Artificial intelligence is the beating heart at the center of delivery robots, autonomous cars, and, as it turns out, ocean ecology trackers. In a blog post on Friday, Global Fishing Watch, a platform founded by Google, Skytruth, and Oceana that monitors fishing activity around the globe, announced the addition of two new data layers to increase "transparency" and "awareness" around overfishing. One of the new layers tracks transshipment, a method whereby one fishing vessel offloads its catch to another, refrigerated ship at sea. It's often used to combine illicitly caught fish with legal seafood, and it usually takes place in international waters, making it difficult for authorities to track. Working from a database of 300,000 ships across 12 categories, Global Fishing Watch trained machine learning algorithms to identify when a fishing vessel is docked alongside a refrigerator vessel, and to determine the likelihood that transshipment is taking place.

Google has unveiled a set of principles for ethical AI development and deployment, and announced that it will not allow its AI software to be used in weapons or for "unreasonable surveillance". In a detailed blog post, CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google would not develop technologies that cause, or are likely to cause, harm. "Where there is a material risk of harm, we will proceed only where we believe that the benefits substantially outweigh the risks, and will incorporate appropriate safety constraints," he explained. Google will not allow its technologies to be used in weapons or in "other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people", he said. Also on the no-go list are "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance, violating internationally accepted norms", and those "whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights". The move follows widespread internal and external criticism of Google's involvement in Project Maven, the Pentagon's aerial battlefield intelligence programme, which some saw as a step towards the weaponisation of AI.

Plenty of people around the world got new gadgets Friday, but one in Eastern Tennessee stands out. Summit, a new supercomputer unveiled at Oak Ridge National Lab is, unofficially for now, the most powerful calculating machine on the planet. It was designed in part to scale up the artificial intelligence techniques that power some of the recent tricks in your smartphone. America hasn't possessed the world's most powerful supercomputer since June 2013, when a Chinese machine first claimed the title. Summit is expected to end that run when the official ranking of supercomputers, from an organization called Top500, is updated later this month.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - Google announced on Thursday (June 7) it would not use artificial intelligence for weapons or to "cause or directly facilitate injury to people", as it unveiled a set of principles for the technologies. Chief executive Sundar Pichai, in a blog post outlining the company's artificial intelligence policies, noted that even though Google won't use AI for weapons, "we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas" such as cyber security, training, or search and rescue. The news comes with Google facing an uproar from employees and others over a contract with the US military, which the California tech giant said last week would not be renewed. Pichai set out seven principles for Google's application of artificial intelligence, or advanced computing that can simulate intelligent human behaviour. He said Google is using AI "to help people tackle urgent problems" such as prediction of wildfires, helping farmers, diagnosing disease or preventing blindness. "We recognize that such powerful technology raises equally powerful questions about its use," Pichai said in the blog.

Better Life Lab is a partnership of Slate and New America. Melissa Turner left her job as a document control administrator late last year after receiving a pudendal neuralgia diagnosis. Pudendal neuralgia, a little-known condition resulting from injury to the pelvic nerves, happens to women and men (most often from childbirth and bicycle injuries). The majority of people with this condition cannot sit or walk without encountering severe pain. Turner's job required spending a significant amount of time walking in a large office building, gathering papers from multiple printers, and it was too painful for her to continue.

Google's collaboration with the Department of Defense to develop AI system's for the US military's fleet of war drones, dubbed Project Maven, proved a double-edged sword for the technology company. On one hand, the DoD contract was quite lucrative, worth as much as $250 million annually. On the other hand, public backlash to the news that the company was helping the government build more efficient killing machines was immediate, unwavering and utterly ruthless. A dozen employees quit the company in protest, another 4,000 petitioned management to terminate the contract outright. The uproar was so deafening that Google had to come out and promise to not renew the deal upon its completion next year.

Car accidents can be the tragic byproducts of any number of factors, each more unpredictable than the next: a sudden thunderstorm, a busy intersection, or even perhaps, gravel on the road. These are just a few examples of the great deal of uncertainty government officials must deal with every day. Even the colours used in a heatmap can sway decisions, says Mansour Raad, a subject matter expert on Advanced Analytics, BigData and AI at Esri, the leading GIS company. However, policies must always be made on accurate facts rather than human subjectivity. We look at how sensors, artificial intelligence, and geospatial technologies can help officials dig out underlying causes, identify patterns, and ultimately, make informed decisions. Government officials are now able to gather an extensive amount of data from the environment and infrastructures using ubiquitous sensors.

There were some tense hours at the operation center for the New Horizons mission when the spacecraft briefly lost contact with Earth on July 4, 2015, just days from its long-awaited flyby of Pluto. It's just one of many gripping moments in a book that Alan Stern, the mission leader and a co-author of "Chasing New Horizons" along with astrobiologist David Grinspoon, describes as a "techno-thriller about how the farthest planet was explored." Dr. Stern recently sat down for an interview in his Boulder, Colo., office, surrounded by photos and mementos from the New Horizons mission – a mission that took decades to convince NASA to get off the ground and another decade to travel 3 billion miles to the last unexplored planet in our solar system. The New Horizons spacecraft continues to explore the vast reaches of the Kuiper Belt, at the outer edge of our solar system. His responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

International trade has dominated the global headlines recently. Much of the discussions have been focused on the threat of a trade war, the tit-for-tat tariffs, and the health of the global trade order. While extremely important, these conversations are missing a brighter side of international trade – how innovative technologies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution are transforming trade by making the processes more inclusive and efficient. The steam power revolution connected the world like never before. The invention of shipping containers laid the foundation for globalization.

Artificial intelligence, robots, and automation are rising in importance in many areas. As noted in the recent book, "The Future of Work: Robots, AI, and Automation," there are exciting advances in finance, transportation, national defense, smart cities, and health care, among other areas. Businesses are developing solutions that improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations and using these tools to improve the way their firms function. Yet there also are concerns about the impact of these developments on jobs and personal privacy. A Pew Research Center national survey revealed considerable unease about emerging trends.