The controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI is in negotiations with several unnamed federal agencies and three US states to provide contact tracing services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Company founder and CEO Hoan Ton-That confirmed the negotiations were ongoing but declined to specify which agencies or states are considering the company's services. Ton-That said the company has seen growing demand for technical solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic and considers it a good opportunity to expand its business. 'What we understand now is we're in the stage where if we are to open up the economy in a way that's safe for everybody, that we need to be able to test quickly and also trace the people who have been infected and find out who they've been in contact with,' Ton-That told NBC News. Clearview has provided access to its facial recognition software to more than 2,220 different government and law enforcement agencies around the country, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the New York Police Department, the US Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency and more.

"We've set it to alert us if someone has a fever over 100.5 degrees Fahrenheit," Brett Smith, chief information officer of the airport's operator, Propeller Airports, said about the repurposed device. The camera screens passengers as they line up for standard security checks by the Transportation Security Administration. Passengers with high fevers are screened a second time, and ultimately the airline determines if they pose a danger to others on board, Mr. Smith said. The airport began operations in March 2019 and serves as a northwestern hub for Alaska Airlines and United Airlines. Developed in 2018, in the wake of a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Athena's gun-detecting camera operates by combining object detection, computer vision and machine-learning to identify weapons and automatically alert on-site workers and police.

Tax policy is surely a complex beast, and depending on your political leanings, you probably have some strong feelings about how it should be implemented. Salesforce AI researchers are trying to build a model to bring artificial intelligence to bear on what will undoubtedly always be a highly political process. Richard Socher, who heads up AI research at Salesforce, says the company is researching all kinds of solutions related to AI and business, and how it could improve the Salesforce product family; however, he also looks at how his team could use AI to solve a set of broader social issues beyond what it can do for the product line. Socher says when you look at the biggest issues of our time, one of the largest is economic inequality, and how we could use policy to solve that. To that end, the company created a model it calls an AI economist that could look at various economic variables, a broad set of economic models and using the power of AI begin to demonstrate how various policies affect economic inequality versus productivity.

This article has been adapted from the podcast, Eye on AI. In 2017, China announced its goal to become the world leader in AI by 2030. The US responded by creating a commission to review America's competitive position and to advise Congress on what steps are needed to maintain US leadership in this important field. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and former Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work were chosen from among fifteen appointed commissioners to lead the work. Earlier this month, the commission issued its first set of recommendations to Congress.

Dr. Amy Compton-Phillips is the chief clinical officer and executive vice president for Providence St. Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. Tokyo will use robots to attend to coronavirus patients housed in local hotels. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government unveiled two robots on Friday at the Apa Hotel & Resort in the capital's Sumida ward. The Apa Hotel is one of five hotels in Tokyo that the metropolitan government is renting to house hospital patients with no or mild symptoms of COVID-19. Doctors and nurses attend the guests at the hotel, but the government hopes that the Softbank-developed robots will help to cheer up the otherwise isolated guests.

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The nation's top inventors and businesses rely heavily on the United States Patent and Trademark Office to issue patents for inventions and register trademarks for product and intellectual property identification. The agency has come to embrace increasingly more emerging and advanced technologies in recent years to meet its mission, and it is now also enduring a large-scale modernization. USPTO Chief Information Officer Jamie Holcombe is working to help make the agency's systems "better, cheaper and faster." Holcombe joined the agency at the request of Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director Andrei Iancu, who immediately articulated his aims to "propel the USPTO into the next decade." "He wanted to ensure that all the up-to-date commercial tools were available to the USPTO examiners so that we could conduct our business in the most advanced way possible," Holcombe told Nextgov in the latest episode of Critical Update.

Facial-recognition algorithms from Los Angeles startup TrueFace are good enough that the US Air Force uses them to speed security checks at base entrances. But CEO Shaun Moore says he's facing a new question: How good is TrueFace's technology when people are wearing face masks? "It's something we don't know yet because it's not been deployed in that environment," Moore says. His engineers are testing their technology on masked faces and are hurriedly gathering images of masked faces to tune their machine-learning algorithms for pandemic times. Facial recognition has become more widespread and accurate in recent years, as an artificial intelligence technology called deep learning made computers much better at interpreting images.

Artificial intelligence (AI), "big data," block-chain and edge computing are all ways of collecting, storing and analyzing information that, if leveraged effectively, have the potential to rapidly speed up progress in healthcare. AI, with its ability to discern patterns, correlations and trends in huge volumes of data, is among a swathe of new technologies that experts expect to have deep, revolutionary impacts across numerous sectors. Already, ophthalmologists have shown that AI algorithms can provide objective metrics, from simple photographs and optical coherence tomography (OCT), as well as quantify the amount of optic nerve damage in glaucoma. Given the speed at which AI is able to accurately work, many experts predict it will help alleviate time and resource pressures against the backdrop of an aging population – a particularly pertinent issue, given the shortage of ophthalmologists. Though research and integration of AI in healthcare is ongoing, it has the potential to transform a number of areas – including processing and analyzing biomedical, clinical and patient data; medical imaging and diagnostics; drug discovery; biomarker research; personal AI assistants; and genomics. There is also a wealth of AI research underway in retinal disease, notably the Moorfields and Deepmind collaboration – a project that is investigating the use of AI to read complex eye scans and detect more than 50 eye conditions, and identify patients who require urgent treatment. Anthony Khawaja, a Consultant Ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital explains how the project came about.

Members get 60 days free site access, $6.95/article thereafter. In 2017, the Chinese government announced plans to "lead the world" in artificial intelligence by 2030. The announcement has fed considerable uneasiness in the United States and elsewhere about the scope of China's aspirations and the extent to which the country might use AI to tighten control over its citizens and develop more sophisticated military capabilities. However, the anxiety over China's plans for AI may be overblown, says Jeffrey Ding, an economics and technology researcher at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute. Yes, there are many signs that China is making huge investments in AI, and it leads the world in AI-related patent filings and publications -- in 2017 alone, it won some 900 patents related to facial recognition, compared with fewer than 150 in the United States.