On many evenings during spring and fall migration, tens of millions of birds take flight at sunset and pass over our heads, unseen in the night sky. Though these flights have been recorded for decades by the National Weather Services' network of constantly scanning weather radars, until recently these data have been mostly out of reach for bird researchers. That's because the sheer magnitude of information and lack of tools to analyze it made only limited studies possible, says artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Dan Sheldon at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Ornithologists and ecologists with the time and expertise to analyze individual radar images could clearly see patterns that allowed them to discriminate precipitation from birds and study migration, he adds. But the massive amount of information – over 200 million images and hundreds of terabytes of data – significantly limited their ability to sample enough nights, over enough years and in enough locations to be useful in characterizing, let alone tracking, seasonal, continent-wide migrations, he explains.

Bengaluru: As India's second mission to the moon, Chandrayaan-2, is poised to make a soft landing on the southern surface of the moon in the early hours of Saturday, the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered rover of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), will play a significant role in this mission's success. Christened'Pragyan' (wisdom in Sanskrit), the homegrown solar-powered robotic vehicle that will manoeuvre the lunar surface on six wheels, comprises a Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscope (LIBS) from the Laboratory for Electro Optic Systems (LEOS) in Bengaluru to identify elements present near the landing site, and an Alpha Particle Induced X-ray Spectroscope (APIXS) from the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad that will inspect the composition of the elements near the landing site. The AI-powered Pragyan rover, which can communicate only with the Lander, includes a piece of motion technology developed by IIT-Kanpur researchers that will help the rover manoeuvre on the surface of the moon and aid in landing. The algorithm will help the rover trace water and other minerals on the lunar surface, and also send pictures for research and examination. Homegrown Pragyan is simply a case in point that AI has been gathering pace in space exploration over the years.

Biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and life sciences industries are where applied artificial intelligence (AI) can greatly accelerate innovation and shorten the product development life-cycle. Developing a drug typically takes 10 to 15 years on average, with only approximately 12 percent of drugs in clinical trials ultimately gaining U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. In an AI milestone in life sciences, Insilico Medicine announced a new machine learning tool for drug discovery that can generate a novel molecule in days instead of years and published their findings in Nature Biotechnology on September 2, 2019. Insilico Medicine is a venture-backed start-up with multiple investors that include WuXi AppTec, Juvenescence, Peter Diamandis' BOLD Capital Partners, and Pavilion Capital. Led by CEO and Founder Alex Zhavoronkov, the company's mission is to extend longevity by applied AI solutions for drug discovery and aging research.

By now execs should be aware of the threat of email fraudsters impersonating them to instruct subordinates to wire funds to a scammer's account. But now they also need to watch out for phone hustlers, aided by artificial intelligence that spoofs the voice of CEOs. Deepfake videos depicting politicians like Barack Obama saying things he never did have sparked concerns over their potential for messing with elections and causing social chaos. But one use of the same technology is simple fraud. And in recent years the most lucrative fraud targeting businesses is carried out by spoofing the email account of a CEO (or some other trusted or authoritative person) who instructs a subordinate, such as a financial controller, to wire funds to a fraudster's account.

To learn, however, a deep neural net needed to do more than just send messages up through the layers in this fashion. It also needed a way to see if it was getting the right results at the top layer and, if not, send messages back down so that all the lower neuron-like units could retune their activations to improve the results. That's where the learning would occur. In the early 1980s, Hinton was working on this problem. So was a French researcher named Yann LeCun, who was just starting his graduate work in Paris.

The authors cautioned that while the number of respondents was high, it was still not nearly enough data for an accurate statistical model, and that the model was not capable of identifying causality. Of the respondents, 74.1% were male. The average age was 32.7, with gender making no difference. When considering the public versus the private sector, the youngest respondents were those in mandatory military service, and the oldest were government employees, where the median age was 36. For those working in startups and corporations, the median age was 32.

Researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have found that bots or fake accounts enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI) on social media have evolved and are now able to copy human behaviour to avoid detection. For the study published in the journal First Monday, the research team from the University of Southern California examines bot behaviour during the 2018 US presidential elections compared to bot behaviour during the 2016 US elections. "Our study further corroborates this idea that there is an arms race between bots and detection algorithms. As social media companies put more efforts to mitigate abuse and stifle automated accounts, bots evolve to mimic human strategies. Advancements in AI enable bots producing more human-like content," said study lead author Emilio Ferrara.

How to identify and respond to "Deepfake" videos -- realistic AI-synthesized video generated for the purpose of spreading misinformation -- is a challenge that has been highlighted by recent social media stumbles on the question, particularly from Facebook. Several months ago Facebook was criticized for failing to remove a viral video manipulated to make US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sound drunk. In collaboration with Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics from top universities, Facebook today announced the Deepfake Detection Challenge (DFDC) with the aim of finding innovative deepfake detection solutions to help the media industry spot videos that have been morphed by AI models. The challenge includes a dataset of video pairs (originals filmed by paid actors and tampered versions generated by various AI techniques). Facebook says no actual Facebook user data will be used, and has pledged US$10 million to encourage global participation in the challenge.

Biotechnology, pharmaceutical and life sciences industries are where applied artificial intelligence (AI) can greatly accelerate innovation and shorten the product development life-cycle. Developing a drug typically takes 10 to 15 years on average, with only approximately 12 percent of drugs in clinical trials ultimately gaining U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. In an AI milestone in life sciences, Insilico Medicine announced a new machine learning tool for drug discovery that can generate a novel molecule in days instead of years, and published their findings in Nature Biotechnology on September 2, 2019. Insilico Medicine is a venture-backed start-up with multiple investors that include WuXi AppTec, Juvenescence, Peter Diamandis' BOLD Capital Partners, and Pavilion Capital. Led by CEO and Founder Alex Zhavoronkov, the company's mission is to extend longevity by applied AI solutions for drug discovery and aging research.

From job killer to killer robot, artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly has come under the spotlight for its potentially adverse impact on human lives. Singapore, however, is advocating the need to hold off judgement whilst the technology continues to evolve and focus instead on building trust. Whilst not a new concept, AI in recent years had been garnering significant interest due to the convergence of three key factors, said S. Iswaran, Singapore's Minister for Communications and Information and Minister-in-charge of Trade Relations. First was the ability now to amass large volumes of data, organise, and use it. Computing power in large quantities also had become more available and at lower costs.