President Donald Trump's pick for Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said Friday he isn't worried about the potential effects of artificial intelligence on the American workforce, which in turn caused considerable consternation within the tech community. In an interview with Axios, Mnuchin said the possibility of AI taking human jobs is "not even on my radar screen" and suggested it was "50-100 more years" away. He insisted he wasn't worried about automation displacing humans in the work force and said, "In fact I'm optimistic." Read: EU To Debate Robots' Legal Rights After Committee Calls For Mandatory AI'Kill Switches' That sentiment did not sit well with Silicon Valley and the broader tech community--the very people behind the technology that Mnuchin is unconcerned with. "Personally I'm dumbfounded," Amy Webb, the head of the Future Today Institute, said on Twitter.

March 24, 2017 --The days when a chemist's assistant like Michael Faraday or a friar like Gregor Mendel could single-handedly revolutionize a field of science may seem long gone, but one British student is showing the world that anyone can play a role in research. This week NASA is feeling grateful to the sharp eyes of 17-year-old Miles Soloman of Sheffield, England, who was able to help uncover a faulty sensor on board the International Space Station (ISS) when he noticed some wacky readings in a data spreadsheet. His findings add to a long history of amateurs making real contributions to science, a phenomenon many researchers are eager to encourage. Miles's physics teacher, James O'Neill, had no idea what was going to happen when he enrolled his class in the TimPix project from the Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS), an initiative that provides classes with data collected from a radiation detector on board the ISS. By studying the data sets, students can learn about energy and "contribute to research that will improve our understanding of radiation in space," IRIS wrote on their website.

Interview Sure, algorithms are insanely useful, but we need to watch we don't become complacent and unable to question them, University College London's Dr Hannah Fry warned in an interview with The Register. Dr Fry is a lecturer in the mathematics of cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL, where her research "revolves around the study of complex social and economic systems at various scales, from the individual to the urban, regional and the global, and particularly those with a spatial element." While not engaged in research, however, Dr Fry is quickly becoming one of the UK's favourite mathematicians, known for her work on BBC 4's The Joy of Data, as well as her popular TED talk, 'The Mathematics of Love', which applied statistical and data-scientific models to dating, sex and marriage. Chatting to The Register ahead of DataFest2017, the inaugural week-long data science festival in Edinburgh, Dr Fry said she thought the event was going to be "a lot of fun". It's something people really need to address, and having so many excellent people together in a room at once; it's going to be a great few days." "Data science as a field has exploded over the past five years," because there's "much more access to data now" said Dr Fry, noting that with "sensors, IoT, with us living more of our lives online" there's now "very little that is untouched by data". We "realised a few years ago how much data there was," Dr Fry said. "I think the whole thing is very exciting.

Seven million years ago, the first ancestors of mankind appeared in Africa and seven million years later, as we speak, mankind's existence is being traced by archaeologists in South Africa, where they believe they are finding several missing links in our history. A history traced back to the first hominid forms. What is a hominid, I hear you say, and when did it exist? Well, way back when scientists believe that the Eurasian and American tectonic plates collided and then settled, creating a massive flat area in Africa, after the Ice Age. This new massive field was flat for hundreds of miles, as far as the eye could see, and the apes that inhabited this land suddenly found there were no trees to climb. This meant that the apes found it hard going thundering over hundreds of miles on their hands and feet, so they started to stand up to make it easier to move over the land. This resulted in a change in the wiring of the brain, which, over thousands of years, led to the early forms of what is now recognized as human. The first link to understanding this chain was the discovery of Lucy. Lucy--named after the Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"--is the first skeleton that could be pieced together to show how these early human forms appeared on the African plains in the post-Ice Age world. The skeleton was found in the early 1970s in Ethiopia by paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and is an early example of the hominid australopithecine, dating back to about 3.2 million years ago. The skeleton presents a small skull akin to that of most apes, plus evidence of a walking gait that was bipedal and upright, similar to that of humans and other hominids. This combination supports the view of human evolution that bipedalism preceded an increase in brain size. Since Lucy was found, there have been many other astonishing discoveries in what is now called the "Cradle of Humankind" in South Africa, a Unesco World Heritage site.

Instead, they might ask their Amazon Alexa, Apple's Siri or a text-based chatbot for help. This week, GSA launched a pilot that would walk federal agencies through the process of setting up virtual assistants, powered by machine-learning and artificial intelligence technology, which can eventually be deployed to citizens. The goal isn't just to produce more "intelligent personal assistants," or IPAs, GSA's Emerging Citizen Technology Office lead Justin Herman told Nextgov. It's also to build out a structure internally, complete with toolkits and guides, so agencies can decide for themselves whether this technology is worthwhile, he explained. "The easiest part of this is actually building them," Herman added.

"As we honor the more mathematical, abstract, and scientific' parts of our subject more, and the practical parts less, we misdirect the young and brilliant minds away from a body of challenging and important problems that are our peculiar domain, depriving these problems of the powerful attacks they deserve." I have the privilege of working at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and currently serve as the Acting Deputy Director of the Defense Sciences Office (DSO). Our goal at DARPA is to create and prevent technological surprise through investments in science and engineering, and our history and contributions are well documented. The DSO is sometimes called "DARPA's DARPA," because we strive to be at the forefront of all of science--on the constant lookout for opportunities to enhance our national security and collective well-being, and our projects are very diverse. One project uses cold atoms to measure time with 10 18th precision; another is creating amazing composite materials that can change the way in which we manufacture.

Real-time communication and collaboration lie at the heart of a new generation of high-definition (HD) digital maps that react quickly to changes in the real world. Autonomous vehicles and construction-site surveys are among the applications that are driving companies toward high-precision mapping performed almost in real time. James Dean, founder and director of technology applications at London, U.K.-based startup SenSat, says, "Digitizing the world is incredibly important. We can make better, faster decisions from that digitized information than is possible with traditional means" Early adopters of SenSat's mapping technology come from the road-construction industry, a sector that today mainly relies on manual surveys conducted at ground level. Surveys can take as long as six weeks and, as a result, can only be performed infrequently during a project.

It is one of the most incredible images of a city ever created - with a hidden surprise. Bentley has revealed a huge interactive 57.7 billion pixels image of the Dubai skyline. Bentley suspended a camera 264 metres up the Cayan Tower – one of Dubai's tallest buildings – to capture what is the world's most detailed landscape image, made up of 1,825 individual frames electronically stitched together. The intricate process took 48 hours and 1,825 frames to create, and downloading the image took a further 18 hours. Bentley suspended a camera 264 metres up the Cayan Tower to capture the image.

Johnstown, PA – The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has awarded Concurrent Technologies Corporation (CTC) a competitively bid prime $498,000 contract to research artificial intelligence (AI) automation capabilities under the agency's Boosting Innovative GEOINT (BIG) program. Under this contract, CTC will further advance the state of knowledge in virtual assistants by evolving from a singular user- centric orientation to a viewpoint of the user within an interdependent network of humans and cognitive machines. The goal is to enable task automation and management to be cloud-wide rather than confined within a traditional desktop or server architecture; and augment and scale human analysts' cognition and intelligence via a capability refined for intelligence community needs. CTC will provide NGA an AI Analyst Virtual Assistant (AVA) capability, incorporating smart technology to address significant challenges in multi-tasking and processing large quantities of rapidly changing information. The AVA will provide recommendations and predictions based on analysts' needs and tasking and by socializing analysts' activities to one another.

But behind every good strategy is good data. Take Korean War veteran and US Air Force officer John Boyd as an example. He was tasked with analysing the outcome of dogfights – aerial battles between fighter planes conducted at close range – and come up with a way to save the lives of more American pilots. What Boyd created was a framework for decision-making that is known as the OODA loop. OODA refers to the recurring cycle of four actions: observe, orient, decide and act.