The Calgary Police Service became the first force in Canada to start using facial recognition software to match suspects against a mug shot database this week, but it likely won't be the last. The use of facial recognition technology is growing not just in law enforcement and security fields but also in commerce. "One of the reasons face [recognition] is so popular is that face images exist of almost everybody," said Kevin Bowyer, an expert on biometrics and computer vision and chair of the department of computer science and engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Some cellphone apps use face recognition instead of passwords to give users access to devices. "You've got your driver's licence photos, you've got your identity badges wherever you work, so you've got this legacy of images that are easily accessible for everyone."

Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving cars program, will tell the Senate Commerce Committee that legislators should grant new authority to the U.S. Transportation Department to help get fully autonomous vehicles on the road, acccording to his prepared testimony, which was reviewed by Reuters. "We propose that Congress move swiftly to provide the secretary of transportation with new authority to approve life saving safety innovations. This new authority would permit the deployment of innovative safety technologies that meet or exceed the level of safety required by existing federal standards, while ensuring a prompt and transparent process," according to the prepared testimony. Major automakers and technology companies are racing to develop and sell vehicles that can drive themselves, but have complained that state and federal safety rules are impeding testing and ultimate deployment of such vehicles. California in December proposed draft rules that would bar autonomous vehicles without human controls and a licensed driver.

Big names in the worlds of big brains and cutting-edge technology are investing millions of dollars in the quantum computing technology of the Burnaby, B.C.-based company D-Wave. They say they're starting to see promising results, despite criticism from some quantum physicists that the technology might never live up to its promise. Quantum computing is a new form of computing based on quantum mechanics, the strange physics that affects very, very small particles such as atoms. In theory, it has the potential to revolutionize artificial intelligence, space travel and other fields by solving problems conventional computers either can't solve or can only solve very slowly. But even Google acknowledges that D-Wave's limited form of quantum computing hasn't yet proven capable of doing anything conventional computers can't.

Big defense budgets during the aughts financed the deployment of thousands of robots, including unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon's fascination with robots hasn't slackened even in these more austere times. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is funding Boston Dynamics' development of a prototype robot called the Cheetah. On March 5, the company announced that the cat-like bot managed to gallop 18 mph on a treadmill, setting a new land speed record for legged robots. Boston Dynamics, a 1992 spinoff from MIT that's headed by Marc Raibert, has also developed a quadrupedal pack robot called the Legged Squad Support System (LS3).

We're all familiar with the standard search engines such as Google and Yahoo, but there is a new technology on the scene that does more than just search the web – it discovers it. Trapit, which is a personalized discovery engine for the web that's powered by the same artificial intelligence technology behind Apple's Siri, launched its public beta last week. Just like Siri, Trapit is a product of the $200 million CALO Project (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), which was the largest artificial intelligence project in U.S. history, according to Mashable. This million-dollar project was funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the Department of Defense's research arm. Trapit, which was first unveiled in June, is a system that personalizes content for its users based on keywords, URLs and reading habits.

The government has released a report highlighting some of the benefits and challenges that are likely to come about as a result of advances in artificial intelligence being made by companies like Google, DeepMind, and Facebook. Written by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Mark Walport and published on Thursday, the report provides an overview of where we're at with AI before going on to highlight how it has the potential to fuel innovation and improve government services. The report -- titled "Artificial intelligence: opportunities and implications for the future of decision making" -- also looks at how government should "manage and mitigate" any negative effects that may be brought about as a result of AI. "It is important to recognise that, alongside the huge benefits that artificial intelligence offers, there are potential ethical issues associated with some uses," Walport writes. "Many experts feel that government has a role to play in managing and mitigating any risks that might arise." Walport also wants to open up the conversation on AI to ensure that scientists in the field gain public trust. "Public trust is a vital condition for artificial intelligence to be used productively," he writes.

Sargur N. Srihari, director of the University at Buffalo's Center of Excellence in Document Analysis and Recognition (CEDAR) and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, has won the 2011 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) Outstanding Achievements award. He is being honored with the award for his outstanding and continued contributions to research and education in handwriting recognition and document analysis, and for his service to the community. Srihari recently traveled to Beijing to accept the award and serve as a keynote speaker at the conference, held bi-annually by the International Association for Pattern Recognition. His speech, entitled "Probabilistic Graphical Models in Machine Learning," focused on the design of computer programs that learn and are able to modify their behavior in an environment of constantly changing information. Without machine learning, many computers that deal with rapidly changing data would require constant reprogramming.

As the United States and China move forward in both collaboration and competition, the ability to communicate becomes ever more critical. While emerging technologies such as Google Translate have shown promise, much work must be done to improve the language translation applications that America will need as one of its most important 21st century relationships develops. To move the technology forward, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded a $13.7 million grant, called "Linguistic Resources for Multilingual, Genre-Independent Language Technologies via its Broad Operational Language Translation" (BOLT) Program to the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania to develop linguistic resources. Brandeis has been given $2 million of that amount as a collaborator. Nianwen Xue, assistant professor of linguistics in the Language and Linguistics Program and the Department of Computer Science at Brandeis, is the principal investigator on the four-year project.

Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT professor and a pioneer in artificial intelligence whose famed computer program Eliza seemed to converse with humans in 1964, spent the rest of his life speaking out against substituting machines for human decision-making. "He was a critic of society and science and a true humanist who really touched people," said Peter Haas, a Vienna-based filmmaker who made the 2007 documentary "Weizenbaum. Mr. Weizenbaum, whose parents fled Nazi Germany when he was a boy, died March 5 in Groben, Germany, from cancer. One of his four daughters, Sharon Weizenbaum, recalled playing with the Eliza program in her father's study at her childhood home in Concord. "Eliza was something that was fun to fool around with," she said.

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