Facial recognition technology used by the UK police is making thousands of mistakes, a new report has found. South Wales Police, London's Met and Leicestershire are all trialling automated facial recognition systems in public places to identify wanted criminals. According to police figures, the system often makes more incorrect matches than correct ones. Experts warned the technology could lead to false arrests and described it as a'dangerously inaccurate policing tool'. South Wales Police has been testing an automated facial recognition system.

WASHINGTON, DC – Around 1200 BC, the Shang Dynasty in China developed a factory system to build thousands of huge bronze vessels for use in everyday life and ritual ceremonies. In this early example of mass production, the process of bronze casting required intricate planning and the coordination of large groups of workers, each performing a separate task in precisely the right order. A similarly complex process went into fashioning the famous army of terracotta warriors that Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor, unveiled one thousand years later. According to the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the statues "were created using an assembly production system that paved the way for advances in mass production and commerce." Some scholars have speculated that these early forms of prescriptive-work technologies played a large role in shaping Chinese society.

This article originally appeared in the April 23, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine. The tech industry has software tools that can pore over a thousand images per minute and identify objects with 99-percent accuracy. The Pentagon badly wants this technology, and sees it as essential to military combat capability as bombs and missiles. "How can I leverage the innovation happening in AI?" asked Gen. Stephen Wilson, vice chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. The military and intelligence agencies have sought to bring artificial intelligence into areas like data mining and autonomous vehicles.

Drones are what you make of them. One person's wedding videographer is another person's drug mule. And while hobbyist drones were first used for simple jobs like sneaking contraband into prisons, over the years they've become the criminal's Swiss Army knife of gizmos. The FBI's Joe Mazel told a crowd at the AUVSI Xponential conference this week about a particularly organized gang that used drones to interfere with a hostage situation last winter. As Defense One reports, a swarm of small drones descended on an FBI hostage team, performing "high-speed low passes" in an effort "to flush them" from their position.

Hawaii's Kilauea volcano erupted Thursday, May 3, 2018, prompting nearby residents to evacuate from their homes. Nearly 1,500 residents were ordered to evacuate from their volcano-side homes after Hawaii's Kilauea Volcano erupted Thursday, sending red molten lava to chew its way through forest land and bubble up on paved streets. Volcano officials couldn't predict how long the eruption could last, prompting Hawaii's Gov. David Ige to activate the National Guard to help with evacuations and provide security to about 770 structures left empty when residents sought shelter. Drone video from above the lava outbreak in Leilani Estates on Hawaii Island shows roads, homes near the path of destruction. Footage shown on local television showed lava spurting into the sky from a crack in a road.

If you combine two or three metals together, you will get an alloy that usually looks and acts like a metal, with its atoms arranged in rigid geometric patterns. But once in a while, under just the right conditions, you get something entirely new: a futuristic alloy called metallic glass. The amorphous material's atoms are arranged every which way, much like the atoms of the glass in a window. Its glassy nature makes it stronger and lighter than today's best steel, and it stands up better to corrosion and wear. Although metallic glass shows a lot of promise as a protective coating and alternative to steel, only a few thousand of the millions of possible combinations of ingredients have been evaluated over the past 50 years, and only a handful developed to the point that they may become useful.

Democracy is a solid form of government, and that's why it isn't particularly exciting. It's based on laws, on an independent judiciary and the separation of powers, all of which makes the system predictable. There is broad consensus in democracies that it is in everyone's best interest to agree on a set of rules that all must live by. There isn't much room left over for personal escapades and individual acts of heroism. But cults of personality are generally incompatible. Democracy always allows room for doubt, for divergent opinions and for criticism.

Much of the discussion about blockchain technology to date has either lauded its transformational promises or snickered at the marketing hype undeterred by the lack of actual breakthrough applications. But Algorithmia, a startup curating a marketplace of machine-learning models, just demonstrated how Ethereum can be used to submit and verify those machine-learning models in a recent contest. Back in February Algorthmia introduced a contest around its new Danku protocol, which was designed to see how well the Ethereum blockchain worked as a vehicle for verifying machine-learning models without Algorithmia's active involvement. Last week the company revealed that a winner had emerged, who submitted a model predicting how a given area of the United States was liable to vote based on a limited random sample of 2016 election data with the required level of accuracy. "We've been thinking about, how we do acquire machine-learning models faster and in a better way?" said Diego Oppenheimer, Algorithmia founder and CEO (and a GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit advisor).

Suppose an autonomous car is coming up an on-ramp onto a bridge. The ramp is fine, but the bridge is icy, and there's an overturned bus full of children blocking several lanes. Children are evacuating through the windows and milling around on the pavement. There isn't time to stop, even with the better-than-human reaction time an autonomous car might have. Swerving to one side might send the car off the bridge, to the other side might send it into a retaining wall, potentially killing or injuring the passengers in either case.

One of the next big things in geospatial intelligence is tiny black boxes aboard satellites that ingest massive amounts of data in space and instantly analyze it. Geospatial data manipulation and analysis in real time is the holy grail in the military intelligence business. "We are trying to help commanders'see through the fog of data' in situations when they have to make decisions very quickly," said Melanie Stricklan, chief technology officer and co-founder of Slingshot Aerospace, in Manhattan Beach, California. Stricklan served 21 years in the U.S. Air Force, and her duties included flying in the back of the JSTARS radar surveillance plane. The airplane's sensors were pulling loads of data but it was hard to extract intelligence, she told SpaceNews.