A dedicated team is extending IBM's cloud-based technology to outer space, and bringing us one step closer to a science fiction future where intelligent talking helper robots collaborate with astronauts. At the end of June, a SpaceX rocket carried an autonomous AI device to the six astronauts onboard the International Space Station. The historic launch carried 5,900 pounds of cargo which reportedly included a delivery of ice cream -- plus some fresh blueberries and some "super-caffeinated coffee." And 11 pounds of that was a talking robot, roughly one foot in diameter. All of its plastic and metal was generated by 3D printers.

SINGAPORE -With Singapore's emergency dispatch phone operators receiving almost 200,000 calls for assistance a year, every minute is vital. In an effort to ease their workload, the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) and four other Government agencies are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) and have developed a speech recognition system that can transcribe and log each call received in real time - even if it is in Singlish. For now the system is programmed to recognise English and Mandarin with some Hokkien and Malay, though it could be customised to incorporate others. AI Singapore (AISG), a programme under the National Research Foundation, is investing $1.25 million to set up the AI Speech Lab which developed the system. The lab claims to have created the first code-switch - or mixed-lingual - speech recognition engine.

Since the 1990s, the UN General Assembly has served as a platform for states to debate these issues. For example, a series of groups of governmental experts agreed on the applicability of international law to cyberspace, recommended norms on state use of information and communication technologies (ICTs), and helped build trust and cooperative measures to reduce the risk of conflict arising from their misuse. Despite facing setbacks, these processes generated important results and can serve as a framework for global stability. Meanwhile, efforts should be redoubled to address the challenges posed by autonomous lethal weapons and emerging risks associated with advances in biotechnology. Of course, geo-strategic calculations will frame states' decisions on whether to cooperate or compete.

Addressing the South Australian government's recent Copper to the World conference in Adelaide, Newcrest's chief information and digital officer, Gavin Wood, gave a rundown on what had already been achieved at Newcrest with data science, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. He also talked about the benefits delivered by crowd sourcing, although this can also create some unique challenges of its own. "If you can imagine, an experienced operator at a site being told by a university student in Argentina the answer for optimising their part of the plant is quite different to something they believe from their experience of 20 or so years. Those are real challenges for our business," Wood said. He said data science coupled with machine learning had alr...

Back in April, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) agreed to figure out whether it's possible to bring Martian soil samples back to Earth. Now, the ESA has granted Airbus a $5.2 million contract to design a concept for a rover that can collect those samples on the red planet. The space agency has chosen Airbus' team in Stevenage, England, because they're already building the ExoMars rover that's scheduled to head to our neighboring planet in 2021. Unlike ExoMars and all its scientific instruments, the fetch rover's lone task is to find and collect the canisters of samples NASA's Mars 2020 rover prepares and leaves behind. However, that doesn't mean that designing the vehicle would be easy.

In recent weeks, two events demonstrated the promise of and concern over the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI). At the #AI4Good Summit in Geneva, attendees reviewed the many ways AI can help humanity in medicine, education, economic and law enforcement applications, to name a few. Meanwhile, Google withdrew from a Pentagon project called Project Maven, using AI to scan video from drones and make suggestions to classify objects as people, buildings, or vehicles. This follows the resignation of about a dozen Google employees and a petition signed by about 4,000 employees urging Google's leadership to stop work on Project Maven and cease any support for "warfare technology." The petition justified these demands by citing the Google slogan, "don't be evil." Is it possible to deploy AI on the battlefield and still live up to the "don't be evil" standard?

As per Israeli authorities, no major damage has been done so far, but this could be the beginning of an even more serious hacking attempt. However, many also question if Hamas has the means to run any sort of a hacking campaign against Israel due to the condition of Palestine.

Learning representations for knowledge base entities and concepts is becoming increasingly important for NLP applications. However, recent entity embedding methods have relied on structured resources that are expensive to create for new domains and corpora. We present a distantly-supervised method for jointly learning embeddings of entities and text from an unnanotated corpus, using only a list of mappings between entities and surface forms. We learn embeddings from open-domain and biomedical corpora, and compare against prior methods that rely on human-annotated text or large knowledge graph structure. Our embeddings capture entity similarity and relatedness better than prior work, both in existing biomedical datasets and a new Wikipedia-based dataset that we release to the community. Results on analogy completion and entity sense disambiguation indicate that entities and words capture complementary information that can be effectively combined for downstream use.

Tornadoes are the most violent of all atmospheric storms. In a typical year, the United States experiences hundreds of tornadoes with associated damages on the order of one billion dollars. Community preparation and resilience would benefit from accurate predictions of these economic losses, particularly as populations in tornado-prone areas continue to increase in density and extent. Here, we use artificial neural networks to predict tornado-induced property damage using publicly available data. We find that the large number of tornadoes which cause zero property damage (30.6% of the data) poses a challenge for predictive models. We developed a model that predicts whether a tornado will cause property damage to a high degree of accuracy (out of sample accuracy = 0.829 and AUROC = 0.873). Conditional on a tornado causing damage, another model predicts the amount of damage. When combined, these two models yield an expected value for the amount of property damage caused by a tornado event. From the best-performing models (out of sample mean squared error = 0.089 and R2 = 0.473), we provide an interactive, gridded map of monthly expected values for the year 2018. One major weakness is that the model predictive power is optimized with log-transformed, mean-normalized property damages, however this leads to large natural-scale residuals for the most destructive tornadoes. The predictive capacity of this model along with an interactive interface may provide an opportunity for science-informed tornado disaster planning.

Apple's digital assistant left a leading member of the U.K. government red-faced on Tuesday, July 3, after it unexpectedly piped up during a speech he was giving to lawmakers in the British Parliament. Perhaps a little too keen to offer help, Siri interrupted a statement that defense secretary Gavin Williamson was giving to the House of Commons about the situation in Syria. Evidently keeping his phone in always-listening mode, Apple's digital assistant should really only have responded upon hearing "Hey, Siri." But, with his iPhone in his pocket, it seems the word "Syria" prompted the assistant to spring into action. As Williamson addressed lawmakers, Siri got back to the defense secretary with its findings, with the response picked up by the Commons' microphones: "I found something on the web for Syria, Syrian Democratic Forces supported by coalition … " Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson'heckled' by Siri at the despatch box https://t.co/CQlxXm5KAa