Six major airports in the United States are participating in pilot programs that require Americans traveling abroad to submit to facial-recognition scans when leaving the country, the Associated Press reported. Airports in Boston, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, New York City and Washington, D.C. have all started to implement the biometric scanning procedures, with plans to expand the program to a number of other high-volume international airports across the country by the start of next year. News of the biometric scans being active at airports and used to scan American citizens prior to boarding their flights is the latest development in the increased effort by the Donald Trump administration to implement strong vetting procedures for those coming and going from the country. U.S. Customs and Border Protection's (CBP) Larry Panetta spoke about adoption of facial recognition technology earlier this year at the Border Security Expo, where he suggested there was already enough information in the government's systems that facial recognition technology could already identify many travelers. "We currently have everyone's photo, so we don't need to do any sort of enrollment," Panetta said at the event.

After helping to launch the Partnership on AI with Google, Facebook and others; and doubling down on AI research, today Microsoft unveiled a new initiative that points to how it plans to target specific verticals in what can potentially be a very nebulous field -- while also raising the public image of AI as some grow concerned about the implications of its encroaching influence. Today, the company announced AI for Earth, a new program that will be dedicated to AI-based projects in the areas of agriculture, water, biodiversity and climate change, where Microsoft proposes to donate up to $2 million in Microsoft tools, services and training per project to help them get a leg up. It will be led by Microsoft Chief Environmental Scientist Lucas Joppa. AI for Earth will not include money grants as such -- although as recent investments from Microsoft Ventures show (and also its acquisitions), the company is also willing to put money where its mouth is, and to take equity in the most interesting projects, too. This program could help create a funnel to identify and follow some of the more interesting projects (and get them using Microsoft services to boot).

SO THE deal struck over patient data between the Royal Free Foundation NHS Trust and AI pioneer DeepMind "failed to comply with" the law. That's the long-awaited verdict of the regulator charged with upholding UK data protection rules. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said the trust, part of the UK's national health service, erred in four ways. It did not examine the privacy implications of the agreement closely enough. It failed to tell patients about the deal or offer an opt-out before handing over their records.

Last year, a Florida man became the first person to die in a crash involving autonomous driving technology. Forty-year-old Joshua Brown had his hands off the wheel when his car slammed into a semi-trailer making a left turn across his lane. The incident caused considerable consternation in the media, not the least for underlining the glaring absence of autonomous vehicle (AV) regulations then in place. "The fatal crash," the Los Angeles Times said, "highlighted what some say is a gaping pothole on the road to self-driving vehicles: the lack of federal rules." The newspaper had a point.

In a June 29, 2017, photo, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer Sanan Jackson, right, helps a passenger navigate the new face recognition kiosks at gate E7 for a United Airlines flight to Tokyo at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. The Trump administration intends to require that American citizens boarding international flights submit to face scans, something Congress has not explicitly approved and privacy advocates consider an ill-advised step toward a surveillance state. In a June 29, 2017, photo, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer Sanan Jackson, right, helps a passenger navigate the new face recognition kiosks at gate E7 for a United Airlines flight to Tokyo at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. The Trump administration intends to require that American citizens boarding international flights submit to face scans, something Congress has not explicitly approved and privacy advocates consider an ill-advised step toward a surveillance state. In a June 29, 2017, photo, passenger Naoki Iseki takes a picture of one of the new face recognition kiosks at gate E7 before he boards a United Airlines flight to Tokyo at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston.

A privately owned company plans to use robotic spacecraft to launch a series of commercial missions to the moon, some 45 years after NASA s last lunar landing, officials said on Wednesday. Cape Canaveral, Florida-based Moon Express is developing a fleet of low-cost robotic spacecraft that can be assembled like Legos to handle increasingly complex missions, founder and Chief Executive Officer Bob Richards said in an interview. Ultimately the company plans to establish a lunar outpost in 2020 and set up commercial operations on the Moon, mining material and returning it to Earth to sell. The initial spacecraft, known as MX-1E,is a similar size and shape to the R2D2 droid from Star Wars, and is slated to fly before the end of the year aboard a Rocket Lab Electron booster, which launches from New Zealand. Google is offering a top prize of $20 million for the first privately funded team to land a spacecraft on the moon; have it fly, drive or hop at least 1,640 feet (500 meters) and relay pictures and video back to Earth.

In a June 29, 2017, photo, U.S. Customs and Border Protection Officer Sanan Jackson, right, helps a passenger navigate the new face recognition kiosks at gate E7 for a United Airlines flight to Tokyo at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. The Trump administration intends to require that American citizens boarding international flights submit to face scans, something Congress has not explicitly approved and privacy advocates consider an ill-advised step toward a surveillance state.

In the most nightmarish drone scenarios, one of the little whirlybirds flies into an airliner, or wanders into military airspace, or swoops down on the White House. At best, such things are mild annoyances. At worst, they pose a grave threat to safety and security. The sky is a big, open place, with a great many no-go zones that aren't clearly delineated. That makes it easy for a drone, or its pilot, to cause trouble.

"The eyes are the window to the soul," the adage goes, but these days our eyes could be better compared to our ethernet connection to the world. According to a 2006 study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, the human retina is capable of transmitting 10 million bits of information per second. But for as potent as our visual capabilities are, there's a whole lot that can go wrong with the human eye. Cataracts, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration (AMD) are three of the leading causes of blindness the world over. Though we may not have robotic ocular prosthetics just yet, a number of recent ophthalmological advancements will help keep the blinds over those windows from being lowered.

Microsoft Corp. is setting up a new research lab focused on artificial intelligence with the goal of creating more general-purpose learning systems. The new lab, called Microsoft Research AI, will be based at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and involve more than 100 scientists from across various sub-fields of artificial intelligence research, including perception, learning, reasoning and natural language processing. The goal, said Eric Horvitz, the director of Microsoft Research Labs, is to combine these disciplines to work toward more general artificial intelligence, meaning a single system that can tackle a wide-range of tasks and problems. Such a system, for instance, might be able to both plan the best route to drive through a city and also figure out how to minimize your income tax bill, while also understanding difficult human concepts like sarcasm or gestures. This differs from so-called narrow AIs, which are just designed to perform a single task well -- for instance, recognize faces in digital photographs.