spray it with your lasers. That won't do much though. The better path, one that is encouraged and most rewarded by the game, is to first target one of its systems (say, the shield generators), flip your deflector shields to the front, boost the engines to enhance your speed and maneuverability to avoid incoming fire, fire off a guided warhead like a Proton Torpedo, sneak inside the ship's shields for maximum damage, level your shields (because now there are turrets on both sides of you), speed boost and then cut the engines and turn hard to drift around the tower, prolonging the time you can fire on it, redirect power from your engines to your lasers and blast away until you're either out of range or your power is depleted, point your fighter away from the Star Destroyer, shift the shields back to your rear, redirect power back to the engines and speed away. When you're finally out of range, maybe redirect power to your shields to recharge them, if you're not being pursued by an enemy fighter.

The federal government may have a role to play as an equity mediator when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence technologies, according to three lawmakers. Robin Kelly, D-Ill., Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Jerry McNerney, D-Calif., are convinced that artificial intelligence will soon be ubiquitous and the U.S. government will play a vital role in its development. But in order for the technology to be developed equitably, the federal government will need to ensure access to education as well as resources like data isn't limited to elites. Let's also make sure that whenever the federal government is doing research and has data, that that information is available for everybody to use so that you don't have to be a large business or corporation … to take advantage of artificial intelligence and the data you need in order to do that, Hurd said. Kelly added historically black colleges and universities need greater access to AI research opportunities as well.

The acceleration of artificial intelligence adoption in the enterprise space has created the chief artificial intelligence officer¹ position to handle increasing roles. Companies see the chief technology officer as the person responsible for all technology solutions, but the reality is that AI deployment² commands time and requires a dedicated leader to coordinate with the C-suite. AI and its impact on enterprises dictates that artificial intelligence is an essential component of strategy that every business needs. The focus for those leading AI is to help organizations utilize these systems for enhancing existing business operations and AI powered³ products. This is where the chief AI officer steps in.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – One of the most contentious battles in politics isn't just the current battle for the White House, it's also the upcoming battle over who could ultimately end up in the halls of Congress and state capitols everywhere, in a process called redistricting. "The basic idea underlying that system is that we should form a constituency with people who live near us," said Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in Virginia. New district maps are created based on census population numbers every 10 years. Yet, those maps can end up getting distorted to favor one political party over another when gerrymandering comes in to play. "I think gerrymandering is of concern to most voters because it seems to violate the foundational principle of our representative system, which is that we are divided into districts geographically," Blahous said.

With connected cars becoming more common, the industry has more standards and options when it comes to autonomous vehicle security. Adam Laurie, known in hacker circles as Major Malfunction, leads X-Force Red's automotive testing practice. He has seen firsthand how easy it can be to compromise an autonomous vehicle if strong security processes and controls are not in place. He recently found an opening in the keyless entry device of his own vehicle, then leveraged it to unlock every vehicle of the same model in a parking lot. The project was for research purposes as opposed to a real attack, but it did show how easy it could be for an attacker to purchase a vehicle, reverse engineer it to find flaws and then exploit those flaws to compromise every other vehicle of that same model.

During your time on earth you've seen hundreds of thousands of faces. Out of all of those faces, you've most likely recognized many of them. The phrase "I'd know that face anywhere" is very relevant here. Have you ever thought about how you recognize a face? The process is much more complicated than you'd think.

The US Navy is developing AI-controlled submarines that could have the ability to kill without human control. The project -- called CLAWS -- is being led by the Office of Naval Research, which is responsible for the science and technology programs of the US Navy and Marine Corps. Budget documents uncovered by New Scientist, describe CLAWS as an "autonomous unmanned undersea weapon system" that could be installed on robot submarines such as the Orca underseas vehicle being developed by Boeing. These boats will be armed with 12 torpedo tubes that could be controlled by CLAWS without any input from a human. "It will clandestinely extend the reach of large UUVs [unmanned underwater vehicles] and increase the mission areas into kinetic effects," read the documents.