The NTSB, in a 2017 report, wrote that design limitations of Autopilot system played a major role in the fatality, the first known one in which a vehicle operated on a highway under semi-autonomous control systems. The agency said that Tesla told Model S owners that Autopilot should be used only on limited-access highways, primarily interstates. The report said that despite upgrades to the system, Tesla did not incorporate protections against use of the system on other types of roads.

AI arms control is all "fun and games" until someone accidentally recreates Skynet. When looking to the future we can't ignore the possibility of a potential artificial intelligence arms race as nations rush to outpace one another. That's exactly the sort of future that former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger is afraid of. Speaking last Thursday at a three-day event celebrating the opening of a new school of computing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kissinger warned that AI weapons might become harder to control than nuclear ones. Such systems will be developed in secrecy leading to a dangerous arms race, as Kissinger said according to MIT Tech Review, "With AI, the other side's ignorance is one of your best weapons--sharing will be much more difficult."

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way in recent years, but the technology still has hurdles to overcome if machines are to become true partners and collaborators with humans. To help push the systems to that next level, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hosting a two-day conference aimed at spurring the next wave of AI advances. The Artificial Intelligence Colloquium being held March 6-7 in Alexandria, Virginia, is designed to bring together AI researchers from across the Defense Department, industry and academia with the broader military community seeking to use AI technologies. Attendees will learn more about DARPA's current and emerging AI programs and how the myriad technologies in development could apply to their diverse missions. "We're going to have 18 briefings in total. The goal of the colloquium is to go a bit deeper into the technology than we typically do. For many events, we try to appeal to a broad audience. For this one, it's more of a technical audience," explains John Everett, deputy director of DARPA's Information Integration Office.

As we indicated in our article on AI applications in Africa, keeping up with the changes in our current fast-paced world where tech solutions are developed by the day and requires formidable structures aimed at leveraging long term objectives and solutions. It's no doubt that AI offers remedies to Africa's most pervasive problems not just in healthcare but also in reducing poverty, elevating inclusion in societies, solutions to food crises, addressing sustainability challenges as well as enhancing the quality of education. Artificial intelligence is crucial in an African setting due to how it democratizes access to pioneering and productivity-boosting innovations that fuel the continent's growth towards sustaining its needs. In the past few years, several governments (as illustrated in our article mentioned above) across Africa have started mobilizing with the aim of promoting the growth of AI in the continent. Having a vibrant AI ecosystem requires integration of precise policies but most importantly, a coming together of progressive lawmakers, global technology partners, governmental institutions and civil society groups.

These built-in machine learning models are based on the learnings from the Microsoft security team over many years of defending our customer's cloud assets,

If you've ever used a customer support livechat service, you've probably experienced that vague, sneaking suspicion that the "person" you're chatting with might actually be a robot. Like the endearingly stiff robots we've seen in countless movies – tragic, pitiful machines tortured by their painfully restricted emotional range, futilely hoping to attain a greater degree of humanity – chatbots often sound almost human, but not quite. Their speech is awkward, the cadence somehow off. It's the online equivalent of the "Uncanny Valley," a mysterious region nestled somewhere between the natural and the synthetic that offers a disturbing glimpse at how humans are making machines that could eventually supplant humans, if only their designers could somehow make their robotic creations less nightmarish. Love them or hate them, chatbots are here to stay. Chatbots have become extraordinarily popular in recent years largely due to dramatic advancements in machine learning and other underlying technologies such as natural language processing.

Chinese technology company Huawei has not had particularly good press recently. Countries including Australia have excluded it from construction of a 5G network, while the U.S. Justice Department recently laid criminal charges against the firm and its chief financial officer. It is understandable that in the midst of such woes, one might turn toward something harmless like classical music to wallow in sophisticated creativity, cultural tradition, and human mystery. In time for the Year of the Pig, Huawei recently presented a completion of Franz Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" in performance at London's Cadogan Hall. It was accomplished by "pairing technological innovations of Huawei's artificial intelligence" from its smartphone with the human expertise of film composer Lucas Cantor. What was the division of labor here?

Federal administrative agencies across the United States employ machine learning and artificial intelligence to make decisions. But what happens when agencies can't explain how those algorithms work? Students in a policy lab at Stanford, Administering by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in the Regulatory State, are exploring this question and what it means for the future when law and computers intersect. Stanford co-instructors David Engstrom, Daniel Ho and California Supreme Court Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar – along with Professor Catherine Sharkey of New York University School of Law – have brought together 25 burgeoning lawyers, computer scientists and engineers to probe the technologies government agencies develop and deploy. The lab culminates in a report that will be submitted to the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS), which puts forward guidelines outlining how such government agencies should operate.

The Alberta government announced yesterday that a new tech accelerator focused on Artificial Intelligence will be part of it's $100M funding for the tech sector. Researchers and entrepreneurs in Edmonton have been quietly leading the way for some time now. This funding will have direct impact on their work enabling them to compete in the AI race. Here's what Dave Damer of Testfire Labs had to say about it.

In December, Microsoft President Brad Smith urged lawmakers to set rules on facial-recognition technology to prevent a privacy-threatening "race to the bottom." Now the company has joined a legislative fight in its home state against rules it says would be too restrictive. Microsoft is pushing back on a bill sponsored by a bipartisan group of Washington state lawmakers that would ban local and state governments from using facial recognition until certain conditions are met, including a report by the state attorney general certifying that systems in use are equally accurate for people of differing races, skin tones, ethnicities, genders, or age. Microsoft has endorsed a different bipartisan privacy bill, modeled on European data laws. It contains less restrictive facial-recognition rules, which closely mirror Smith's proposals from December.