AI is seen as a key to unlocking big data and the Internet of Things. It allows us to make better decisions faster and will soon enable smarter cities, self-driving cars, personalized medicines, and other new commercial applications that could potentially help solve various global problems. The field of AI is going through a period of rapid progress, with improvements in processor design and advances in machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. China has invested massively in AI research since 2013, and these efforts are yielding incredible results. China's AI pioneers are already making great strides in core AI fields.

Last August, Masahide Sasaki and his team instructed a satellite to shoot laser beams at a suburb of Tokyo. The laser beam, made of infrared light, was invisible to the human eye. By the time it had traveled through hundreds of miles of outer space and atmosphere, the light was harmless: It had spread out like a spotlight, about as wide as 10 soccer fields. Some of that light made its way into the end of a telescope, where it bounced off mirrors and flew through lenses and filters onto a photon-measuring detector. Someday, Sasaki hopes, that light could be more than invisible wavelengths hitting a telescope--it could be encoded with information.

An international partnership on cybersecurity can mean many things--it can mean mutual assistance with enforcement and criminal investigations, or sharing threat information and intelligence, or jointly developing software that can be used to target adversaries' computer systems, or even jointly developing tools and techniques that can be used to detect and mitigate threats. An "impenetrable" unit hints most closely at the last of these functions--a defensive joint effort in which the two countries share not just intelligence but also technical expertise and controls to protect their systems against intruders. But people who help design and implement your defenses then know an awful lot about the way your systems work and how, precisely, they are protected. Possibly, they're even writing code and giving it to you to download on your computers to help make them more impenetrable. And if that code also created backdoors on every computer it was installed on so that Russia had easy access to control those systems, who would be surprised?

DARPA announced on Monday that it has selected its five grant recipients for the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program, which it began at the start of this year. Brown University, Columbia University, The Seeing and Hearing Foundation, the John B. Pierce Laboratory, Paradromics Inc and the University of California, Berkeley will all receive multi-million dollar grants to help develop various aspects of the emerging technology. The goal of the NESD program is to develop "an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world," according to a DARPA release. Also known as "wetware", these brain-computer interfaces would effectively convert the chemical and electrical signals from the brain into machine readable data, and vice versa. Ultimately, the program's operators hope that neural interfaces will be able to communicate with up to 100 million neurons in parallel (though still a far cry from the 86 billion that our brains use in total).

For decades, textbooks were seen as the foundation for instruction in American schools. These discipline-specific tomes were a fundamental part of the educational infrastructure, assigned to students for each subject and carried in heavy backpacks every day – from home to school and back again. The experience of students is much different today. As a scholar of learning technologies and a director for outreach and engagement at Ohio State's College of Education and Human Ecology, we've seen how technological advances and an increase in digital curriculum materials have hastened the move away from textbooks. Does all of this technology spell the end of traditional textbooks?

Iraqi Special Forces soldiers celebrate after reaching the bank of the Tigris river as their fight against Islamic State militants continues in parts of the Old City of Mosul, Iraq, Sunday, July 9, 2017. Iraqi Special Forces soldiers celebrate after reaching the bank of the Tigris river as their fight against Islamic State militants continues in parts of the Old City of Mosul, Iraq, Sunday, July 9, 2017. In this Thursday, July 6, 2017 photo, Sumaya Farooqi, 14, left, practices robotics with her colleagues, at the Better Idea Organization center, in Herat, Afghanistan. Six female students from war-torn Afghanistan who had hoped to participate in an international robotics competition July 16-18 in Washington D.C will have to watch via video link after the U.S. denied them visas -- not once, but twice. Of 162 teams participating, the Afghan girls are the only nation's team to be denied visas.

The field of AI is going through a period of rapid progress, with improvements in processor design and advances in machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. The reports recommended increased expenditure on machine learning research and enhanced collaboration between the U.S. government and tech industry leaders to unlock the potential of AI. But despite these efforts, 91 percent of the 1,268 tech founders, CEOs, investors, and developers surveyed at the international Collision tech conference in New Orleans in May 2017 believed that the U.S. government is "fatally under-prepared" for the impact of AI on the U.S. ecosystem. Research firm CB Insights found that Chinese participation in funding rounds for American startups came close to $10 billion in 2016, while recent figures indicate that Chinese companies have invested in 51 U.S. AI companies, to the tune of $700 million.

In the battle of technology innovation between East and West, artificial intelligence (AI) is on the frontline. And China's influence is growing. AI is seen as a key to unlocking big data and the Internet of Things. It allows us to make better decisions faster, and will soon enable smarter cities, self-driving cars, personalized medicines and other new commercial applications to potentially help solve various global problems. The AI field is going through a time of rapid progress, with improvements in processor design and advances in machine learning, deep learning and natural language processing.

Artificial intelligence is helping the Army keep its Stryker armored vehicles in fighting shape. Army officials are using IBM's Watson AI system in combination with onboard sensor data, repair manuals and 15 years of maintenance data to predict mechanical problems before they happen. IBM and the Army's Redstone Arsenal post in Alabama demonstrated Watson's abilities on 350 Stryker vehicles during a field test that began in mid-2016. The Army is now reviewing the results of that test to evaluate Watson's ability to assist human mechanics, and the early insights are encouraging. The Watson AI enabled the pilot program's leaders to create the equivalent of a "personalized medicine" plan for each of the vehicles tested, said Sam Gordy, general manager of IBM U.S. Federal.

A Master Algorithm would allow machines to learn anything from data, and has applications in fields from marketing to medicine. But to do that we need a deeper understanding of learning in our own brains. This helmet of sensors is part of a brain scanner. We may not be aware of it, but machine learning is already an integral part of our daily lives, from the product choices that Amazon offers us to the surveillance of our data by the National Security Agency. Few of us understand it or the implications, however.