The Pentagon's research chief is deep in discussions about the newly announced Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, or JAIC, a subject of intense speculation and intrigue since Defense Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Michael Griffin announced it last week. Griffin has been sparse in his public comments on what the center will do. But its main mission will be to listen to service requests, gather the necessary talent, and deliver AI-infused solutions, according to two observers with direct knowledge of the discussions. Little else about the center has been decided, they say. "We are looking right now, as we speak, at things like how we structure it, who should lead it, where it should be, how we should structure our other research. These are ongoing questions we are addressing this week," Griffin said at a House Armed Services Committee hearing.

The Silicon Valley-military industrial complex is increasingly in the crosshairs of artificial intelligence engineers. A few weeks ago, Google was reported to be backing out of a Pentagon contract around Project Maven, which would use image recognition to automatically evaluate photos. Earlier this year, AI researchers around the world joined petitions calling for a boycott of any research that could be used in autonomous warfare. For Paul Scharre, though, such petitions barely touch the deep complexity, nuance, and ambiguity that will make evaluating autonomous weapons a major concern for defense planners this century. In Army of None, Scharre argues that the challenges around just the definitions of these machines will take enormous effort to work out between nations, let alone handling their effects.

Perceptual manifolds arise when a neural population responds to an ensemble of sensory signals associated with different physical features (e.g., orientation, pose, scale, location, and intensity) of the same perceptual object. Object recognition and discrimination requires classifying the manifolds in a manner that is insensitive to variability within a manifold. How neuronal systems give rise to invariant object classification and recognition is a fundamental problem in brain theory as well as in machine learning. Here we study the ability of a readout network to classify objects from their perceptual manifold representations. We develop a statistical mechanical theory for the linear classification of manifolds with arbitrary geometry revealing a remarkable relation to the mathematics of conic decomposition. Novel geometrical measures of manifold radius and manifold dimension are introduced which can explain the classification capacity for manifolds of various geometries. The general theory is demonstrated on a number of representative manifolds, including L2 ellipsoids prototypical of strictly convex manifolds, L1 balls representing polytopes consisting of finite sample points, and orientation manifolds which arise from neurons tuned to respond to a continuous angle variable, such as object orientation. The effects of label sparsity on the classification capacity of manifolds are elucidated, revealing a scaling relation between label sparsity and manifold radius. Theoretical predictions are corroborated by numerical simulations using recently developed algorithms to compute maximum margin solutions for manifold dichotomies. Our theory and its extensions provide a powerful and rich framework for applying statistical mechanics of linear classification to data arising from neuronal responses to object stimuli, as well as to artificial deep networks trained for object recognition tasks.

WATERLOO – An exciting wave of tech industry investment is set to make Kitchener-Waterloo the Canadian hub of creating an uncontrollable line of code that goes on to wreak incalculable economic and human damage. "AI is the future, and it's important for Canada to be part of that future," said Prime Minister Trudeau. "Even if that future includes the complete destruction of all life on earth." While some experts worry that the increasing integration of tech into the realms of economics, policing, personal finance, transit, health, and parenting, exponentially increases the ability of rogue code to create human suffering, other experts are paid a lot to design it, and say that things will'probably be fine'. "On our current course, it's inevitable that some country will invent a piece of AI with the power to destroy the world in the next 20 years," said Trudeau.

WATERLOO – An exciting wave of tech industry investment is set to make Kitchener-Waterloo the Canadian hub of creating an uncontrollable line of code that goes on to wreak incalculable economic and human damage. "AI is the future, and it's important for Canada to be part of that future," said Prime Minister Trudeau. "Even if that future includes the complete destruction of all life on earth." While some experts worry that the increasing integration of tech into the realms of economics, policing, personal finance, transit, health, and parenting, exponentially increases the ability of rogue code to create human suffering, other experts are paid a lot to design it, and say that things will'probably be fine'. "On our current course, it's inevitable that some country will invent a piece of AI with the power to destroy the world in the next 20 years," said Trudeau.

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.

New drone rules are being introduced in U.K. that'll restrict all drones from flying above 400 feet and within 1 km of airport boundaries, and the changes will come into effect on July 30. The law will also be requiring the registration of drones weighing 250 grams or more with the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), and these requirements will come into force on Nov.30, 2019. "We welcome the clarity that today's announcements provides, as it leaves no doubt that anyone flying a drone must stay well away from aircraft, airports and airfields, says Chris Woodroofe, Chief Operating Officer of London's Gatwick Airport. On the other hand, 'Drone bill' will be published to provide police officers the powers to intervene if the drones are used inappropriately. "The CAA supports the safe development of drones in the U.K., as they can bring many benefits, but to achieve those, we need everyone flying a drone now to do so safely.

UAVs have become the valuable tool for emergency search and rescue operations. On the island of Hawaii, drones are being used to move people out of harm's way as lava continues to pour from Kilauea volcano. "The drone helps prompt and guide evacuations and led to the successful rescue of a resident after a lava pond outbreak sent a very fast pahoehoe flow down Luana Street," the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said in a Twitter post. The drone technology is a boon for both the volcanologists and the emergency management teams. UAVs are considered the safest option to get up close to the active volcanoes, providing the geologists with the current data and valuable information regarding developments on and around the volcano over a longer period of time.

Sine 2010, AI has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of almost 60 percent, according to one source. Competition among nation states to "dominate" the AI sphere is reported to be fierce, raising concern that an "intelligence arms race" has already commenced with adversarial governments jockeying for supremacy. Dating back to 1956, AI was first coined by a Stanford University researcher and defined its key mission as a sub-field of computer science. Fast forward to today, AI conjures up images of autonomous robots replacing humans that will quickly take over the world. Simply, AI is the ability of a machine/computer to not only think, but also learn, like human beings.

PESHAWAR/DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (Reuters) - The Pakistani Taliban named Mufti Noor Wali Mehsud as the new leader on Saturday, a week after the previous chief Mullah Fazlullah was killed in a U.S.-Afghan air strike in Afghanistan, the group's spokesman said.