The unique nature of the Science article is its reference to race. Doing scientific work to test healthcare algorithms is difficult. Many are concealed behind a wall of intellectual property protection. They may be trade secrets, and unlike patents, unavailable to the public. Discussing the methodologies used to do this is beyond the scope of this article.

In the world of federal IT, the Government Accountability Office is known primarily for its hard-hitting audits of government tech systems and programs. But what technologies does GAO itself use in service of its work? And what emerging capabilities might help it fulfill its mission into the future? The watchdog agency is just beginning to explore the latter question, with help from a new internal innovation team. GAO released a blog post this week teasing the work coming out of its new Innovation Lab -- a group focused on "transforming the way that GAO thinks about and uses advanced analytical capabilities."

Once it has used deep learning to identify an object, the robot uses a knowledge base to pull out more detailed information that helps it carry out its orders. For example,when it identifies an object as a car, it consults a list of facts relating to cars: a car is a vehicle, it has wheels and an engine, and so on. These facts need to be hand-coded and are time consuming to compile, however, and Stump says the team is looking into ways to streamline this.

Artificial intelligence has become a crucial part of our technological infrastructure and the brain underlying many consumer devices. In less than a decade, machine learning algorithms based on deep neural networks evolved from recognizing cats in videos to enabling your smartphone to perform real-time translation between 27 different languages. This progress has sparked the use of AI in drug discovery and development. Artificial intelligence can improve efficiency and outcomes in drug development across therapeutic areas. For example, companies are developing AI technologies that hold the promise of preventing serious adverse events in clinical trials by identifying high-risk individuals before they enroll.

GitHub's annual Octoverse report is out today. It found that Microsoft's Visual Studio Code or VSCode (19.1K), Azure Docs (14K), and Flutter (13K) were the top open source projects in total contributors on GitHub in the last year, followed by projects like Google's TensorFlow (9.9K), Kubernetes (6.9K), and the React Native framework created by Facebook. The annual report that looks at trends and milestones for the code repository acquired by Microsoft last year also found that repositories with topics like "deep learning," "natural language processing," and "machine learning" grew in popularity over the course of the past year. GitHub is now used by more than 40 million developers worldwide, a statistic it first shared this summer.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is pressing forward with a lawsuit involving the facial recognition software offered by Amazon and Microsoft to government clients. In a complaint filed in a Massachusetts federal court, the ACLU asked for a variety of different records from the government, including inquiries to companies, meetings about the piloting or testing of facial recognition, voice recognition, and gait recognition technology, requests for proposals, and licensing agreements. At the heart of the lawsuit are Amazon's Rekognition and Microsoft's Face API, both facial recognition products that are available for customers of the companies' cloud platforms. The ACLU has also asked for more details on the US government's use of voice recognition and gait recognition, which is the automated process of comparing images of the way a person walks in order to identify them. Police in Shanghai and Beijing are already using gait-analysis tools to identify people.

Have you ever read or written an online review? The answer is probably yes, and many other consumers would agree. Business owners are also avid readers of online reviews, using this information to gauge customer satisfaction and steer product development. Now, there's a new type of audience looking through online reviews: an artificial intelligence platform called BERT. BERT, also known as Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformations, is a deep learning platform capable of language modelling.

Chinese military contractors have already started to sell dangerous, autonomous killer robots to customers in the Middle East. For instance, a Chinese company called Ziyan is actively marketing its Blowfish A3 -- an autonomous helicopter-like drone armed with a machine gun -- to international buyers, according to Defense One. While several countries have been working towards this tech for years, this news means we're finally, and unfortunately, living in the era of killer robots. While Ziyan works to sell its autonomous killbots to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Chinese government is already entrenched in the killer robot trade. "As we speak, the Chinese government is already exporting some of its most advanced military aerial drones to the Middle East, as it prepares to export its next-generation stealth UAVs when those come online," said Defense Secretary Mark Esper, per Defense One.

Pointing fingers, is missing the point. One of the most frequently asked questions I get is: Don't Machines do not see the world as humans do. What if, it would help to kill only the bad guys? What if, AI would make war more humane? Decide (How to react?) and Act (Do something, a response).

Demand and costs are pushing free school transport in England "to breaking point", a new report has revealed. Local authorities are now spending more than £1 billion per year year on school transport, according to the analysis. Ofqual goes to enormous lengths to ensure that GCSE standards are consistent from year to year using its carefully calibrated comparable outcomes grading system. So you might expect that the exams regulator would achieve the same consistency when it came to grading standards between different GCSE subjects. But an announcement today suggests not.