During a recent four-day trip to Marib with a group of Western journalists and researchers, I saw a town struggling for a sense of normalcy -- and even progress -- despite the collapsed country around it. The trip was organized by the Sana Center for Strategic Studies, a research institute focused on Yemen, and led by Farea al-Muslimi, an energetic young Yemeni scholar, who said he worried that the international community was forgetting about Yemen, to the peril of both. "We can't stop the war in Yemen right now, but at least we can cause more conversation about it," he said. "We want to bring the world to Yemen and bring Yemen to the world." Marib's unlikely success is partly a symptom of the near complete shattering of the Yemeni state, which has left regions to fend for themselves in providing life's basics for their people.

When you think of NASA you probably think of the missions to the moon or the International Space Station but the agency has plans to start conducting some work closer to the Earth's surface soon. The agency's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate is working on research and implementation of Urban Air Mobility or UAM for the coming years. NASA defines UAM as "a safe and efficient system for air passenger and cargo transportation within an urban area," said a release from NASA. These include small package delivery, like drone or Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) deliveries, and other services that could be controlled from onboard, on the ground or could potentially be autonomous. NASA is helping companies looking to add urban air mobility to cities. Photo: NASA Not only is NASA working on developing these technologies as it has for the past six or so years, but it's also working to create more successful management of those technologies.

Decisions about whether to grant bail could be better made by a machine than by a human. Predictions based on machine learning could outperform judges when deciding which defendants to jail before trial and which to release on bail. Kleinberg et al. exploited data on more than 758,000 defendants who were arrested in New York City between 2008 and 2013. Compared with carefully devised counterfactual scenarios based on actual judges' decisions, the machine predictions based on defendants' histories could reduce crime by up to 25% with no increase in jailing, or reduce jailing up to 42% with no increase in crime. All categories of crime, including violent crimes, could be reduced, and, critically, so could racial disparities in jailing rates.

AI is a booming industry with a lot of noise, thought leadership, and hype. However, as we attend industry events, work with clients, and tell the story of AI for customer data, there's one common trend. Many of the people we talk to only have a loose idea of what AI does, with little or no mind to what it is. This post will serve as an easy to read primer on what AI truly is, and what kinds of AI are being developed/where things stand today in the ecosystem. AI is a form of intelligence - Specifically AI is a synthetic intelligence - intelligence of a man-made yet real quality.

Swarms of drones buzz overhead, while robotic vehicles crawl across the landscape. Orbiting satellites snap high-resolution images of the scene far below. Not one human being can be seen in the pre-dawn glow spreading across the land. This is a snapshot of the farm of the future. Every phase of the operation--from seed to harvest--may someday be automated, without the need to ever get one's fingernails dirty.

The results are in from the biggest computer face-recognition contest to date. Everyone from government agencies to police forces are looking for software to track us in airports or spot us in CCTV images. But much of this technology is developed behind closed doors – how can we know if any of it really works? To answer this question, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have been running the biggest face-recognition competition to date. The Face Recognition Prize Challenge tested two tasks: face verification and face search. Face verification is what phone manufacturers such as Apple – whose iPhone X, out last week, can be unlocked with your face – are trying to master.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning dominate so much conversation about cybersecurity that any CISO is faced with the necessity of explaining this family of technologies to the board. This is always challenging, especially with technologies so heavily hyped, and so liable to easy misunderstanding. As one panelist (Sriram Chandrasekar, Co-Head, AI Investments, Point72 Venture) put it, his role as a venture capitalist is to discern "the faint shimmer of snake oil" that so often rides atop presentations about artificial intelligence." The panel took up the task of framing AI in ways that would be accessible to boards, and that would give them a realistic sense of what AI is, does, and doesn't do. The panel was moderated by Dr. Reggie Brothers, Chertoff Group Principal and former senior science and technology executive at both the US Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. In addition to Chandrasekar, the panelists included Walid Ali (Senior Director, Artificial ...

As Russia's government develops a digital economy, organisations are stepping up the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technologies. Every conference this year contains a dead human genius reincarnated as software system or a robot. Yes, there is a lot of hype, but there is real worth in AI and Machine Learning. Read our counseling on how to avoid adopting "black box" approach. You forgot to provide an Email Address.

This might come across surprising for lot many AI enthusiasts out there, but the technology actually fosters the capability to create fake audio and video, which is difficult to distinguish from reality. In a recent feat, scientists at University of Washington created an AI software that could generate highly realistic fake videos of former president Barack Obama using existing audio and video clips of him. The tool essentially takes audio files, converts them into realistic mouth movements, and then grafts those movements onto existing video. The resultant video shows someone saying something they didn't. University of Washington scientists had previously revealed that the tool could be utilized for generating digital doppelgangers of anyone by simply analyzing their images.

Louis Buckley, Content Developer at London's Science Museum, plays rock, paper, scissors with Berti the Robot, London, UK, February, 2009. Sign up for Take Action Now, our newsletter that connects busy people to the resistance. Thank you for signing up. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.