MetroLab Network has partnered with Government Technology to bring its readers a segment called the MetroLab Innovation of the Month Series, which highlights impactful tech, data and innovation projects underway between cities and universities. If you'd like to learn more or contact the project leads, please contact MetroLab at info@metrolabnetwork.org for more information. In this month's installment of the Innovation of the Month series, we explore a collaboration between the University of Texas at Austin and the city of Austin, involving leveraging AI to improve the lives of people experiencing homelessness. MetroLab's Ben Levine spoke with Sherri R. Greenberg from the UT-Austin LBJ School of Public Affairs; Min Kyung Lee, Stephen C. Slota and Kenneth R. Fleischmann from the UT-Austin School of Information; James Snow from the city of Austin Public Works Department; and Jonathan Tomko from the city of Austin Neighborhood Housing and Community Development Department about the background and development of their project. Ben Levine: Can you describe the origin and objective of this project and who has been involved in it?

The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is focused on overlaying artificial intelligence tools on the military's mega information-sharing platform effort, called Joint All Domain Command and Control. Nand Mulchandani, JAIC's acting director, told reporters during a July 8 news briefing the center is "spending a lot of time and resources focused on building the AI components on top of JADC2," which is a patchwork quilt of platforms to improve coordination and information sharing. This involves figuring out how to build AI components, such as data, AI modeling, training and deployment, across all domains including cyber, he said. Mulchandani said JAIC is also investing in cognitive assistance technologies, helping human operators make better decisions, using "predictive analytics or picking out particular things of interest, and those types of information overload cleanup." Working through objections to the Defense Department's use of AI in weapons systems is still a chief concern, however.

Will Hurd, R-Texas as well as a two-time Wash100 Award recipient, and Robin Kelly, D-Ill., have put out a white paper discussing the future relevance of artificial intelligence in the country's workforce and education. Hurd and Kelly worked with the Bipartisan Policy Center to develop the "AI and the Workforce" report, the first of four white papers in a series of AI-focused strategic documents, Hurd's office said Thursday. "AI is the future of the world's economy, and we want to ensure that every American worker has the opportunity to thrive in an AI-driven economy," said Hurd. The report tackles how the U.S. may incorporate AI curricula into the country's education system in support of workforce needs in the emerging field. The government will release the other three white papers in weeks to come.

Voted and approved by state assembly and the senate, New York will suspend implementation of AI facial recognition technology in schools for two years on Wednesday. State Governor Andrew Cuomo has signed the legislation into law. The decision is the aftermath of a lawsuit filed in June by the New York Civil Liberties Union on behalf of student parents, whose school district adopted the technology earlier this year. Facial recognition technology remains the most controversial AI deployment in the United States: cities like San Francisco, Somerville, and Oakland have already banned the technology in 2019. Moreover, a letter was sent to the US Privacy and Civil Liberties Board (PCLOB) in January, requesting the US government to halt relevant applications while waiting for further review.

Technology may shape the way people live, but sometimes the inverse is also true. In many ways, the issues of 2020 will drive the innovations of 2021, especially in AI. You can determine what AI research and development will look like by looking at where it needs to go from here. AI expert Mark Gorenberg predicts that the pandemic will spur an AI revolution, just as the Great Recession did for big data. As the outbreak and subsequent recession reveal the world's shortcomings, AI will rise to fix them. The next generation of AI will be one that addresses the problems of today. Medical Research If the pandemic has highlighted one area of need, it's the health and medicine sector. Healthcare systems need better tools to be able to predict and respond to any outbreaks in the future. The predictive power of AI offers a solution. Researchers are already using AI to find drugs that could potentially fight COVID-19. A National Science Foundation-funded supercomputer program is using machine learning to run simulations about how the virus interacts with different compounds. Using the results from these simulations, scientists could find potential vaccines to start testing. As people recognize the value of systems like these, it will lead to further research and development. In the coming years, you'll see a broader emphasis on healthcare technologies in the AI industry. AI could help scientists predict and prevent outbreaks or treat them faster if they do occur. Navigating New Data Regulations As big data becomes more of standard practice, data governance is a more pressing concern. People are becoming more aware of how companies are gathering their information, which will likely lead to more data regulations. In response, companies will turn to AI to ensure they don't violate any privacy laws with their data use. AI solutions can help institutions balance convenience for their customers with privacy and security. With the help of AI, organizations like banks can manage data across multiple platforms, keeping customer information safe while still making it accessible. Handling these things manually could make it more challenging to stay within increasing guidelines. Automating data management will become increasingly critical to businesses as both data and regulations grow. AI that can understand and follow restrictions like the GDPR will become a necessity. National Security The past couple of years have also brought new emphasis to the importance of cybersecurity. AI in cybersecurity is nothing new, and many organizations employ it already, but you don't see it on a national level. As cyber-risks have become more prominent, though, AI will play a more significant role in national security. Government adoption of technology is typically slower than that you see in the private sector. AI has already established itself in the commercial world, so the logical next step is the government. For national security agencies to implement these technologies, though, AI will have to prove its reliability and security. Governments in the U.S. and Europe experienced several cyber attacks from threat actors like North Korea this year. To combat these rising threats, agencies will have to turn to AI. As a result, cybersecurity AI will evolve rapidly over the next few years. AI in the IoT The convergence of separate technologies is a natural step in development. One of the most noteworthy you'll see in the future is the marriage of AI and the IoT. As the IoT grows, so will AI functionality in these devices. The IoT is a provides AI with the landscape necessary for it to see wider adoption and implementation. AI technologies like self-driving cars will need to take advantage of edge computing, which requires the IoT. AI development in the coming years will shift towards IoT platforms. AI-enabled IoT devices will also make smart cities a possibility. In the face of growing environmental and sociological concerns, that's a needed improvement. You can already see this trend starting to take place, and it will only increase from here. An AI Revolution Is Coming Soon The world stands on the cusp on a technological revolution. AI may not be new technology, but it's still growing, changing, and driving innovation. In the next few years, AI will see much wider adoption and an unprecedented period of advancement. Technological shifts typically follow significant cultural or societal events. The tumultuous period that has been 2020 will spur the next wave of AI technologies.

Artificial intelligence could play a critical role in all phases of disaster resilience, according to "Into the Storm: Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve California's Disaster Resilience," an issue brief the Partnership released with Microsoft in early July. The brief explores the AI tools governments can use for disaster resilience and highlights how agencies are using AI technologies in the field. Considering that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has declared 27 major disasters across the United States in 2020 so far--not including those related to the COVID-19 pandemic--government officials need to think through how they can strengthen their ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from these shocks. Disasters put lives and livelihoods at risk, and governments at all levels--federal, state and local--must seek the best tools available to tackle the complex challenges involved and protect lives. At a release event held in July, Bijan Karimi, assistant deputy director for emergency services at the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management, and Stuart McKee, chief technology officer for state and local government at Microsoft, discussed basic principles disaster resilience officials should keep in mind when considering the use of AI.

The government's highest priority investment in artificial intelligence needs to be its AI workforce. It is not adopting AI as quickly as the private sector, and potentially as quickly as our adversaries. Most government teams developing AI solutions we have met face high barriers when they begin a project. They include limited access to data sets, constrained system authorities, and less computing power than they need. As a result, projects are slower and more expensive than they might be, delaying the fielding of systems that can decrease costs, increase capabilities, and help improve national security.

As I've noted in the past ICT related legislation tends to be considerably over broad in scope ay the best of times, and prosecuters have tried very hard to open it up further with case law. Whilst some judges do pull things in a bit, to many alow prosecutorial over reach go to far. A rule of thumb for legislation should be to reset any proposed legislation from ICT and see what equivalent legislation exists for non ICT situations. Thus any ICT legislation should be similarly restrained in scope. After all it is not illegal to walk up to somebodies door and knock politely, if you've made a nusance of yourself there are civil remidies. However ICT legislation makes the equivalent online activity actually a criminal activity from the get go, and it's frequently treated as something worse than armed robbery.

When Gulzira Aeulkhan finally fled China for Kazakhstan early last year, she still suffered debilitating headaches and nausea. She didn't know if this was a result of the guards at an internment camp hitting her in the head with an electric baton for spending more than two minutes on the toilet, or from the enforced starvation diet. Maybe it was simply the horror she had witnessed – the sounds of women screaming when they were beaten, their silence when they returned to the cell. Like an estimated 1.5 million other Turkic Muslims, Gulzira had been interned in a "re-education camp" in north-west China. After discovering that she had watched a Turkish TV show in which some of the actors wore hijabs, Chinese police had accused her of "extremism" and said she was "infected by the virus" of Islamism.

Co-CEO at Fluree, the scalable semantic graph database backed by blockchain technology. As AI continues to permeate the online world, it opens up a Pandora's box of unintended consequences. That's because unleashing AI on the current version of the internet and letting it feed on potentially inauthentic data can lead to devastation. Our increasing reliance on machine learning opens the floodgates for hackers and other bad actors to manipulate data and exploit algorithms in dangerous ways. From entering counterfeit products into the supply chain to changing software source code to meddling with voter registration databases, data tampering is already being used as a powerful weapon.