Thermal cameras like FLIR, or Forward Looking Infrared, sensors are actively deployed on aerial and ground vehicles, in watch towers and at check points for surveillance purposes. More recently, thermal cameras are becoming available for use as body-worn cameras. The ability to perform automatic face recognition at nighttime using such thermal cameras is beneficial for informing a Soldier that an individual is someone of interest, like someone who may be on a watch list. The motivations for this technology -- developed by Drs. Benjamin S. Riggan, Nathaniel J. Short and Shuowen "Sean" Hu, from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory -- are to enhance both automatic and human-matching capabilities.

A new report by the Lords Select Committee in the UK claims that Britain is in a strong position to be a world leader in the development of artificial intelligence. But to get there--and to keep AI safe and ethical--tech firms should follow the Committee's newly proposed "AI Code." The new report was penned by the House of Lords Artificial Intelligence Committee, and it's titled "AI in the UK: Ready, Willing and Able?." The AI Committee is proposing a path for both the British government and UK-based businesses to move forward as AI increasingly expands in power and scope. The report is particularly timely given the recent scandal surrounding Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data and growing concerns that tech companies aren't working in the public's best interests.

Before it started scampering after the machine learning chip market in 2016, but after it was founded at the University of Michigan in 2012, Mythic was trying to build embedded chips that would let surveillance drones run software modeled after the human brain. Part of the funding for the company, then known as Isocline, came from the Department of Defense. But after relaunching two years ago, Mythic refocused on embedded devices like autonomous cars and security cameras. Now the company is only a few months from sampling chips based on an aggressively ambitious architecture, which uses analog computing inside flash memory cells to accelerate machine learning tasks like facial recognition. Helping it over the finish line is $40 million raised last month from new and existing investors, including SoftBank Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Lux Capital.

AI and robotics are going to shape our future. Next there are 10 issues that professionals and researchers need to address in order to desing intelligent systems that help humanity. The flow of misinformation together with our natural inability of perceiving reality based on evidence (a phenomenon called confirmation bias) is a threat to having an informed democracy. Russian hackers influencing the US elections, Brexit campaign and Catalonia crisis are examples of how social media can massively spread misinformation and fake news. It is an open question how institutions are going to address this threat. The scientific revolution in the 18th century and the industrial revolution in the 19th marked a complete change in society.

Many are doing brisk business as companies around Eastern Europe accelerate an automation drive. At Rittal, a maker of switch gears and control cabinets for industrial robots, orders rose 15 percent last year and have jumped 25 percent since January. "Companies aren't able to produce more, so their competitiveness is falling," said Jaromir Zeleny, Rittal's managing director. "They don't want to be so dependent on people." Eastern Europe became a manufacturing powerhouse by luring multinationals with low wages. That advantage is ebbing, though.

If a robot, acting autonomously, injures or otherwise wrongs a human, who will be held responsible? Some European lawmakers think that the best way to resolve this question will be to give robots "electronic personalities," a form of legal personhood. Proposed in a 2017 report from the European Union, this form of robot rights wouldn't give them status like that of human beings -- they're not going to get married, or buy a house, or adopt a child. But it would make it possible for self-learning robots to sue and be sued, with legal status like a corporation. Proponents say that the idea is a common-sense move, one that will be necessary to create a workable legal structure as these entities become smarter and more integrated into everyday human life.

The House of Lords report on the implications of artificial intelligence is a thoughtful document which grasps one rather important point: this is not only something that computers do. Machine learning is the more precise term for the technology that allows computers to recognise patterns in enormous datasets and act on them. But even machine learning doesn't happen only inside computer networks, because these machines are constantly tended and guided by humans. You can't say that Google's intelligence resides either in its machines or in its people: it depends on both and emerges from their interplay. Complex software is never written to a state of perfection and then left to run for ever.

China's Alibaba Group has been testing its own autonomous vehicle technology, the South China Morning Post reports, and is looking to hire an additional 50 self-driving vehicle experts. Alibaba's rivals Baidu and Tencent have also been working on autonomous technology and last month, Baidu received the go-ahead from the Chinese government to begin testing its technology on Beijing roads. Tencent reportedly sent one of its autonomous vehicles for a ride on a Beijing highway earlier this month. According to the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba, the company has been conducting regular road tests of self-driving vehicles and has the capability to perform open road trials. It's looking to develop Level 4 autonomous technology, meaning that under certain conditions, the car can operate on its own without human involvement.

As governments around the world plan for their AI-powered futures, the UK is preparing to take on a somewhat scholarly and moral mantle. In a report published today by the House of Lords, which will be used to guide future government policy, a committee recommended that the UK "forge a distinctive role for itself as a pioneer in ethical AI." Doing so would allow the UK to play to its "particular blend of national assets," write the report's authors, and guide global development in the field. These assets include leading universities, a thriving legal industry, and "world-respected institutions such as the BBC." The report suggests that the government sponsor more basic research into AI to develop its role, and convene a global summit in London next year to create a "common framework for the ethical development and deployment of artificial intelligence systems." The recommendations are ambitious but essentially pragmatic.

Researchers have created a new metallic glass that is stronger and lighter than some of the best steel, while standing up to corrosion and wear. A team from the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Northwestern University used a new system at SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) that combines machine learning with experiments that quickly make and screen hundreds of sample materials at a time. This allowed the researchers to discover three new blends of ingredients that form metallic glass about 200 times faster than before. While there are millions of possible combinations of ingredients for metallic glass, only a few thousand combinations have been evaluated in the last 50 years, with only a select few being developed to the point where they can be commercially useful. "It typically takes a decade or two to get a material from discovery to commercial use," Chris Wolverton, the Jerome B. Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, said in a statement.