Mark Zuckerberg told the US Congress this week that Facebook will increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to catch hate speech spread on the platform. "I am optimistic that over a five-to-10-year period we will have AI tools that can get into some of the linguistic nuances of different types of content to be more accurate," said the Facebook CEO, who was called to testify after the scandal around Cambridge Analytica's misappropriation of personal data belonging to millions of users. Facebook already employs 15,000 human moderators to screen and remove offensive content, and it plans to hire another 5,000 by the end of this year, Zuckerberg said. But right now, those moderators can only react to posts Facebook users have flagged. Using AI to identify potentially offending material would make it faster and easier to remove.

Following the corporate corruption scandals of the early 2000s, then-Securities and Exchange Commission chairman William Donaldson said determining the company's moral DNA "should be the foundation on which the Board builds a corporate culture based on a philosophy of high ethical standards and accountability." Today's crisis of confidence in technology companies, especially those controlling deep pools of data and developing and deploying artificial intelligence, not only demands more responsible engineers, entrepreneurs, and executives but more assertive boards who make ethics and the public interest strategic priorities. Board of directors' responsibilities include hiring, firing, and holding the CEO's feet to the fire, as well as approving and overseeing the company's strategy and ensuring the integrity of company financials. Boards must also set a tone at the top of ethics and responsible business practices. Norms and standards are still emerging; laws, regulations, and legal precedent are scarce; and pressure groups are still finding their voice and translating concerns into actionable demands.

The Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is getting serious about using group of drones as a way to complement traditional ground forces. Be it in the area of sensors, control or propulsion, the military is looking forward to creative ideas to innovate the drone technology. The ultimate aim of the drone units will vary from each mission and revolve around the concept of objectives within urban environment. "As operations in urban environments continue to evolve, our warfighters need advanced capabilities to keep up with the ever-changing complexity of the urban scenario, and focus on enhancing autonomy in operational contexts will further advance future swarming capabilities to defeat the opponents in complex urban environments," said DARPA's Timothy Chung. Drones have seen a lot of expansion in commercial areas and major of the companies are making use of drones to work efficiently and smartly.

Until AI can learn on the fly as our brains do, it will never be truly intelligent. One avenue to teaching AI to act like the brain is to study the brain itself. At the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, we are developing brain-computer interfaces--devices that sit directly in or on the brain and record cell activity, allowing us to see how neural signals translate into actions like movement and speech. We've used this knowledge to enable paralyzed patients to move robotic limbs and regain a sense of touch. First we ask a volunteer with a brain implant to imagine moving her arm.

For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved an artificial intelligence diagnostic device that doesn't need a specialized doctor to interpret the results. The software program, called IDx-DR, can detect a form of eye disease by looking at photos of the retina. It works like this: A nurse or doctor uploads photos of the patient's retina taken with a special retinal camera. The IDx-DR software algorithm first indicates whether the image uploaded is high-quality enough to get a result. Then, it analyzes the images to determine whether the patient does or does not have diabetic retinopathy, a form of eye disease where too much blood sugar damages the blood vessels in the back of the eye.

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first artificial intelligence software that can decide, without a clinician's involvement, whether a patient might have a certain disease, the agency announced Wednesday. The software, called IDx-DR, looks for diabetic retinopathy, an eye disease that afflicts individuals with diabetes. With minimal training, health care providers can use a special camera to take a picture of the back of the patient's retina, which an algorithm then analyzes to look for the disease. If the software finds evidence of the disease, it recommends that a patient see an eye specialist. A computer program that can analyze medical images could save time and money, cutting down on unnecessary, expensive trips to specialists.

Marking a new era of "diagnosis by software," the US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday gave permission to a company called IDx to market an AI-powered diagnostic device for ophthalmology. What it does: The software is designed to detect greater than a mild level of diabetic retinopathy, which causes vision loss and affects 30 million people in the US. It occurs when high blood sugar damages blood vessels in the retina. How it works: The program uses an AI algorithm to analyze images of the adult eye taken with a special retinal camera. A doctor uploads the images to a cloud server, and the software then delivers a positive or negative result.

An additional 84.1 million have prediabetes, which often leads to the full disease within five years. It's important to detect diabetes early to avoid health complications like heart disease, stroke, amputation of extremities and vision loss. Technology increasingly plays an important role in early detection, too. In that vein, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just approved an AI-powered device that can be used by non-specialists to detect diabetic retinopathy in adults with diabetes. Diabetic retinopathy occurs when the high levels of blood sugar in the bloodstream cause damage to your retina's blood vessels.

News and hype surround the field of radiology with headlines around the world purporting that it will be disrupted overnight. Few companies though really have the evidence to back up these claims. A combination of factors have led to this field being a target for innovators including the expansion of image archiving, the increase of diagnostic image-sharing and the computer-readable DICOM format. These innovative companies are seeking to apply AI, Machine and Deep Learning to this field in the hope of achieving time and cost savings, and to help doctors detect changes such as tumors, hardening of the arteries and provide highly accurate measurements of organs and blood flow. Even though in principal the challenges in this field are ripe for the application of modern technology, there are considerable market barriers new companies must face.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has endured a gruelling five-hour hearing before the US House of Representatives, facing tough questions about how the site protects user data, whether it is biased against certain users – and what, exactly, it is. The second day of questioning before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce proved more taxing for the 33-year-old than his testimony before two Senate committees on Tuesday. Representatives shot rapid-fire questions at the entrepreneur, and even interrupted his answers at several points. "While Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured," Representative Greg Walden said at the opening of the hearing on Wednesday. "I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things."