Provost Ian Walmsley welcomed Education Secretary Damian Hinds to the College's South Kensington Campus The Department for Education's leadership team were given an insight into the College's pioneering research, education and innovation. On Thursday 11 October Provost Ian Walmsley and President Alice Gast welcomed the Secretary of State for Education, Damian Hinds MP, to the College for the Department for Education board's away day. Before the board meeting began, Anne Milton MP, Minister of State for Apprenticeships and Skills, a number of senior civil servants and non-executive directors from the Department for Education met Provost Ian Walmsley, Vice-Provost (Education) Professor Simone Buitendijk and a number of students and academics from across the College. The visit included tours and demonstrations at the Aerial Robotics Lab, the Carbon Capture Pilot Plant and the Dyson School of Design Engineering. Director Dr Mirko Kovac gave a presentation on the work of the Aerial Robotics Lab at Imperial's Department of Aeronautics.

Wherever artificial intelligence is deployed, you will find it has failed in some amusing way. Take the strange errors made by translation algorithms that confuse having someone for dinner with, well, having someone for dinner. But as AI is used in ever more critical situations, such as driving autonomous cars, making medical diagnoses, or drawing life-or-death conclusions from intelligence information, these failures will no longer be a laughing matter. That's why DARPA, the research arm of the US military, is addressing AI's most basic flaw: it has zero common sense. "Common sense is the dark matter of artificial intelligence," says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a research nonprofit based in Seattle that is exploring the limits of the technology.

It's been quite a few years since huge parts of our lives have ported over to digitalisation, and almost by accident, many organisations have accumulated swaths of data that they've more recently just realised could be turned into valuable analytics. Global trends by large corporations may hint at 2019 becoming the year of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Similar realisations have led to the prominence of machine learning and artificial intelligence in recent years, particularly in Singapore. There has even been talk about artificial intelligence as the fourth industrial revolution--probably why the Singaporean government is so keen on jumping aboard that train through advocacy, and throwing a lot of money into its development. It probably helps that artificial intelligence could make it easier for the island nation to govern its people--the Monetary Authority of Singapore's (MAS) foray into suptech (supervisory technology) comes to mind. Almost literally putting money where their mouth is, Singapore has thrown a lot of money into supporting its growth.

Panelists discuss the global race for leadership in artificial intelligence, and provide an analysis of major AI legislation and initiatives in China, the European Union, and the United States.

My sandwich looked like something out of a restaurant commercial: glossy yellow cheese oozing between two golden-brown slices of toast. The first bite should have been rich, gooey and decadent. I stalked back to the kitchen, pulled open the fridge door, and snatched the culprit. Printed on the back of the plastic package--Mexican Style Blend Finely Shredded Cheese, left by a visiting friend--was an ingredient list longer than just "cheese." Food additives are a fact of modern life--they improve shelf-life, flavor, texture, consistency and color.

Amazon has scrapped a "sexist" tool that used artificial intelligence to decide the best candidates to hire for jobs. Members of the team working on the system said it effectively taught itself that male candidates were preferable. The artificial intelligence software was created by a team at Amazon's Edinburgh office in 2014 as a way to automatically sort through CVs and select the most talented applicants. But the algorithm rapidly taught itself to favour male candidates over female ones, according to members of the team who spoke to Reuters. Amazon wage increase could result in lower pay for some employees Black Friday 2018: The best Amazon deals Will Amazon's deliver-on-demand smart homes be the future of housing? Will Amazon's deliver-on-demand smart homes be the future of housing?

The man flying the drone didn't know he was violating a temporary restriction on flights around New York City (the president was in town for the 2017 United Nations General Assembly). He didn't know he had just two minutes to land before he violated the prohibition on nighttime flights. And he didn't know his DJI Phantom 4--300 feet up, 2.5 miles away from him, and well beyond his line of sight--was flying dangerously close to an Army Black Hawk helicopter. The drone smashed to pieces. The helicopter, luckily, only suffered a dented rotor and a few scratches, according to the National Transportation Safety Board report.

Philip K. Dick was living a few miles north of San Francisco when he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which envisioned a world where artificially intelligent androids are indistinguishable from humans. The Turing Test has been passed, and it's impossible to know who, or what, to trust. A version of that world will soon be a reality in San Francisco. Google announced this week that Duplex, the company's phone-calling AI, will be rolled out to Pixel phones in the Bay Area and a few other US cities before the end of the year. You might remember Duplex from a shocking demonstration back in May, when Google showed how the software could call a hair salon and book an appointment.

Self-driving startup Aurora is the first company to receive Pennsylvania's blessing to test autonomous vehicles on its roads. As TechCrunch noted, it's actually been trialing its technology on the streets of Pittsburgh since 2017 -- along with other companies -- but the state only released its automated vehicle testing guidance in July. While automakers aren't required to register, Aurora voluntarily complied with the government's request, which will give the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation access to information about its test results and conditions, the safety measures it takes, the vetting and training of its vehicle operators and the internal details about how its self-driving system works. Aurora is nowhere near as recognizable as Waymo, but it was founded by three experienced names in the field: Chris Urmson (led Carnegie Mellon's self-driving efforts in DARPA's Grand Challenges), Drew Bagnell (formerly of Uber's self-driving team) and Sterling Anderson (from Tesla's Autopilot team). In fact, the startup's beginnings were mired in controversy.

New facial recognition technology has identified three impostors at Washington Dulles International Airport. Citing a U.S. Customs and Border Protection release, The Washington Post reports a woman arriving on a Monday flight from Accra, Ghana, presented a U.S. passport, but the facial recognition technology reported a mismatch. A secondary inspection and biometric examination identified her as a 26-year-old citizen of Cameroon, not the United States. The release says the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority partnered with CBP to use biometric entry and exit technology using facial comparison to bolster security and efficiency for international travelers. Officers at Dulles previously intercepted a Congolese man using a French passport Aug. 22 and a Ghanaian woman using a U.S. passport Sept. 8. Posing as another person when entering the United States violates immigration law.