Roughly eight months after it fell silent during a planet-wide Martian dust storm, and just weeks after celebrating its 15th anniversary on the red planet, NASA is finally saying goodbye to the Opportunity rover. The space agency has made hundreds of attempts to contact the rover since it powered down back in June, when dark skies prevented its solar battery from charging. In a last-ditch effort, NASA sent out a final set of commands on Tuesday in hopes it might finally respond. But once again, their calls were met only with silence. NASA confirmed the grim news in a press conference Wednesday afternoon, where it officially bade farewell to the long-running Mars exploration mission. With the death of the Opportunity rover also comes the end of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers program, which launched from Cape Canaveral in July 2003 with the twin robots, Spirit and Opportunity.

Nasa's Opportunity rover is officially dead, the space agency has said, after it disappeared in a dust storm on Mars. Clearly emotional Nasa staff, standing in front of a life-sized replica of the rover, said they had not heard back from the rover and that the mission would come to an end. Scientists described the difficult process of saying goodbye to the rover, which they had nicknamed Oppy and described as being like a beloved member of the family. "I am standing here with a sense of deep appreciation and gratitude," said Nasa associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen, before he announced that the Opportunity mission is now considered complete. The robot set a huge number of records as it travelled across the Martian surface, eventually travelling some 28 miles and lasting far longer than any other Mars lander.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty will be among the company executives who will be joining a Trump administration advisory board set to deal with the effects of artificial intelligence and automation on the workforce. According to Reuters, the panel will be co-chaired by Ivanka Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. Board members will serve until 2020. The panel -- which also includes executives from companies including Walmart, Home Depot, Visa, Siemens USA and Lockheed Martin -- was created by an executive order signed by President Trump in July 2018. The order stated that "for too long, our country's education and job training programs have prepared Americans for the economy of the past."

WHAT: The United States is in a new arms race with Russia and China; the Pentagon just released (Feb. EXPERT: Tomás Díaz de la Rubia, vice president for Purdue University's Discovery Park, is an expert in emerging technologies, including AI and quantum information systems. He was also a speaker at a May 2018 White House summit, "Artificial Intelligence for American Industry." QUOTE from de la Rubia: "We live today again in a world of great power competition. Those groups and nations that innovate most effectively and dominate the AI technology landscape will not only control commercial markets but will also hold a very significant advantage in future warfare and defense. In many respects, the threat of AI-based weapons is perhaps as existential a threat to the future national security of the United States and its allies as nuclear weapons were at the end of World War II."

President Trump signed an executive order on February 11 meant to shore up our competitive position in the international race for AI supremacy, but it is short on concrete steps. As the CEO of an artificial intelligence research institute, I am calling on him to include a special visa program for AI students and experts to help us win this race for the sake of both economic vitality and national security. In 2017, China announced its intent to "become the world's premier artificial intelligence innovation center" by 2030. One of our greatest advantages over China and other nations has been our ability to attract and retain the very best students from around the world. Yet, the Trump administration's increasingly restrictive immigration policies are systematically depriving our universities of some of the world's top talent.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is largely an experimental science—at least as much progress has been made by building and analyzing programs as by examining theoretical questions. MYCIN is one of several well-known programs that embody some intelligence and provide data on the extent to which intelligent behavior can be programmed. As with other AI programs, its development was slow and not always in a forward direction. But we feel we learned some useful lessons in the course of nearly a decade of work on MYCIN and related programs. In this book we share the results of many experiments performed in that time, and we try to paint a coherent picture of the work. The book is intended to be a critical analysis of several pieces of related research, performed by a large number of scientists. We believe that the whole field of AI will benefit from such attempts to take a detailed retrospective look at experiments, for in this way the scientific foundations of the field will gradually be defined. It is for all these reasons that we have prepared this analysis of the MYCIN experiments.

ORLANDO – Seemingly overnight, artificial intelligence has found its way into every corner of healthcare, from patient-facing chatbots to imaging interpretation to advanced analytics applications. With that sea change comes a host of ethical questions about how, where and to what extent AI and machine learning apps should be deployed. Most of them are still unanswered. At HIMSS19 on Tuesday, a panel of healthcare and technology experts assessed this new landscape, taking stock of the big opportunities that AI can enable – while also exploring some of the "bright lines that we don't want to cross," as Microsoft Associate General Counsel Hemant Pathak put it. AI has already done wonders for healthcare.

Nasa has sent its last message to the Opportunity Mars rover. But it doesn't expect a reply. The robot has been silent for the past eight months, disappearing amid an intense dust storm on the red planet. As the thick dust whipped up and around the rover – and across the entirety of Mars – the sunlight that powers it was blocked and its batteries ran out. Nasa has now issued a last series of recovery commands.

For a flagship single-person shooter, Battlefield V didn't exactly set the sales chart alight. But EA Dice keeps cranking out the updates to keep devotees happy, while everyone else waits for its incoming battle royale mode. And so we come to Chapter 2: Lightning Strikes Update #3, which is out now. The biggest change, aside from a new co-op mode (we'll get to that later), is support for NVIDIA's performance-boosting DLSS tech and optimized ray-tracing for GeForce RTX graphics cards. Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is essentially a rendering technique that's designed to deliver better performance and more pleasing visuals.

The Federal Trade Commission is celebrating Valentine's Day by reminding people to not get scammed when looking for love. The agency received more than 21,000 reports about romance scams in 2018 with total reported losses of $143 million. Of those who said they lost money in a romance scam, the median amount lost was $2,600 -- seven times more than the median loss for other types of frauds tracked by the FTC. Romance scammers often use online dating sites and create fake profiles or use a real person's identity, the FTC says. Scammers also cultivate targets on Facebook and social media sites not specifically designed for dating.