After WWII, a number of people independently started to work on intelligent machines. The English mathematician Alan Turing may have been the first. He gave a lecture on it in 1947. He also may have been the first to decide that AI was best researched by programming computers rather than by building machines. By the late 1950s, there were many researchers on AI, and most of them were basing their work on programming computers.

Finding defects in electron microscopy images takes months. It's called MENNDL, the Multinode Evolutionary Neural Networks for Deep Learning. It creates artificial neural networks--computational systems that loosely mimic the human brain--that tease defects out of dynamic data. It runs on all available nodes of the Summit supercomputer, performing 152 thousand million million calculations a second. In mere hours, scientists using MENNDL created a neural network that performed as well as a human expert.

Machine intelligence has become a technology player in fields from medical research to financial services. This year it began to make its presence felt in cybersecurity. The initial inroads have been tightly targeted, but some experts say more substantial uses are almost inevitable. "Intelligence" is a word heavily freighted with meaning in cybersecurity technology because it covers a wide variety of techniques and products. Expert systems, machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence are all represented in the whole, with each being used and promoted by different vendors and service organizations.

FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb's recently announced appointment of Dr. Amy Abernethy to serve as his first lieutenant perfectly exemplifies the sort of thinking that has enabled Gottlieb to earn nearly universal praise at a time of unprecedented partisanship. He has focused his attention on high-priority, immediate concerns like the targeting of e-cigarettes to children, the opioid epidemic, and the need for a more robust market in affordable generic medications, while also seeking to prepare the agency to engage with emerging technologies, from consumer wearables to applications of artificial intelligence, to expand the breadth of evidence generation and accelerate the speed of analysis. Amy Abernethy, MD, PhD, formerly Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientific Officer, and Senior Vice President, Flatiron Health, and recently named Deputy Commissioner of the FDA.A. Abernethy Abernethy combines the pragmatic humanism of an oncologist (which she is) with the technological sophistication of someone who spent their teenage years attending math camp and programming computers for NASA – after originally learning math by helping her mother edit a nursing textbook, as she recently told Lisa Suennen and me on our Tech Tonics podcast. The key challenge that Dr. Abernethy has focused on throughout her career – first in academia, at Duke, and more recently in business – is how to close the gap between clinical practice and clinical research. While at Duke, it struck her as odd, if not absurd, that she'd see patients in her oncology practice on a Monday, and then they'd need to come back on Tuesday to participate in a clinical trial she was conducting, because the two activities were considered so distinct.

What an innocent, carefree year it must have been to spawn so bland a word of the year. It has a nice ring to it, especially when spoken with the Hokkaido lilt the women's curling team -- surprise bronze medalists -- gave it during February's Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. So what if all it means is, "That's right"? Let 2018, the Year of the Dog, end as it began -- on a positive note. Speaking of dogs and beginnings: Sony's robot dog Aibo was a big hit at January's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The so-called'Godfather of Deep Learning' Geoffrey Hinton has been appointed as a Companion of the Order of Canada. In a statement, Governor General Julie Payette said she appointed Hinton as a result of his contributions to artificial intelligence, "as a computer scientist and specialist in cognitive psychology." Hinton also holds a Canada Research Chair in machine learning, and is an advisor at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Hinton was born in Wimbledon, London, and holds a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from the University of Cambridge, as well as a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Following stints at institutions like the University of California, San Diego and Carnegie Mellon University, Hinton moved to Canada partly due to his disappointment with U.S. politics.

AI could have a key role to play in climate change after the technology was used by scientists to identify greenhouse gas leaks in oil and gas wells. Research conducted at the University of Vermont used machine learning algorithms to predict whether the wells would emit significant amounts of methane – one of the most harmful gases contributing to global warming. It tested 38,391 wells in Alberta, Canada, and was able to determine which wells leaked – and those that didn't – with up to 87% accuracy. Professor George Pinder, who conducted the research alongside former doctoral student James Montague, said: "The big picture is that we can now have tool that could help us much more efficiently identify leaking wells. "Given that methane is such a significant contributor to global warming, this is powerful information that should be put to use." The analysis yielded a cluster of 16 traits that predicted whether a well would fail and leak. Researchers were given access to more complete information, including the fluid properties of the oil or natural gas being mined, for 4,000 wells. For these wells, the machine learning algorithm identified leaks with 87% accuracy. For a larger sample of about 28,500 wells, where the fluid property was not known and taken into account, the accuracy level was 62%. Companies in Alberta are required to test wells at the time they begin operating to determine if they have failed and are leaking methane. They must also keep careful records of each well's construction characteristics. Professor Anthony R Ingraffea – based at Cornell University's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, in Ithaca, New York – is an expert in oil and natural gas well design and construction, but was not involved in the study. He said: "Provincial and state regulatory agencies never have enough inspectors or financial resources to locate, let alone repair, leaking wells.

Depending on your perspective, 2018 either brought us closer to salvation by way of robots, or closer to doom by way of robots: Where some see the end of meaningless work, others see the end of humanity, also meaningless. Whatever your biases toward the machines, this year has been a big one for the field of robotics, which continues to roll around joyously in the convergence of falling prices, better software and hardware, and skyrocketing demand from industry. Given that it's That Time of Year again, we've collected a list of the biggest moments in robotics in 2018, from the continued ascendance of Boston Dynamics' SpotMini quadruped to the rapid rise and fall of the home robot. Taking a quick break from uploading videos of its humanoid robot Atlas doing backflips, Boston Dynamics announced that one of its machines, the four-legged SpotMini, will finally go on sale in 2019. The question now becomes: What do you do with a robot that can fight off stick-wielding humans?

LONDON – British police said Saturday that two drones found near London's Gatwick Airport were not involved in the disruption that shut down the busy airport just days before Christmas. Sussex Police Chief Giles York told BBC radio that police have searched 26 potential launch sites near the airport but do not believe they have found the drone that was seen near the runway on Dec. 19 and Dec. 20. York said he is "absolutely certain that there was a drone flying throughout the period that the airport was closed." A senior detective said last week it was possible drones hadn't flown over the airport last week, sowing confusion, but police later insisted that the drone sightings were authentic. The airport's closure led to more than 100,000 people being stranded or delayed in the worst ever drone-related disruption at an international airport.

An A.I. programmer responds to Annalee Newitz's "When Robot and Crow Saved East St. In 2018 the A.I. robot CIMON was sent to the International Space Station--and that's when the awkwardness began. A floating sphere with a digital face displaying a few simple expressions, CIMON was supposed to help astronauts through many-step procedures by displaying information and answering questions. When astronaut Alexander Gerst tested it, he found CIMON's maneuverability impressive but its social awareness perhaps less so. It had been programmed to know Gerst's favorite song, but had to be ordered multiple times to stop playing it. "Let's sing along with those favorite hits," it interrupted, as Gerst tried to get it to record video. Moments later it seemed to take exception to Gerst's mild comments on its flying ability. "Don't be so mean, please," it told him. "Don't you like it here with me?" Soon it seemed CIMON's mood detection system had a "hangry" category and had confusedly placed Gerst in it. "Oh, dear, I feel you.