An award-winning brewpub built with recycled materials as part of a "zero waste" mission. There is new life in the mountains of Tokushima Prefecture, in the neighboring towns of Kamiyama and Kamikatsu, even as depopulation afflicts most rural areas with rot. In Kamiyama, young people work remotely for tech companies or as artists in cooperative spaces. In Kamikatsu, the elderly test drones as part of their work harvesting leaves and flowers for use as garnishes in restaurants as far away as Europe. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has stressed the need to revitalize rural areas as the country struggles with demographic decline.

Intelligence agents and military operatives may come to rely heavily on machine learning to parse huge quantities of data, and to control a growing arsenal of autonomous systems. But the U.S. military wants to make sure that this doesn't lead to blindly trusting in any algorithm. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a division of the Defense Department that explores new technologies, is funding several projects that aim to make artificial intelligence explain itself. The approaches range from adding further machine-learning systems geared toward providing an explanation, to the development of new machine-learning approaches that incorporate an elucidation by design. "We now have this real explosion of AI," says David Gunning, the DARPA program manager who is funding an effort to develop AI techniques that include some explanation of their reasoning.

NASA researchers are developing origami-inspired robots that could soon be used to explore extreme alien environments. The Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robots, or Puffers, have a collapsible design and are small enough to hitch a ride on another craft, such as a Mars rover or Europa lander. According to the space agency, these adorable robots will be able to reach areas that the larger vehicles cannot, allowing them to investigate caves and lava tubes on Mars, or the icy'chaos terrains' of Europa. NASA researchers are developing origami-inspired robots that could soon be used to explore extreme alien environments. Not only are these bots similar in size to a smartphone when folded, they also have a comparable weight and volume.

Active search (AS) on graphs focuses on collecting certain labeled nodes (targets) given global knowledge of the network topology and its edge weights under a query budget. However, in most networks, nodes, topology and edge weights are all initially unknown. We introduce selective harvesting, a variant of AS where the next node to be queried must be chosen among the neighbors of the current queried node set; the available training data for deciding which node to query is restricted to the subgraph induced by the queried set (and their node attributes) and their neighbors (without any node or edge attributes). Therefore, selective harvesting is a sequential decision problem, where we must decide which node to query at each step. A classifier trained in this scenario suffers from a tunnel vision effect: without recourse to independent sampling, the urge to query promising nodes forces classifiers to gather increasingly biased training data, which we show significantly hurts the performance of AS methods and standard classifiers. We find that it is possible to collect a much larger set of targets by using multiple classifiers, not by combining their predictions as an ensemble, but switching between classifiers used at each step, as a way to ease the tunnel vision effect. We discover that switching classifiers collects more targets by (a) diversifying the training data and (b) broadening the choices of nodes that can be queried next. This highlights an exploration, exploitation, and diversification trade-off in our problem that goes beyond the exploration and exploitation duality found in classic sequential decision problems. From these observations we propose D3TS, a method based on multi-armed bandits for non-stationary stochastic processes that enforces classifier diversity, matching or exceeding the performance of competing methods on seven real network datasets in our evaluation.

IBM unveils Power8 Linux servers for deep learning IBM Linux server for high-performance computing. IBM has launched three Power8 Linux servers designed to accelerate artificial intelligence, deep learning, and advanced analytics applications. The new systems tap the Nvidia NVLink technology to move data five times faster than any competing platform, said Stefanie Chiras, an IBM vice president, in an interview with VentureBeat. These systems and their operating systems are part of a larger business group that generates about $2 billion a quarter for IBM. And the A.I. markets they're going after have exploded in the past couple of years.

On Thursday, March 9th, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hosted a forum on the consumer implications of recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies. This was the FTC's third forum on issues in FinTech. Previous FinTech Forums covered marketplace lending and crowdfunding and peer-to-peer payments. In opening remarks, the FTC acknowledged the benefits of technological developments in AI and blockchain technologies: AI promises better decision-making and personalized consumer technologies, while blockchain technologies would increase the efficiency of financial transactions and eliminate the need for the middleman, among other benefits. But, the FTC stressed that advancements in these technologies must be coupled with an awareness of and active engagement in identifying and minimizing associated risks.

It's been a year since the U.S. Army began researching the use of a British-built hoverbike as an autonomous delivery drone for battlefields, and it recently showed off its progress. The Army is hoping to develop the drone so that it can fly supplies to troops in combat zones, removing the need for risky ground transport missions. It boasts some impressive stats for carrying out such missions: The drone, dubbed the Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle (JTARV) in military-speak, has four rotors, and can carry up to 300 pounds (130 kilograms) of material at speeds of up to 60 mph. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory and U.S. Marine Corps are researching the drone with Malloy Aeronautics, a British company that originally developed the drone as a hoverbike. On Jan. 10, the Army demonstrated the drone to Dr. William Roper, director of the Strategic Capabilities Office at the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Making arguments like the poor "just don't want healthcare," Congressional Republicans are implementing their long-standing agenda to tear down America's social safety net. The GOP's stunningly myopic actions ignore the fact that a strong safety net is vital to helping workers weather upcoming labor market disruptions from automation in transportation and other sectors. Maya Rockeymoore (@mayarockeymoore) is founder and CEO of Global Policy Solutions LLC, a social change strategy firm and a certified B Corporation, and the Center for Global Policy Solutions, a 501c3 think tank and action organization dedicated to driving society toward inclusion. Automation can offer many advantages--increased safety, efficiency, convenience, and ecology are among them--but it also has the potential to eliminate human jobs. Tech sector observers and economists have been sounding the alarm about the threat of mass layoffs due to automation for several years.

A tax on robots is one of those ideas that sounds attractive, and when it's put forward by someone with the credibility of Bill Gates, as it was in a recent interview with Quartz magazine, you can guarantee it will generate a lot of interest. If he, of all people, says taxing robots is a good idea, then surely it is worth considering? At first pass, the idea feels like common sense. After all, if robots replace workers but don't generate tax revenue, it means not only that the funds available for government services are substantially diminished, but that inequality – already at record levels in developed nations – is likely to increase. Wages that would have been earned by human workers, now displaced by robots, will go straight to profits, increasing the wealth gap between those who own the robots and the growing pool of unemployed workers.

In the Terminator films, Skynet was a self aware AI hellbent on taking on humanity. However, the version the US Air Force has bought is a little more low tech. The anti-drone 12 gauge shotgun shells release a five foot net to trap the drone's propellers causing it to fall from the sky. The US Air Force is getting a new weapon to take down devious commercial drones. Called Skynet, these anti-drone 12 gauge shotgun shells release a five foot net to trap the drone's propellers causing it to fall from the sky The US Air Force has contracted AMTEC Less Lethal Systems to use their technology to take down drowns.