Chinese internet firm Baidu Inc has agreed to acquire US computer vision firm xPerception for an undisclosed amount to support their renewed efforts in artificial intelligence as Chinese tech firms face regulatory headwinds in the United States. "The acquisition of xPerception is the latest in a recent series of notable investments aimed at strengthening Baidu's position as a global leader in AI," it said. Baidu is targeting foreign personnel and technology as part of a wider drive to refocus company resources on developing artificial intelligence capabilities. Revenues from the firm's core search unit took a beating last year when the Chinese government tightened online ad regulations, culling a chunk of existing advertisers with new eligibility requirements. The announcement comes as other Chinese tech firms struggle with regulatory push-back on acquisitions in the US market.

One of the amazing (and scary) things about artificial intelligence programs is that in learning to mimic their human masters so perfectly, these wonders of computer software hold up a mirror to patterns of behavior we engage in every day but may not even notice. Beyond their extraordinary usefulness in industry, medicine and communications, these "learning" programs can lay bare the mental shortcuts we humans use to make sense of our world. Indeed, new research with artificial intelligence programs highlights the ethnic and gender biases of English speakers. In a first-of-its-kind effort, a group of Princeton University computer scientists set a widely used artificial intelligence program to the task of learning English by performing a massive "crawl" of the World Wide Web. After gobbling up some 840 billion words, the software developed a vocabulary of 2.2 million distinct words, and the fluency to use them in ways that were grammatically correct.

When Rachel Whetstone left Google two years ago to replace David Plouffe, a former Barack Obama official, as policy and communications vice-president at Uber, it seemed like a promising Silicon Valley role. The taxi-hailing app had a reputation for aggressive and even underhand tactics, and a CEO, in Travis Kalanick, with a reputation as a gaffe-prone "tech bro", but it was one of the fastest growing startups in the world, achieving a $50bn valuation (now almost $70bn) within just six years. However Whetstone departed the company this week amid a stunning array of scandals and controversies, including allegations of sexual harassment, a video of Kalanick berating an Uber driver, a legal battle with Google over the alleged theft of driverless car technology, the revelation that Uber used secret "Greyball" software to deceive city regulators, and allegations that the company had another program called "Hell" designed to spy on its arch-rival Lyft. For Whetstone it's been a hell of a ride. Public relations veteran Ed Zitron described Whetstone's job as the equivalent of having "two fists permanently punching you in the head".

Graduating university represents the culmination of years of hard work for most, but for Canberra man and paraplegic Paul Jenkins it marked something much more. Mr Jenkins has spent the past six months training in an exoskeleton device and on Tuesday realised his dream of walking on stage at Parliament House and accepting his two bachelor degrees from the University of Canberra. Paul Jenkins, left paralysed by a motorcycle accident, is the first person in Australia approved under the NDIS to use a robotic walker that allows him to walk with the help of crutches. Counter-terrorism police are investigating links to terrorism in the stabbing death of a man in Queanbeyan, New South Wales. Police hunt for two teenagers after a service station worker was stabbed to death near the ACT border on Thursday night.

The cybersecurity wars of the future will be fought by good artificial intelligence (AI) bots and bad ones, with the rest of us just watching to see who wins, writes Telecoms.com It isn't quite as dark as the world being taking over by robots or sentient beings, but it's a very realistic possibility due to the vast complications and workloads which will soon be placed on security teams. "Ironically and unfortunately, some of the people who are becoming most advanced when it comes to AI in the security world are the ones on the offensive," says Hoffman. "These are the cyber criminals, and one of the only ways to combat these guys will be to escalate defences to be built around AI." It's a world which pits computer against computer, where Darwinism has taken a twist. But this is the end of the story, not the beginning. At the beginning, where we are right now, there is a shift in the security paradigm.

Germany's lower parliamentary house, the Bundestag, has approved the regular use of self-driving vehicles and features in the country, according to reports. As the country relies on a bicameral parliament, though, the upper house known as the Bundesrat will apparently also have to approve the legislation, and the executive branch will have to as well, before the law can be changed. The coalition forces that are backing the legalization of self-driving vehicles -- composed of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CSU) -- are reportedly confident that approval will be forthcoming. The law (as quoted in translation by Teslarati) reads: "During vehicle driving, the driver may turn away from traffic and vehicle control by means of highly automated or fully automated driving function … (but must) immediately (assume control) if he recognizes that the conditions for the intended use of the highly or fully automated driving functions no longer exist … even if he does not control the vehicle in the context of the intended use of this function." So, people will seemingly be responsible for whatever the self-driving vehicle/tech providers are unwilling to explicitly take responsibility for.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is abruptly reversing himself on key issues. "After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it's not so easy," the president said after a discussion with Chinese President Xi Jinping that included his hopes that China's pressure could steer North Korea away from its nuclear efforts. "I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power" over North Korea, he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "But it's not what you would think." That's just one of several recent comments offering insight into what looks like a moderate makeover for an immoderate president.

In debates over the future of artificial intelligence, many experts think of the new systems as coldly logical and objectively rational. But in a new study, researchers have demonstrated how machines can be reflections of us, their creators, in potentially problematic ways. Common machine learning programs, when trained with ordinary human language available online, can acquire cultural biases embedded in the patterns of wording, the researchers found. These biases range from the morally neutral, like a preference for flowers over insects, to the objectionable views of race and gender. Identifying and addressing possible bias in machine learning will be critically important as we increasingly turn to computers for processing the natural language humans use to communicate, for instance in doing online text searches, image categorization and automated translations.

Predictions of robots replacing human workers and rampant job loss are in the news every day. Is AI mired in controversy? If artificial intelligence is really a sleeping giant, why rattle its cage? Why not leave well enough alone? Much to our credit, we have quite an imagination.

Artificially intelligent robots and devices are being taught to be racist, sexist and otherwise prejudiced by learning from humans, according to new research. A massive study of millions of words online looked at how closely different terms were to each other in the text – the same way that automatic translators use "machine learning" to establish what language means. The researchers found male names were more closely associated with career-related terms than female ones, which were more closely associated with words related to the family. This link was stronger than the non-controversial findings that musical instruments and flowers were pleasant and weapons and insects were unpleasant. Female names were also strongly associated with artistic terms, while male names were found to be closer to maths and science ones.