Google employees have spoken out against the project and their opposition ultimately led to the company deciding not to renew the contract when it expires next year. Now, former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, who started the Project Maven initiative, is saying he's "alarmed" by Google's decision to walk away from the program. Bloomberg reports that Work shared his concerns about the move during an event on tech in the military held today in Washington. "I fully agree that it might wind up with us taking a shot, but it could easily save lives. I believe the Google employees created an enormous moral hazard for themselves."

When a group of about 40 players first tested out a live game called the Machine Learning President at a private event in San Francisco this February, they were unaware that the game would end up memorialized in the pages of The New Yorker. But during a ski vacation in March, the Republican mega-donor Rebekah Mercer gathered her friends together to play several rounds of the game, which pits special interest groups, political candidates, and activist organizations against each other in a simulated presidential election, aided by cash and artificial intelligence. A lawyer for Mercer told The New Yorker that she owned a copy of the Machine Learning President but had not created it and that it did not reflect her family's views. It's not hard to draw comparisons between the rules of the game, with its reliance on big cash and tech capabilities, and the actions of the Mercer-backed Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But, as Mercer's lawyer stated, she had nothing to do with creating the game--in fact, it was conceptualized by one of her vocal critics.

IN THE MODERN FIELD OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, all roads seem to lead to three researchers with ties to Canadian universities. The first, Geoffrey Hinton, a 70-year-old Brit who teaches at the University of Toronto, pioneered the subfield called deep learning that has become synonymous with A.I. The second, a 57-year-old Frenchman named Yann LeCun, worked in Hinton's lab in the 1980s and now teaches at New York University. The third, 54-year-old Yoshua Bengio, was born in Paris, raised in Montreal, and now teaches at the University of Montreal. The three men are close friends and collaborators, so much so that people in the A.I. community call them the Canadian Mafia. In 2013, though, Google recruited Hinton, and Facebook hired LeCun. Both men kept their academic positions and continued teaching, but Bengio, who had built one of the world's best A.I. programs at the University of Montreal, came to be seen as the last academic purist standing. Bengio is not a natural industrialist. He has a humble, almost apologetic, manner, with the slightly stooped bearing of a man who spends a great deal of time in front of computer screens.

Globally-renowned AI expert Dr Demis Hassabis will today be confirmed as an adviser to the new Office for Artificial Intelligence as the UK looks to cement its place as a world leader in the fast-growing technology. Hassabis, who is the co-founder of leading AI research company DeepMind, will provide expert industry guidance to help the country build the skills and capability it needs to capitalise on the huge social and economic potential of AI - a key part of the Government's modern Industrial Strategy. Digital Secretary Matt Hancock will also confirm Tabitha Goldstaub as the chair and spokesperson of the AI Council, a new industry body tasked with increasing growth in the AI sector and promoting its adoption in other sectors of the economy. Tabitha Goldstaub is the co-founder of AI company CognitionX, an online platform which provides companies with information and access to AI experts to boost their businesses, and runs CogX, one of the largest gatherings of AI experts in the world. She led the team who wrote the influential report London: the AI Growth Capital of Europe, and was the co-founder of Rightster, the largest online video distribution company outside the US.

The human backup driver in an autonomous Uber SUV was streaming the television show "The Voice" on her phone and looking downward just before fatally striking a pedestrian in suburban Phoenix, according to a police report. The 300-page report released Thursday night by police in Tempe revealed that driver Rafaela Vasquez had been streaming the musical talent show via Hulu in the 43 minutes before the March 18 crash that killed Elaine Herzberg as she crossed a darkened road outside the lines of a crosswalk. The report said the crash, which marks the first fatality involving a self-driving vehicle, wouldn't have happened had the driver not been distracted. Dash camera video shows Vasquez was looking down near her right knee for four or five seconds before the crash. She looked up a half second before striking Herzberg as the Volvo was traveling about 44 miles per hour.

An image from a presentaton by Amazon's Ranju Das shows a demonstration of real-time facial recognition and tracking. Das said the video came from a traffic cam in Orlando, where police were in a pilot program of Amazon's Rekognition service. An image from a presentaton by Amazon's Ranju Das shows a demonstration of real-time facial recognition and tracking. Das said the video came from a traffic cam in Orlando, where police were in a pilot program of Amazon's Rekognition service. The city of Orlando, Fla., says it has ended a pilot program in which its police force used Amazon's real-time facial recognition – a system called "Rekognition" that had triggered complaints from rights and privacy groups when its use was revealed earlier this year.

On Monday, a group of 650 Salesforce employees called on CEO Marc Benioff to "re-examine" the company's relationship with US Customs and Border Protection in light of the agency's role in separating children and parents at the border. "Given the inhumane separation of children from their parents currently taking place at the border, we believe that our core value of Equality is at stake and that Salesforce should re-examine our contractual relationship with CBP and speak out against its practices," states the employee letter, which was obtained by Buzzfeed. Last week, employees at Amazon and Microsoft released similar letters, calling on their CEOs to end relationships with policing agencies at the border. The protests come about a month after an employee protest at Google resulted in the company deciding to not renew its contract providing the Pentagon with artificial intelligence to analyze drone footage. Salesforce, a cloud computing company based in San Francisco, is best known for its customer relationship software.

Machine learning has advanced radically over the past 10 years, and machine learning algorithms now achieve human-level performance or better on a number of tasks, including face recognition,31 optical character recognition,8 object recognition,29 and playing the game Go.26 Yet machine learning algorithms that exceed human performance in naturally occurring scenarios are often seen as failing dramatically when an adversary is able to modify their input data even subtly. Machine learning is already used for many highly important applications and will be used in even more of even greater importance in the near future. Search algorithms, automated financial trading algorithms, data analytics, autonomous vehicles, and malware detection are all critically dependent on the underlying machine learning algorithms that interpret their respective domain inputs to provide intelligent outputs that facilitate the decision-making process of users or automated systems. As machine learning is used in more contexts where malicious adversaries have an incentive to interfere with the operation of a given machine learning system, it is increasingly important to provide protections, or "robustness guarantees," against adversarial manipulation. The modern generation of machine learning services is a result of nearly 50 years of research and development in artificial intelligence--the study of computational algorithms and systems that reason about their environment to make predictions.25 A subfield of artificial intelligence, most modern machine learning, as used in production, can essentially be understood as applied function approximation; when there is some mapping from an input x to an output y that is difficult for a programmer to describe through explicit code, a machine learning algorithm can learn an approximation of the mapping by analyzing a dataset containing several examples of inputs and their corresponding outputs. Google's image-classification system, Inception, has been trained with millions of labeled images.28 It can classify images as cats, dogs, airplanes, boats, or more complex concepts on par or improving on human accuracy. Increases in the size of machine learning models and their accuracy is the result of recent advancements in machine learning algorithms,17 particularly to advance deep learning.7 One focus of the machine learning research community has been on developing models that make accurate predictions, as progress was in part measured by results on benchmark datasets. In this context, accuracy denotes the fraction of test inputs that a model processes correctly--the proportion of images that an object-recognition algorithm recognizes as belonging to the correct class, and the proportion of executables that a malware detector correctly designates as benign or malicious. The estimate of a model's accuracy varies greatly with the choice of the dataset used to compute the estimate.

When webpages influence choice: Effects of visual primes on experts and novices.

If Elon Musk doesn't like something, he'll create his own version. That's exactly what he's done for his children's education by starting a radical ultra-exclusive school at his SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. For the past four years, the non-profit'experimental' school has been educating the billionaire's five sons, children of some SpaceX employees and a number of gifted students from Los Angeles. The school has some unconventional teaching methods. Reports suggest it allows students to skip subjects they don't like, build flamethrowers and'defeat evil AIs'.