The US, China, Russia and the UK are among a growing number of countries that are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning as they look to develop a new generation of advanced weapons system. The Pentagon, in the US, has made a commitment to spend $2 billion over the next five years through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its OFFSET programme, for example, is looking to develop drone swarms comprising of up to 250 unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and/or unmanned ground systems (UGSs) for deployment across a number of diverse and complex environments. In China, there are a growing number of collaborations between defence and academic institutions in the development of AI and machine learning and Tsinghua University has launched the Military-Civil Fusion National Defense Peak Technologies Laboratory to create "a platform for the pursuit of dual-use applications of emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence." Russia has gone one step further and is creating a new city named Era, which is devoted entirely to military innovation.

Andrew Weinert and his colleagues were deeply frustrated. After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, the researchers from MIT's Lincoln Laboratory were hard at work trying to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assess the damage. In hand they had the perfect data set: 80,000 aerial shots of the region taken by the Civil Air Patrol right after the disaster. But there was an issue: there were too many images to sort through manually, and commercial image recognition systems were failing to identify anything meaningful. In one particularly egregious example, ImageNet, the golden standard for image classification, recommended labeling an image of a major flooding zone as a toilet.

In my last article here at Data Social we saw that it is very tricky to cluster European political parties based on the classic (and outdated?) Indeed, I found that although parties may belong to the same family they have different positions on important policies. Let's invoke together the power of machine learning and develop a better classification. In this article, using Principal Components Analysis (PCA), an unsupervised method, I find out where political parties really do belong in respect to each other's positions. Note: Check out this very cool article to learn more about what supervised and unsupervised methods are in the context of machine learning!

Network will transform Canada's image-guided therapy industry into a global leader by integrating artificial intelligence into imaging-based medical technologies The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, today announced an investment of $49 million into the Industry Consortium for Image-Guided Therapy (ICIGT), a pan-Canadian network led by Sunnybrook. "Canadians have long been at the forefront of exciting innovations in health and biosciences, and through the Strategic Innovation Fund we have brought together the best in the public and private sectors to find real health care solutions. Our investment in the ICIGT project is helping to leverage Canada's strengths in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and image-guided therapies to ultimately deliver better health care for Canadians across the country," says Bains. The network of 70 private and public sector partners will invest more than an additional $76 million, for a total project value of $126 million. It will transform Canada's image-guided therapy sector into a global leader by integrating artificial intelligence and data advances into medical technologies that use imaging to treat, diagnose and monitor disease.

"Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull." That's from George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949. The comment is meant to highlight what a repressive surveillance state the characters live in, but looked at another way, it shows how lucky they are: At least their brains are still private. Over the past few weeks, Facebook and Elon Musk's Neuralink have announced that they're building tech to read your mind -- literally. Mark Zuckerberg's company is funding research on brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that can pick up thoughts directly from your neurons and translate them into words.

A Google insider who anonymously leaked internal documents to Project Veritas made the decision to go public in an on-the-record video interview. The insider, Zachary Vorhies, decided to go public after receiving a letter from Google, and after he says Google allegedly called the police to perform a "wellness check" on him. Along with the interview, Vorhies asked Project Veritas to publish more of the internal Google documents he had previously leaked. "I gave the documents to Project Veritas, I had been collecting the documents for over a year. And the reason why I collected these documents was because I saw something dark and nefarious going on with the company and I realized that there were going to not only tamper with the elections, but use that tampering with the elections to essentially overthrow the United States."

Fox News Flash top headlines for September 1 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com As Americans celebrate Labor Day 2019, robots are stealing their jobs, as are immigrants, as are cheap imports from China. The first puzzle is: if all of these nefarious forces of free markets are stealing jobs, how is it that there are more Americans employed than ever before? Today, there are over 151 million workers on U.S. payrolls.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is asking for the help of experts and the broader public to determine the impact AI will have on intellectual property and "whether new forms of intellectual property protection are needed." A call for public comment was published in the Federal Registrar by the USPTO today in search of answers about such issues as how AI is reshaping perceptions of inventions or whether additional information should be required to claim a deep learning system as an invention since they can have a large number of hidden layers and weights that evolve. To help solicit responses, the notice in the federal registrar comes along with a series of questions such as "what is an AI invention and what does it contain?" "What are the different ways that a natural person can contribute to conception of an AI invention and be eligible to be a named inventor? Structuring data in order to train a model?

Science fiction has long imagined a future in which humans constantly interact with robots and intelligent machines. This future is already happening in warehouses and manufacturing businesses. Other workers use virtual or augmented reality as part of their employment training, to assist them in performing their job or to interact with clients. And lots of workers are under automated surveillance from their employers. All that automation yields data that can be used to analyze workers' performance.

Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal," marks one of the famous lines from US President Nixon's interviews, where Nixon implicated himself in the Watergate scandal. At the time it was well-known that the government was tapping phones of its opponents, Nixon's confession gave it the much-needed propriety. What is different about today's scenario is that tech companies are well within their confines to listen to your conversations. It's just that they are being obscure about the way they do it. The latest to join this is Cupertino giant Apple.