Premier Notley announces investment in high tech with (L-R) Laura Kilcrease, John Shillington, Minister Bilous and Minister of Finance Joe Ceci. The Alberta government is investing $100 million to attract more artificial intelligence-based high-tech companies to invest in Alberta. Coupled with last year's investment of $50 million to create 3,000 new high-tech training seats at post-secondary institutions across the province, this represents a significant diversification initiative. "Innovation is a critical tool for competitiveness in nearly every sector of the economy, including energy. By investing in technology and the talent that powers it, we are ensuring Alberta continues to be a world leader in clean, efficient energy production and that our economy is more resilient and diversified for the future."

NASA's longest-running rover on Mars, Opportunity, is no more. Officials declared the 15-year-old rover Opportunity dead Wednesday, eight months after by a ferocious dust storm in June. The Mars rover Opportunity is dead after a record-setting 15-year run, but its memory – and scientific discoveries – live on. NASA announced Wednesday that the Mars rover was deemed dead after it hadn't communicated in more than eight months. Opportunity, along with twin Spirit, had unprecedented success and contributed greatly to scientific understand of the red planet, NASA said.

In May of 2010, prompted by a series of high-profile scandals, the mayor of New Orleans asked the US Department of Justice to investigate the city police department (NOPD). Ten months later, the DOJ offered its blistering analysis: during the period of its review from 2005 onwards, the NOPD had repeatedly violated constitutional and federal law. It used excessive force, and disproportionately against black residents; targeted racial minorities, non-native English speakers, and LGBTQ individuals; and failed to address violence against women. The problems, said assistant attorney general Thomas Perez at the time, were "serious, wide-ranging, systemic and deeply rooted within the culture of the department." Despite the disturbing findings, the city entered a secret partnership only a year later with data-mining firm Palantir to deploy a predictive policing system.

Pledging to focus the resources of the federal government to develop artificial intelligence that will enhance national and economic security and prosperity, President Donald J. Trump has signed an executive order to launch the American AI Initiative. The order is the second action the Trump administration has taken in relation to AI technologies. It follows an AI summit hosted by the White House in May 2018. Today's executive order marks another step towards advancing a technology that is being used to create self-driving cars, find cures for cancer, fight human trafficking, design better products, and offer consumers the thing they want to buy before they even know they want it. The executive order comes at a time when China is considered a competitive threat in AI advances.

Pledging to focus the resources of the federal government to develop artificial intelligence that will enhance national and economic security and prosperity, President Donald J. Trump has signed an executive order to launch the American AI Initiative. The order is the second action the Trump administration has taken in relation to AI technologies. It follows an AI summit hosted by the White House in May 2018. Today's executive order marks another step towards advancing a technology that is being used to create self-driving cars, find cures for cancer, fight human trafficking, design better products, and offer consumers the thing they want to buy before they even know they want it. The executive order comes at a time when China is considered a competitive threat in AI advances.

Owing to our varied circumstances and experiences, there are contradictory tendencies to either exaggerate or underestimate the power and importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in contemporary society. Nor should we uncritically legitimise everything AI can be used for, even if it has been hailed as the main frontier of the Davos-proclaimed Fourth Industrial Revolution. AI, more than other elements of Industry 4.0, is transforming humanity's understanding of ourselves in novel ways the world has neither experienced nor conceived of. The AI market is already huge but it is still growing fast. The expertise needed is said to be growing exponentially.

During 14 years of intrepid exploration across Mars it advanced human knowledge by confirming that water once flowed on the Red Planet - but NASA's Opportunity rover has analysed its last soil sample. The robot has been missing since the US space agency lost contact during a dust storm in June last year and was declared officially dead on Wednesday, ending one of the most fruitful missions in the history of space exploration. Unable to recharge its batteries, Opportunity left hundreds of messages from Earth unanswered over the months, and NASA said it made its last attempt at contact. "I declare the Opportunity mission as complete," Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate told a news conference at mission headquarters in Pasadena, California. The community of researchers and engineers involved in the programme were in mourning over the passing of the rover, known affectionately as Oppy. "Spent the evening at JPL as the last ever commands were sent to the Opportunity rover on #Mars," Tanya Harrison, director of Martian research at Arizona State University, tweeted after a stint at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Are algorithms and artificial intelligence inherently prejudiced? Do Facebook, Google, and Twitter have political biases? But if the question is whether the tech industry doing enough to address these biases, the straightforward response is no. Yaël Eisenstat is a former CIA officer, national security adviser to vice president Biden, and CSR leader at ExxonMobil. She was elections integrity operations head at Facebook from June to November 2018.

The expanding use of AI is attracting new attention to the importance of workforce diversity. Although tech companies have stepped up efforts to recruit women and minorities, computer and software professionals who write AI programs are still largely white and male, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. Developers testing their products often rely on data sets that lack adequate representation of women or minority groups. One widely used data set is more than 74% male and 83% white, research shows. Thus, when engineers test algorithms on these databases with high numbers of people like themselves, they may work fine.

The Department of Defense issued an unclassified summary Tuesday of its strategy for the accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence for military applications. Then-Deputy Secretary Patrick Shanahan approved the classified strategy in June 2018. The summary further details many things DOD has revealed since last June, like the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), which is the focal point of the strategy. The unclassified document emphasizes the "urgency, scale, and unity of effort" needed to make AI transformational both for the DOD and the nation. In that respect, CIO Dana Deasy told reporters Tuesday, it works in step nicely with the AI executive order President Donald Trump issued Monday, introducing the administration's plan for American leadership in the development of artificial intelligence.