The boss of Amazon's server business has joined Apple's Tim Cook in demanding Bloomberg retract a story claims Chinese spy chips were inside some of its servers. '@tim_cook is right,' Andy Jassy tweeted. 'Bloomberg story is wrong about Amazon, too. Andy Jassy said the'Reporters got played or took liberties'. Bloomberg has so far stood by its story, despite every firm involved denying it.

A group of Cornell researchers has received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to use machine learning to rapidly analyze agricultural and food market conditions, aiming to better predict poverty and undernutrition in some of the world's poorest regions. The method will use open-source, freely available satellite data to measure solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) – photons emitted from plants during the process of photosynthesis, detected by satellite, which can monitor agricultural productivity. It will also consider land-surface temperature, which provides information about crop stress under water deficit or excessive heat, as well as food-price data. "A method that can use near real-time, low-cost or freely available remotely sensed data can speed up the delivery of this information, and sharply reduce the cost," said Chris Barrett, the Stephen B. and Janice G. Ashley Professor of Applied Economics and Management in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the principal investigator on the three-year grant. "If you are a humanitarian organization trying to really target your resources at the poorest rural areas, this seems a powerful diagnostic tool."

DARPA stands for "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency," but while defense is good and all, what DARPA is really into is that P, for projects. The agency is focused on the development of breakthrough technology, and its sights are focused on the enormous potential of artificial intelligence. Its funding for AI projects is huge by any measure, and available to applicants far beyond the traditional defense community. As a 60th birthday present for itself, DARPA launched the AI Next campaign this past September, announcing a $2 billion investment applied to AI in a variety areas over a period of five years -- or about $400 million a year, says Brian Pierce, Director of the Information Innovation Office at DARPA. Anyone can participate in DARPA-funded programs by responding to an invitation for proposals on fbo.gov.

Imagine a global "Hive Mind" that can tap the knowledge, wisdom, insights, and intuitions of millions of people, and produce a super-intelligence that is much smarter than any individual person. A new technology called Artificial Swarm Intelligence is making this possible and it could be our best defense against the emerging dangers of AI. Louis Rosenberg, PhD is a researcher, entrepreneur, and writer. He is currently Founder & CEO of Unanimous AI, an artificial intelligence company that amplifies human intelligence by building "hive minds" modeled after biological swarms. A prolific inventor, Rosenberg has been awarded over 350 patents worldwide for his work in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Human-Computer Interaction. Rosenberg was also the creator of the Virtual Fixtures system for the U.S. Air Force in the early 90's, the first immersive Augmented Reality system.

In a quiet corner of rural Hampshire, a robot called Rachel is pootling around an overgrown field. With bright orange casing and a smartphone clipped to her back end, she looks like a cross between an expensive toy and the kind of rover used on space missions. Up close, she has four USB ports, a disc-like GPS receiver, and the nuts and bolts of a system called Lidar, which enables her to orient herself using laser beams. She cost around £2,000 to make. Every three seconds, Rachel takes a closeup photograph of the plants and soil around her, which will build into a forensic map of the field and the wider farm beyond. After 20 minutes or so of this, she is momentarily disturbed by two of the farm's dogs, unsure what to make of her.

IMAGE: Fanelli, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the winner of the 2018 Jefferson Science Associates Postdoctoral Prize for his project to use artificial... view more In the world of computing, there's a groundswell of excitement for what is perceived as the impending revolution in artificial intelligence. Like the industrial revolution in the 19th century and the digital revolution in the 20th, the AI revolution is expected to change the way we live and work. Now, Cristiano Fanelli aims to bring the AI revolution to nuclear physics. Fanelli, who is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the winner of the 2018 Jefferson Science Associates Postdoctoral Prize for his project to use artificial intelligence to optimize systems for nuclear physics research being carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. "It's an exciting time to do nuclear and particle physics research with the artificial intelligence revolution happening now," said Fanelli.

NASA has released a mesmerizing new video of the moon set to Claude Debussy's famous piano composition, Clair de Lune. The stunning nature documentary-style footage uses high-resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to reveal an unprecedented look at the surface of Earth's only natural satellite. It follows the sun over the course of one lunar day, slowly panning over an endless landscape of craters and other surface features brought to life by elevation maps and image mosaics. The new visualization was created to accompany a performance of Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops. It was performed at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on June 1 and 2, 2018, led by conductor Emil de Cou, as part of a celebration of NASA's 60th anniversary.

Uber's dream of delivering food via drones may no longer be just pie in the sky. The ride-hailing giant is eyeing the launch of its drone delivery service in multiple markets as soon as 2021, the Wall Street Journal reported. This plan is described in a since-deleted job listing on Uber's website, where it appears to be looking for a drone executive to'enable safe, legal, efficient and scalable flight operations.' Uber's dream of delivering food via drones may no longer be just pie in the sky. The drone executive would be tasked with making Uber's delivery drones functional by 2019 and, ultimately, commercially operational by 2021.

Alien life could be hiding in briny water underneath the Martian surface, according to a new study. Scientists had long feared that the lack of plants on Mars would also mean there wouldn't be enough oxygen to support life. But the salty water underneath the surface could store up that oxygen and provide a place for life, a new study suggests. There might be simple animals like sponges hiding beneath that surface, the scientists report. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater.

For the first time in the literature, we develop a quantitative indicator of the Chinese government's policy priorities over a long period of time, which we call the Policy Change Index (PCI) of China. The PCI is a leading indicator of policy changes that runs from 1951 to the third quarter of 2018, and it can be updated in the future. It is designed with two building blocks: the full text of the People's Daily -- the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China -- as input data and a set of machine learning techniques to detect changes in how this newspaper prioritizes policy issues. Due to the unique role of the People's Daily in China's propaganda system, detecting changes in this newspaper allows us to predict changes in China's policies. The construction of the PCI does not require the researcher's understanding of the Chinese context, which suggests a wide range of applications in other settings, such as predicting changes in other (ex-)Communist regimes' policies, measuring decentralization in central-local government relations, quantifying media bias in democratic countries, and predicting changes in lawmaker's voting behavior and in judges' ideological leaning.