The South Australian government and the University of Adelaide will co-invest in a new machine learning "institute" to open next year. The institute will operate from the former Royal Adelaide Hospital site and eventually be home to 200 "creative thinkers, researchers and start-ups". The state government said it would invest $7.1 million towards establishing the institute "with $1.5 million prioritised for defence capability research projects". "The institute will dedicate a minimum of 18,000 research hours over the five-year agreement for projects which help the government to improve productivity, efficiency and service delivery for South Australians," it said. The defence work isn't explained aside from a stated aim to "build new AI-enabled defence capabilities".

Alphabet Inc's Google said on Wednesday it is opening an artificial intelligence (AI) research center in China to target the country's local talent, even as the US search firm's products remain blocked in the country. Google said in a statement the research center is the first of its kind in Asia and will comprise a small team operating out of its existing office in Beijing. Chinese policy makers have voiced strong support for AI research and development in the country, but have imposed increasingly strict rules on foreign firms in the past year, including new censorship restrictions. Google's search engine is banned in the Chinese market along with its app store, email and cloud storage services. China's cyber regulators say restrictions on foreign media and internet platforms are designed to block influences that contravene stability and socialist ideas.

Yitu Technology, based in Shanghai, China has developed and employed an artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithm called Dragonfly Eye that uses facial recognition technology capable of identifying 2 billion people in seconds. Zhu Long, CEO of Yitu Technologies, told the South China Morning Post, "Our machines can very easily recognise you among at least 2 billion people in a matter of seconds, which would have been unbelievable just three years ago." Dragonfly Eye is presently used by 150 municipal public security systems and 20 provincial public security departments across the country of China. Dragonfly Eye was initially employed on the Shanghai Metro in Shanghai, China, during January of this year. Local police authorities credit Dragonfly Eye with aiding in the arrest of 576 suspects on the Shanghai Metro in the first three months of using the facial recognition system.

New York City may soon gain a task force dedicated to monitoring the fairness of algorithms used by municipal agencies. Formed from experts in automated systems and representatives of groups affected by those systems, it would be responsible for closely examining algorithms in use by the city and making recommendations on how to improve accountability and avoid bias. The bill, which doesn't have a fancy name, has been approved by the city council and is on the Mayor's desk for signing. The New York division of the ACLU has argued in favor of it. Say, for instance, an "automated decision system" (as the law calls them) determines to a certain extent who's eligible for bail.

Referring to the fact that productivity growth slowed in the 1970s and 1980s even while information technology developed rapidly, economist Robert Solow once quipped: "You can see the impact of IT everywhere but in the productivity statistics." Today, one can see the so-called job-destroying impact of robotics everywhere but the employment statistics. Last month, the U.S. economy created over 220,000 net jobs. On average, it has created 174,000 jobs a month this year, relatively tepid but nonetheless steady job growth (just below last year's 187,000 jobs a month). With a 4.1 percent jobless rate, and more Americans re-entering the workforce, the economy seems to be at or near full employment.

Companies running AI applications often need as much computing muscle as researchers who use supercomputers do. IBM's latest system is aimed at both audiences. The company last week introduced its first server powered by the new Power9 processor designed for AI and high-performance computing. The powerful technologies inside have already attracted the likes of Google and the US Department of Energy as customers. The new IBM Power System AC922 is equipped with two Power9 CPUs and from two to six NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.

Affectiva, one in a series of companies to come out of MIT's Media Lab whose work revolves around affective computing, used to be best known for sensing emotion in videos. It recently expanded into emotion detection in audio with the Speech API for companies making robots and AI assistants. Affective computing, the use of machines to understand and respond to human emotion, has many practical uses. In addition to Affectiva, Media Lab nurtured Koko, a bot that detects words used on chat apps like Kik to recognize people who need emotional support, and Cogito, whose AI is used by the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs to analyze the voices of military veterans with PTSD to determine if they need immediate help. Then there's Jibo, a home robot that mimics human emotion on its five-inch LED face that Time magazine recently declared one of the best inventions of 2017. Instead of natural language processing, the Speech API private beta uses voice to recognize things like laughing, anger, and various forms of arousal, alongside voice volume, tone, speed, and pauses.

The US' brief period of registration-free drone flight is over -- President Trump has signed the National Defense Authorization Act for 2018, and it revives the registration requirement for civilian drones. Robotic fliers between 0.5lbs and 55lbs need to be submitted to a database if they're going to remain legal. A Washington, DC appeals court had struck down the FAA's original requirement in May, arguing that it didn't have the authority to regulate model aircraft, but that clearly wasn't a deterrent. The FAA had said said it would rethink its approach to the regulation after its earlier defeat. Naturally, the FAA is slightly giddy.

The contraception mandate was implemented as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, former Democratic President Barack Obama's signature healthcare legislation, popularly known as Obamacare. Republicans, who control the U.S. House of Representatives, Senate and White House, have so far failed to repeal the law, a top presidential campaign promise of Trump.

Nasa is holding a major press conference after its planet-hunting telescope made a new breakthrough. The Kepler space telescope is operated by Nasa to discover other earths, some of which could support life. And its latest discovery is significant enough to bring with it a huge press conference. Very little further information was given about the announcement, which will take place on Thursday. But it will almost certainly relate to exoplanets – Earth-sized worlds that orbit around their own stars, and are our best hope of finding alien life.