Congress is authorizing $10 million in prize money to help the Defense Department reach out to the public to battle foreign disinformation, and to further ramp up the Pentagon's 5G technologies. The 2020 defense authorization act allows the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to use the funds for two prize competitions: one for 5G, and the other to study and detect deepfake technology. Deepfakes are videos manipulated to look like a celebrity or politician said something they did not say. Foreign and domestic groups are using the videos to sway public opinion. The defense authorization act allows IARPA $5 million specifically for stimulating "the research, development, or commercialization of technologies to automatically detect machine-manipulated media."

In its efforts to make greater use of commercial technologies, a Pentagon innovation office formed to streamline government contracting has expanded an predictive maintenance effort designed to keep front-line aircraft ready for duty. The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) created in 2015 to link the military with technology vendors recently awarded a five-year, $95 million contract to C3.ai to boost aircraft readiness. The company said it will provide an AI-based software application that uses machine learning algorithms to monitor aircraft systems. The goal is to spot critical subsystem failures before they occur and help predict the parts and maintenance required to keep aircraft flying. The AI platform also would serve as a logistics tool, identifying the type of part required to fix an airborne system and where that part can be acquired from DoD's far-flung logistics network.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare is expected to revolutionise the sector. Expectations are high and since 2015 the number of medical algorithms approved by the FDA has grown exponentially. We can see it in this interesting infographic designed by Dr. Bertalan Mesko (@Berci), known as the Medical Futurist, which shows that in 2014 only AliveCor's algorithm for the detection of atrial fibrillation was approved, and then in recent years dozens of algorithms have burst onto the scene with the go-ahead of the FDA, among them, products from Apple and Verily. However, the hype in which AI has been involved has left us some disappointments. But in recent years, a great number of startups and healthcare organisations are getting tangible results in AI applied to different medical fields.

First ever footage of the underside of the'doomsday' Thwaites glacier has been sent back by a robotic yellow submarine dubbed Icefin. Glaciologists have likened the groundbreaking images and video to the first steps on the moon taken by Neil Armstrong in 1969. Early analysis reveals that turbulent warm waters underneath the ice sheet, which is the same size as Britain, are causing an'unstoppable retreat'. Experts have previously predicted that if Thwaites was to melt completely, it would lead to a significant increase in worldwide sea levels of around two feet (65cm). The impact on coastal communities around the world would be catastrophic.

In this part 2 of the series, we will examine some key considerations and hurdles in patenting machine learning-based biotech or synthetic biology inventions. In this series, we are focusing on artificial intelligence inventions, but as Alan Turing aptly pointed out, that neologism is a "suitcase" term because you can stuff a lot of intelligence classifications and different types of technologies into it. Many of the ground-breaking AI developments in biotech are in the AI subfield of Machine Learning. First, we will briefly discuss what is meant by Machine Learning and discuss some relevant terms. Second, we will review some real world challenges in patenting AI inventions.

It seems the White House wants to ramp up America's Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominance. Earlier this month, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget released its "Guidance for Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Applications," for federal agencies to oversee AI's development in a way that protects innovation without making the public wary. The noble aims of these principles respond to the need for a coherent American vision for AI development--complete with transparency, public participation and interagency coordination. But the government is missing something key. For technological innovation to flourish, regulators have to be innovative too. A recent paper by Jack Clark and Gillian Hadfield at OpenAI proposes the idea of regulatory markets, wherein private competitive regulators would take on the role traditionally held by by legislators and government agencies.

HPE announced today that it won the contract to build a supercomputer that will drive France's AI and HPC efforts. The computer will be part of GENCI, the French national infrastructure for HPC resources and facilities. The system, named Jean Zay after the French politician and cultural figure, came at the behest of an action issued by President of France Emmanuel Macron in support of the national strategy to make France the European leader in artificial intelligence research. Financed by GENCI and based on the HPE SGI 8600 platform, Jean Zay is slated to deliver a peak performance of 14 petaflops. Under a unified Omni-Path Architecture network, the system encompasses 1,528 Intel next-generation Xeon nodes and 261 GPU nodes, each with four Nvidia Tesla V100 (32GB) GPUs, 1,044 in all.

What exactly is biotechnology, and how could it change our approach to human health? As the age of big data transforms the potential of this emerging field, members of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Biotechnology tell you everything you need to know. What if your doctor could predict your heart attack before you had it – and prevent it? Or what if we could cure a child's cancer by exploiting the bacteria in their gut? These types of biotechnology solutions aimed at improving human health are already being explored. As more and more data (so called "big data") is available across disparate domains such as electronic health records, genomics, metabolomics, and even life-style information, further insights and opportunities for biotechnology will become apparent. However, to achieve the maximal potential both technical and ethical issues will need to be addressed. As we look to the future, let's first revisit previous examples of where combining data with scientific understanding has led to new health solutions. Biotechnology is a rapidly changing field that continues to transform both in scope and impact. Karl Ereky first coined the term biotechnology in 1919.

'Collective intelligence' is defined as the capacity of human communities to cooperate intellectually in creation, innovation and invention. As our society becomes more and more knowledge-dependent, this collective ability becomes of fundamental importance. It is therefore vital to understand, among other things, how collective intelligence processes can be expanded by digital networks. It is one of the keys to success for modern societies. Pierre Lévy is one of the world's leading thinkers, not only in the vast area of cyberculture, but also in the fundamental field of knowledge and its processes. He was essentially the first to focus research on collective intelligence when it became a determining factor in the competitiveness, creativity and human development of knowledge-based societies. Michael Peters (MP): May I call you'Pierre'? Can you tell us something about your education, especially over the three institutions of your experience as a graduate?