With improvements in artificial intelligence technology, a proliferation of robots are now among us, so it's important to remember that humans and machines inevitably have a lot in common. After all, we designed them to do the same things we do and to be capable of learning, just like us. The visceral drive for humans to automate processes using machines is not new. Humans and machines share a long history of working together to continually make improvements in almost every aspect of our lives. AI is another disruptive technology of our time, and just like its predecessors, it will have a profound impact on our existence.

President Xi Jinping wants China to dominate artificial intelligence by 2030. But all it seems the Middle Kingdom's new AI entrepreneurs want to talk about ancient history. Take Kai-Fu Lee, for example. The founder of Face was born in Taiwan and emigrated to America when he was eleven. After earning a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s, he worked his way up at Apple, Microsoft, and eventually, Google. In his book AI Superpowers, he likens Chinese entrepreneurs to "gladiators" fighting in a new techwar arena, where it's "kill or be killed."

Physicists have designed artificial intelligence that thinks like the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus by realizing the Sun must be at the centre of the Solar System.Credit: NASA/JPL/SPL Astronomers took centuries to figure it out. But now, a machine-learning algorithm inspired by the brain has worked out that it should place the Sun at the centre of the Solar System, based on how movements of the Sun and Mars appear from Earth. The feat is one the first tests of a technique that researchers hope they can use to discover new laws of physics, and perhaps to reformulate quantum mechanics, by finding patterns in large data sets. The results are due to appear in Physical Review Letters1. Physicist Renato Renner at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich and his collaborators wanted to design an algorithm that could distill large data sets down into a few basic formulae, mimicking the way that physicists come up with concise equations like E mc2.

PITTSBURGH, PA (November 7, 2019) Mayor William Peduto, the City of Pittsburgh Department of Innovation & Performance, the Urban Redevelopment Authority of Pittsburgh, the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh, and Allegheny County Airport Authority today announced the fifth cohort of the PGH Lab program. PGH Lab connects local startup companies with the City of Pittsburgh and local authorities, and independent institutions to explore new ways to use technology and innovative solutions to help improve city operations. The program provides an opportunity for local startups to test their beta-stage products and services in a real-world environment for three-four months. The City of Pittsburgh and the participating authorities have successfully completed four cycles and engaged 21 local startups, putting forth a variety of technological and innovative solutions ranging from waste management and composting to business processes and automation to immigrant inclusion initiatives. For the fifth cycle, three different startups will be joining PGH Lab.

An AI that was deemed too dangerous to be released has now been released into the world. Researchers had feared that the model, known as "GPT-2", was so powerful that it could be maliciously misused by everyone from politicians to scammers. GPT-2 was created for a simple purpose: it can be fed a piece of text, and is able to predict the words that will come next. By doing so, it is able to create long strings of writing that are largely indistinguishable from those written by a human being. But it became clear that it was worryingly good at that job, with its text creation so powerful that it could be used to scam people and may undermine trust in the things we read.

The US is trailing behind in the world's artificial intelligence arms race, a new report warns. The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence explained China and Russia are ahead of the game and using this technology in their military operations to undermine US superiority. The US group urges officials to developed AI-powered security and defense technologies before the US falls victim to increased cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns and the erosion of individual privacy and civil liberties. The interim report was released on Tuesday, with the final report set to be out sometime next year. This document is set to be handed to the US Secretary of Defense next year and includes key steps the government can take to position the US in the top spot.

Air quality is a vastly underestimated problem, said NASA research scientist Christoph Keller in a talk at this week's GTC DC, the Washington edition of NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference. Nine in 10 people breathe polluted air, and millions of deaths a year are attributed to household or outdoor air pollution. Poor air also lowers crop yields, costing billions of dollars in agricultural yield losses annually. To better understand and forecast air quality, NASA researchers are developing a machine learning model that tracks global air pollution in real time. The model also provides forecasts up to five days in advance that can help government agencies and individuals make decisions.

Let's talk infrastructure: What does it take to support Biomedicine?

Researchers have already demonstrated how Amazon's facial analysis software, for example, distinguishes gender among certain ethnicities less accurately than other services, while Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Elizabeth Warren has called on federal agencies to address questions around algorithmic bias, such as how the Federal Reserve deals with money lending discrimination. Against this backdrop, "in-the-wild" software-testing company Applause is looking to "reinvent" AI testing with a new service that better detects AI bias by crowdsourcing larger training data sets. By way of a brief recap, Massachusetts-based Applause, formerly known as uTest, offers companies like Google and Uber a different kind of app-testing platform, one that taps hundreds of thousands of "vetted" real-world users around the world to squish bugs and iron out usability issues -- it's all about harnessing the power of the crowd rather than running tests entirely in contrived laboratory settings. The company had raised north of $115 million before it was acquired by investment firm Vista Equity Partners in 2017. A key facet of the Applause platform is not only the sheer number of crowd testers in its community, but the demographic diversity -- spanning language, race, gender, location, culture, hobbies, and more.

Day after day, Walter Diaz, an immigrant truck driver from El Salvador, steers his 18-wheeler toward the giant ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Will it take him a half hour to pick up his cargo? Or will it be as long as seven hours? Diaz is paid by the load, so he applauds the arrival of more waterfront robots, which promise to speed turnaround times at a port complex that handles about a third of the nation's imported goods. "I'm for automation," Diaz says.