"There is an urgent need to identify effective drugs that treat or prevent COVID-19," said Anandasankar Ray, a professor of molecular, cell, and systems biology who led the research. "We have developed a drug discovery pipeline that identified several candidates." The drug discovery pipeline is a type of computational strategy linked to artificial intelligence -- a computer algorithm that learns to predict activity through trial and error, improving over time. With no clear end in sight, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted lives, strained health care systems, and weakened economies. Efforts to repurpose drugs, such as Remdesivir, have achieved some success.

The United States Postal Service is reportedly retiring mail sorting machines. According to Postmaster general Louis DeJoy, the agency is in a "dire" financial situation, citing significant falls in mail volume, "a broken business model" and an inadequate management strategy as reasons for the "impending liquidity crisis." Dejoy has been implementing changes since assuming the role in June, including organizational restructuring and a management hiring freeze, saying they're meant to "strengthen the Postal Service." But there appear to be moves that he might have left out. Vice is reporting that the USPS is also retiring mail sorting machines around the country "without any official explanation or reason given."

The proposal includes funding to develop AI research institutes, formed by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Agriculture and other agencies, the administration said. It also includes $25 million in funding for the Energy Department to build an early-stage quantum internet, which uses the principles of quantum mechanics to more securely transmit data. AI and quantum information science, an area of study that includes quantum-based cryptography, communication and quantum computing, are critical for economic growth and national security, said Michael Kratsios, U.S. chief technology officer. "We need to make sure we're winning and leading in the technologies of today…and also in technology that will define our future," Mr. Kratsios said. The White House's fiscal year 2021 budget proposal includes $1.5 billion for AI, up from about $1.12 billion in 2020, and $699 million for quantum information science, up from about $579 million in 2020.

Basically, what a hospital needs to accomplish is to eliminate spots on the CT scan image that are "less important" -- meaning, in this application, spots that don't reflect the actual image of the lungs. That can be done through a common algorithm called singular value decomposition (SVD). To apply the SVD, a little preprocessing is necessary. A CT scan image is normally represented in three dimensions. One dimension is a series of "slices," each slice being a two-dimensional image. The SVD algorithm requires a two-dimensional matrix, but it's easy to reduce three dimensions to two: just string out the rows of each two-dimensional matrix, as you might unfold a fold-up walking stick or measuring stick. The SVD algorithm produces a new set of matrices with powerful properties.

No one wants their most private activities secretly monitored. That's why wiretapping is strictly regulated in the US and most of the world. Federal law makes it a crime for the government to surveil communications without a court-ordered warrant. This is not the issue here. Nor is this a case involving one-party consent.

Encountering altered videos and photoshopped images is almost a rite of passage on the internet. It's rare these days that you'd visit social media and not come across some form of edited content -- whether that be a simple selfie with a filter, a highly embellished meme or a video edited to add a soundtrack or enhance certain elements. But while some forms of media are obviously edited, other alterations may be harder to spot. You may have heard the term "deepfake" in recent years -- it first came about in 2017 to describe videos and images that implement deep learning algorithms to create videos and images that look real. For example, take the moon disaster speech given by former president Richard Nixon when the Apollo 11 team crashed into the lunar surface.

WASHINGTON: Inventing artificial intelligence algorithms shouldn't require reinventing the wheel but in the fractured, bureaucratic world of the Defense Department it all too often does. That's why the Pentagon's Joint AI Center has hired Deloitte Consulting to build the Joint Common Foundation, a cloud-based AI development kit for any DoD organization to use. Awarded yesterday but announced this afternoon, the contract names Deloitte as the one and only "prime integrator" for "Systems Engineering, Technology, and Innovation." That makes the company responsible for pulling together all the technologies and subcontractors required to build the Joint Common Foundation and keeping it updated, secure and operational. The minimum scope of the contract is $31 million over one year (starting Aug. 17), but if the Pentagon is pleased with Deloitte's performance, it can exercise annual options that could grow the contract to a maximum of $106.4 million over four years (through 2024).

When Tokuso Hamai saw the colorized version of an old black-and-white photo of a picnic held under cherry tree blossoms sometime before World War II, forgotten memories of family members, most of whom died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, came pouring out. "In colorized photos, people come to life," said Hamai, now 86. "I often played near (the picnic site), and sometimes I would do some naughty things and get scolded by my father." The power of a colorized photo to reignite lost memories was eye-opening for Anju Niwata, the student who gave Hamai the colorized photo as a present three years ago. The 75th anniversary of the end of World War II is Saturday, and Niwata, now 18, said she hopes it will bring attention to her project with a Tokyo University professor to painstakingly colorize photos using artificial intelligence and their own research to spark lost memories for the rapidly aging generation who experienced the war.

For 23 years, Larry Collins worked in a booth on the Carquinez Bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area, collecting tolls. The fare changed over time, from a few bucks to $6, but the basics of the job stayed the same: Collins would make change, answer questions, give directions and greet commuters. "Sometimes, you're the first person that people see in the morning," says Collins, "and that human interaction can spark a lot of conversation." But one day in mid-March, as confirmed cases of the coronavirus were skyrocketing, Collins' supervisor called and told him not to come into work the next day. The tollbooths were closing to protect the health of drivers and of toll collectors. Going forward, drivers would pay bridge tolls automatically via FasTrak tags mounted on their windshields or would receive bills sent to the address linked to their license plate. Collins' job was disappearing, as were the jobs of around 185 other toll collectors at bridges in Northern California, all to be replaced by technology.

Starting a new life is difficult for criminals transitioning from prison back to regular society. To help those individuals, Purdue University Polytechnic Institute researchers are using artificial intelligence to uncover risky behaviors which could then help identify when early intervention opportunities could be beneficial. Results of a U.S. Department of Justice study indicated more than 80 percent of people in state prisons were arrested at least once in the nine years following their release. Almost half of those arrests came in the first year following release. Marcus Rogers and Umit Karabiyik of Purdue Polytechnic's Department of Computer and Information Technology, are leading an ongoing project focused on using AI-enabled tools and technology to reduce the recidivism rates for convicted criminals who have been released.