It could be the most advanced robot dog ever created. Boston Dynamics, best known for Atlas, its 5 foot 9 humanoid robot, has revealed a new'lightweight' version of its robot MiniSpot. The robotic canine is shown trotting around a yard, with the promise that more information from the notoriously secretive firm is'coming soon'. The robotic canine is shown trotting around a yard, with the promise that more information from the notoriously secretive firm, recently bought by SoftBank, is'coming soon'. 'SpotMini is a small four-legged robot that comfortably fits in an office or home' the firm says on its website.

A new short film illustrating the prospect of military drones has been commissioned for an event at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons, which is being hosted by the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. The film presents a fictionalized scenario in which a tech company showcases and deploys its latest combat drone, which is capable of distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys. A montage of mock new reports illustrates what happens next, when the device's true abilities are revealed and the machines begin killing off politicians and activists. Stuart Russell, an artificial intelligence (AI) scientist at the University of California in Berkeley, is part of the group that will show the film to attendees. He has stated that the technology depicted in the film already exists, and it would actually be much easier to implement than self-driving vehicles.

Browsing and finding relevant information for Bangladeshi laws is a challenge faced by all law students and researchers in Bangladesh, and by citizens who want to learn about any legal procedure. Some law archives in Bangladesh are digitized, but lack proper tools to organize the data meaningfully. We present a text visualization tool that utilizes machine learning techniques to make the searching of laws quicker and easier. Using Doc2Vec to layout law article nodes, link mining techniques to visualize relevant citation networks, and named entity recognition to quickly find relevant sections in long law articles, our tool provides a faster and better search experience to the users. Qualitative feedback from law researchers, students, and government officials show promise for visually intuitive search tools in the context of governmental, legal, and constitutional data in developing countries, where digitized data does not necessarily pave the way towards an easy access to information.

We analyze low rank tensor completion (TC) using noisy measurements of a subset of the tensor. Assuming a rank-$r$, order-$d$, $N \times N \times \cdots \times N$ tensor where $r=O(1)$, the best sampling complexity that was achieved is $O(N^{\frac{d}{2}})$, which is obtained by solving a tensor nuclear-norm minimization problem. However, this bound is significantly larger than the number of free variables in a low rank tensor which is $O(dN)$. In this paper, we show that by using an atomic-norm whose atoms are rank-$1$ sign tensors, one can obtain a sample complexity of $O(dN)$. Moreover, we generalize the matrix max-norm definition to tensors, which results in a max-quasi-norm (max-qnorm) whose unit ball has small Rademacher complexity. We prove that solving a constrained least squares estimation using either the convex atomic-norm or the nonconvex max-qnorm results in optimal sample complexity for the problem of low-rank tensor completion. Furthermore, we show that these bounds are nearly minimax rate-optimal. We also provide promising numerical results for max-qnorm constrained tensor completion, showing improved recovery results compared to matricization and alternating least squares.

As technology becomes more advanced, those who design, use and are otherwise affected by it want to know that it will perform correctly, and understand why it does what it does, and how to use it appropriately. In essence they want to be able to trust the systems that are being designed. In this survey we present assurances that are the method by which users can understand how to trust autonomous systems. Trust between humans and autonomy is reviewed, and the implications for the design of assurances are highlighted. A survey of existing research related to assurances is presented. Much of the surveyed research originates from fields such as interpretable, comprehensible, transparent, and explainable machine learning, as well as human-computer interaction, human-robot interaction, and e-commerce. Several key ideas are extracted from this work in order to refine the definition of assurances. The design of assurances is found to be highly dependent not only on the capabilities of the autonomous system, but on the characteristics of the human user, and the appropriate trust-related behaviors. Several directions for future research are identified and discussed.

A test version of a'mini space shuttle' has soared over the Mojave Desert in a major step forward for the mini shuttle. Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser was carried to an altitude of 10,000 feet by the civilian version of the Army's CH-47 Chinook, and then dropped to glide to the ground and land on a runway at Edwards Air Force Base in a test of its autonomous landing systems. The uncrewed Dream Chaser made a smooth landing at Edwards Air Force Base during the free-flight test at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, NASA officials said in a statement Spot the shuttle: Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Dream Chaser was carried to an altitude of 10,000 feet by the civilian version of the Army's CH-47 Chinook, and then dropped to glide to the ground and land on a runway at Edwards Air Force Base in a test of its autonomous landing systems. The mini shuttle made a perfect lading at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. The Dream Chaser is preparing to deliver cargo to the International Space Station beginning in 2019.

Artificial intelligence experts are calling for a ban on "killer robots", and have warned that we need to move quickly. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots has released a short film designed to demonstrate what could happen if machines that are capable of choosing who lives and who dies continue to be developed. In the video, autonomous weapons are used to carry out mass killings with frightening efficiency, while people struggle to work out how to combat them. It also depicts swarms of smart drones, which are equipped with explosives and use facial recognition, GPS, voting and social media data to establish and pursue targets. "[Artificial intelligence's] potential to benefit humanity is enormous, even in defense," says Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at the University of Berkeley, at the end of the film.

In the near term I see greater prosperity and reduced mortality due to things like highway accidents and medical errors, where there's a huge loss of life today.

Education Department officials opened formal negotiations on Monday to rewrite federal rules meant to protect students from fraud by colleges and universities. The talks with university representative and student advocates are taking place as the department faces criticism for delaying consideration of tens of thousands of loan forgiveness claims from students who say they were defrauded by for-profit colleges. The 1994 rule, known as borrower defense, allowed loan forgiveness if it was determined that the college had deceived them. But the rule was rarely used until the demise of Corinthian and ITT Tech for-profit chains several years ago, when thousands of students flooded the department with requests to cancel their loans. In 2016, the Obama administration passed revisions to the rule, which clarified the process and added protections for students.

Police in the US state of Delaware are poised to deploy'smart' cameras in cruisers to help authorities detect a vehicle carrying a fugitive, missing child or straying senior. The video feeds will be analyzed using artificial intelligence to identify vehicles by license plate or other features and'give an extra set of eyes' to officers on patrol, says David Hinojosa of Coban Technologies, the company providing the equipment. 'We are helping officers keep their focus on their jobs,' said Hinojosa, who touts the new technology as a'dashcam on steroids.' The program is part of a growing trend to use vision-based AI to thwart crime and improve public safety, a trend which has stirred concerns among privacy and civil liberties activists who fear the technology could lead to secret'profiling' and misuse of data. US-based startup Deep Science is using the same technology to help retail stores detect in real time if an armed robbery is in progress, by identifying guns or masked assailants.