London might be tussling with Uber over its taxi license and grappling with Brexit, but it wants you to know that it's still a major hub for artificial intelligence. On Monday the city's Mayor, Sadiq Khan, promoted a survey he'd commissioned that suggested London was the'capital' of AI for Europe. "London has twice as many AI companies as Paris and Berlin combined," Khan said on the sidelines of the launch of London Tech Week, a collection of 200 tech events across the city that also kicked off on Monday (disclosure: Forbes is the festival's official media partner). Khan denied his transport office was smothering innovation by moving to take away Uber's taxi license last year. "We're not saying'no' to innovation, but'no' to rule-breaking," he said.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency's new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will include multiple forms of biometrics--from face recognition to DNA, data from questionable sources, and highly personal data on innocent people. It will be shared with federal agencies outside of DHS as well as state and local law enforcement and foreign governments. And yet, we still know very little about it. The records DHS plans to include in HART will chill and deter people from exercising their First Amendment protected rights to speak, assemble, and associate. Data like face recognition makes it possible to identify and track people in real time, including at lawful political protests and other gatherings.

This video establishes a baseline understanding of disruptive technology (DT), artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy aimed at NATO policymakers and senior military officials. It explains disruptive technology and its historical importance for military innovation and changes in warfare, in addition to the current state of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems technology. The video features experts Dr. Andrew Moore, Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and Co-Chair of the CNAS Task Force on AI and National Security, and Paul Scharre, Senior Fellow and Director of the Technology and National Security Program at CNAS and Executive Director of the CNAS Task Force on AI and National Security.

IMAGE: This is the Rice University's PlinyCompute team includes (from left) Shangyu Luo, Sourav Sikdar, Jia Zou, Tania Lorido, Binhang Yuan, Jessica Yu, Chris Jermaine, Carlos Monroy, Dimitrije Jankov and Matt... view more HOUSTON -- (June 11, 2018) -- Computer scientists from Rice University's DARPA-funded Pliny Project believe they have the answer for every stressed-out systems programmer who has struggled to implement complex objects and workflows on'big data' platforms like Spark and thought: "Isn't there a better way?" Rice's PlinyCompute will be unveiled here Thursday at the 2018 ACM SIGMOD conference. In a peer-reviewed conference paper, the team describes PlinyCompute as "a system purely for developing high-performance, big data codes." Like Spark, PlinyCompute aims for ease of use and broad versatility, said Chris Jermaine, the Rice computer science professor leading the platform's development. Unlike Spark, PlinyCompute is designed to support the intense kinds of computation that have only previously been possible with supercomputers, or high-performance computers (HPC). "With machine learning, and especially deep learning, people have seen what complex analytics algorithms can do when they're applied to big data," Jermaine said.

CogX is a two-day AI extravaganza that brings together the biggest, best and brightest minds in Europe to really talk about the future of AI, blockchain and the future. Hold this conference in China or the US and you'd have a completely different conversation thanks to investment levels, protectionism and talent strategies - a key theme of several of the early panels and people I spoke to. The panel on the main stage who opened up CogX in London were tasked with setting the scene for the future of AI and where we are right now. The tone set felt distinctly like we're losing to the US/China, mixed with'we're on a knife-edge of bad things happening' sprinkled with distinctly hopeful tones that potential issues are not inevitable. Made up of some of the best minds currently thinking about such things, the focus seems to have moved from potential to'winning races' and protectionism.

Last week, IBM announced, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), some impressive AI performance numbers from the Summit supercomputer. ORNL is hailing Summit as the world's "most powerful and smartest supercomputer" currently in existence, unseating the previous record-holder, a Chinese supercomputer named Sunway TaihuLight. Based on its self-published, mixed precision performance numbers, it is the new AI beast. Summit was designed with 4,608 of IBM's newest generation POWER9 Systems (which I've written previously on here and here) and 27,648 of NVIDIA's Volta GPUs. IBM says this is the first supercomputer to be designed expressly for the purpose of AI which wasn't an accident, by the way- it was by design.

Google is committing to not using artificial intelligence for weapons or surveillance after employees protested the company's involvement in Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to analyse drone footage. However, Google says it will continue to work with the United States military on cybersecurity, search and rescue, and other non-offensive projects. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the change in a set of AI principles released today. The principles are intended to govern Google's use of artificial intelligence and are a response to employee pressure on the company to create guidelines for its use of AI. Employees at the company have spent months protesting Google's involvement in Project Maven, sending a letter to Pichai demanding that Google terminate its contract with the Department of Defense.

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In Ensenada, a Mexican city about two hours south of Tijuana, a new crime fighter has taken to the skies. And over a few months on patrol, it's had quite the impact. The city's police department claims the solitary DJI Inspire 1 Quadcopter led to more than 500 arrests and a 10 percent drop in overall crime rates, with a 30 percent drop in home robberies. It's the latest example of drones slowly finding their place in civilian life, like soldiers returning from war, seeking to apply their skills to life in a country not entirely comfortable with what they were up to overseas. Unmanned aerial vehicles may have gotten their start with the military, flying recon missions in Vietnam and dropping bombs over Afghanistan.

Bedside robots could do swathes of the work now done by doctors and nurses, saving the NHS almost £13bn a year - a tenth of its budget - a major report says today. The controversial study led by surgeon and former health minister Lord Darzi calls for the "full automation" of health and social services, claiming it would give staff "time to care" for patients. Almost one third of the tasks now done by nurses, and nearly one quarter of that done by hospital doctors could be done by robots and artificial intelligence systems, it says. And the widespread use of such methods could save the NHS almost 10 per cent of its annual running costs, the report says, while "carebots" in homes and care homes could take on 30 per cent of the workload now done by humans. The research, due out next week [June 19], follows calls from the Health and Social Care Secretary for an expected cash boost to be focussed on a "technological revolution" across the NHS, transforming the way it deals with pressures on it.