Christoph Mertz, the principal project scientist at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute, started taking pictures of the hills overlooking Pittsburgh's West End on his smartphone. "Every day, for months, I was collecting images of these hillsides," Mertz said. "I wanted to see if I could use these pictures as a way to predict the next landslide." Landslides are natural phenomena, but many of the conditions that can increase their likelihood are caused by human activity, such as directing surface runoff to an area or altering natural slopes for the construction of buildings and roads. Combined with increased rainfall rates related to climate change, landslides in the United States have become more common and more severe.

Automation is not likely to eliminate millions of jobs any time soon--but the U.S. still needs vastly improved policies if Americans are to build better careers and share prosperity as technological changes occur, according to a new MIT report about the workplace. The report, which represents the initial findings of MIT's Task Force on the Work of the Future, punctures some conventional wisdom and builds a nuanced picture of the evolution of technology and jobs, the subject of much fraught public discussion. The likelihood of robots, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) wiping out huge sectors of the workforce in the near future is exaggerated, the task force concludes--but there is reason for concern about the impact of new technology on the labor market. In recent decades, technology has contributed to the polarization of employment, disproportionately helping high-skilled professionals while reducing opportunities for many other workers, and new technologies could exacerbate this trend. Moreover, the report emphasizes, at a time of historic income inequality, a critical challenge is not necessarily a lack of jobs, but the low quality of many jobs and the resulting lack of viable careers for many people, particularly workers without college degrees.

Raytheon has deployed artificial intelligence technology to support training programs for the U.S. Army and envisions AI and machine learning tools integrated with virtual and augmented reality to help improve the skills of warfighters. The company said Wednesday it is developing intelligent bots designed to handle lower-level logistics functions at the Army's Multinational Readiness Center in Germany and intends to use data from the bots to provide training aids, gear equipment for the Army's virtual training programs. Malachi Lawson, technical director for global training solutions at Raytheon, said that VR and AR-driven environments integrated with AI result in less dangerous mission exercises compared to live training. Corey Hendricks, the company's senior solutions architect, noted that AI and ML capabilities can also be used to develop hyper-engagement tools that work to inform warfighters' decision-making by analyzing data such as routines and daily habits. He added that such emerging technologies may support efforts to improve soldiers' cultural awareness and help commanders in battlefield operations through the implementation of combat doctrine data.

China designed and executed a policy that shrank the industrialization process in a mere 25 years -- something that many economies took at least a century to do. That redesign has brought immense dislocation in global commerce and industry, enabling China to become one of the world's leading economies. China's success has led many African capitals to pursue the country's same industrialization trajectory. Over the last few years, African leaders have been pursuing policies designed to mimic the path China took. Some of these policies include creating special economic zones after China's Shenzhen and positioning the manufacturing sector as a fulcrum to attract investments and create new jobs.

AS THE NAVY plane swooped low over the jungle, it dropped a bundle of devices into the canopy below. Some were microphones, listening for guerrilla footsteps or truck ignitions. Others were seismic detectors, attuned to minute vibrations in the ground. Strangest of all were the olfactory sensors, sniffing out ammonia in human urine. Tens of thousands of these electronic organs beamed their data to drones and on to computers.

Technologies are increasingly being used to shape public policy, business, and people's lives. AI court judges are helping to decide criminal's sentences and AI is being used to catch murder suspects and even shape your insurance policy. That's why the fact that computers aren't great at detecting lies should be a worry. Researchers from the USC Institute for Creative Technologies recently put AI's capability for lie detection to the test, and the test results left a lot to be desired. The USC Institute for Creative Technologies research team recently tested algorithms using basic tests for truth detectors and found that the AIs failed these tests.

The Partnership on AI, a nonprofit group researching the uses of artificial intelligence, is calling for a softening of immigration laws and visa rules to make it easier for AI experts to travel around the world. The PAI's new policy paper, released today, addresses what it says is the impact of current restrictive visa laws and immigration rules on AI and machine learning technology development. It says these policies impede the ability of many students, researchers and industry practitioners to travel freely and, as a result, hurt the progress of AI research. "It is tremendously important to have international scholars be able to meet in person to discuss issues in technology ethics, especially in AI, which is transforming the world so rapidly," said Brian Green, director of technology ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. "Visas have supported these meetings."

Artificial intelligence systems can be attacked. The methods underpinning the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems are systematically vulnerable to a new type of cybersecurity attack called an "artificial intelligence attack." Using this attack, adversaries can manipulate these systems in order to alter their behavior to serve a malicious end goal. As artificial intelligence systems are further integrated into critical components of society, these artificial intelligence attacks represent an emerging and systematic vulnerability with the potential to have significant effects on the security of the country. These "AI attacks" are fundamentally different from traditional cyberattacks. Unlike traditional cyberattacks that are caused by "bugs" or human mistakes in code, AI attacks are enabled by inherent limitations in the underlying AI algorithms that currently cannot be fixed. Further, AI attacks fundamentally expand the set of entities that can be used to execute ...

New research published today by the Artificial Intelligence Forum of New Zealand (AI Forum) is calling for urgent action to progress the use of AI to address some of New Zealand's most pressing social, environmental and economic challenges, and not wait for a formal Government-led national strategy. The study called'Towards Our Intelligent Future' positions AI as a fundamental tool to tackle issues highlighted by the Treasury's new Living Standards Framework for Wellbeing, launched in December 2018, and also the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It reveals how New Zealand can benefit from AI supporting wellbeing and sustainability, along with the multi-billion dollar boost to the economy it could provide by 2030. By then, models from McKinsey and PwC show global GDP could be 14 percent higher with AI, and New Zealand could gain between 5.6 and 10.4 percent of total GDP, compared to a scenario without AI. It also shows New Zealand is performing reasonably well in the international AI discussion but highlights an urgent need to invest more and secure supply of homegrown talent.

In January of this year, Wired Magazine published an article about a collaboration between The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Google parent Alphabet's DeepMind unit to create software powered by artificial intelligence that attempts to predict which patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) are likely to develop acute kidney injury (AKI). The article stated that more than 50% of adults admitted to an ICU end up getting AKI, which is life-threatening. According to the article, the Department of Veterans Affairs contributed 700,000 medical records to the project. The goal of the project was to test whether artificial intelligence could be developed to help doctors better predict which patients were at risk for developing AKI so preventative measures could be taken sooner. It looks like artificial intelligence may in fact be able to help doctors identify which patients in the ICU are at serious risk of AKI.