Commercial supersonic air travel could return in just half a decade after a Richard Branson-backed company aiming to replace the concord announced it will begin test flights next year. Boom Supersonic has said initial test flights for its 1,451mph (2,330kph) aircraft, nicknamed the'baby boom', will begin by the end of 2018, with both subsonic and supersonic tests taking place in the US. Supersonic flight tests will be conducted near Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California in partnership with Virgin Galactic's The Spaceship Company. If the firm's full-sized, 55-seater aircraft is approved, the first passengers could be making a supersonic journey across the Atlantic by 2023 at a top speed more than 100mph (160km/h) faster than the infamous Concorde. Boom Supersonic has said initial test flights for its 1,451mph (2,330kph) aircraft, nicknamed the'baby boom', will begin by the end of 2018, with both subsonic and supersonic tests taking place in the US.

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With the help of the Kaggle data science community, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is hosting an online competition to build machine learning-powered tools that can augment agents, ideally making the entire system simultaneously more accurate and efficient. Kaggle, acquired by Google earlier this year, regularly hosts online competitions where data scientists compete for money by developing novel approaches to complex machine learning problems. The TSA is making its data set of images available to competitors so they can train on images of people carrying weapons. Thankfully, Google, Facebook and others are heavily investing in lighter versions of machine learning frameworks, optimized to run locally, at the edge (without internet).

Like many artificial intelligence companies in Canada, PeopleAnalytics.ai was happy to see the federal government's launch of its Pan-Canadian Artificial lntelligence Strategy for research and talent as part of the federal budget this year. The $125-million that the Liberals are committing to the project, to be administered through the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR), is expected to help to attract and retain top academic talent in this country. With the market for AI-related ideas and products expected to reach $47-billion by 2020, according to CIFAR, the sector has already attracted major investment from Facebook and Google, among others. For PeopleAnalytics.ai, based out of Toronto's MaRS Discovery District, Canada is at a crossroads where it has the ability to define exactly how it wants to mould its focus on AI. Mark Chaikelson, below, vice-president of product for PeopleAnalytics.ai, says the success of the government's plan, particularly in the AI clusters in Montreal, Toronto-Waterloo and Edmonton, will come down to three things: capital, customers and talent.

As a kid, I saw the 1968 version of Planet of the Apes. As a future primatologist, I was mesmerized. Years later I discovered an anecdote about its filming: At lunchtime, the people playing chimps and those playing gorillas ate in separate groups. It's been said, "There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't." And it can be vastly consequential when people are divided into Us and Them, ingroup and outgroup, "the people" (i.e., our kind) and the Others. The core of Us/Them-ing is emotional and automatic. Humans universally make Us/Them dichotomies along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, language group, religion, age, socioeconomic status, and so on. We do so with remarkable speed and neurobiological efficiency; have complex taxonomies and classifications of ways in which we denigrate Thems; do so with a versatility that ranges from the minutest of microaggression to bloodbaths of savagery; and regularly decide what is inferior about Them based on pure emotion, followed by primitive rationalizations that we mistake for rationality. But crucially, there is room for optimism. Much of that is grounded in something definedly human, which is that we all carry multiple Us/Them divisions in our heads. A Them in one case can be an Us in another, and it can only take an instant for that identity to flip.

Federal agencies are a step closer to automating some of their common customer service processes using artificial intelligence. The General Services Administration recently wrapped a pilot that walked federal agencies through the process of building chatbots and other intelligent personal assistants similar to Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. Graduates of that pilot have developed some basic prototypes--a single chatbot that lets users access Small Business Administration licenses, Internal Revenue Service tax credits, Forest Service park permits, and Health and Human Services Department benefits, for one. But prototypes weren't the point of the pilot, GSA's Emerging Citizen Technology Office lead Justin Herman told Nextgov--instead, it was to help agencies understand what they'd need before they can fully deploy intelligent personal assistants. One finding, Herman said, was that agencies need to assess their cloud services, as chatbots and voice-controlled virtual assistants would need to pull information from the internet.

Future space missions are going to reach the deepest part of the final frontier. Some of those missions, like those planned to Mars, may carry humans. But some unmanned missions will rely on technology that either has to be controlled by humans or have the capacity to act autonomously. An article in the journal Science: Robotics, written by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory employees Steve Chien and Kiri Wagstaff, emphasizes the importance autonomy will play in future space exploration. Researchers currently conduct their work through the remotely controlled robotic spacecraft. The Mars rovers, Kepler space telescope and Cassini oribiter are all examples of spacecraft controlled from Earth to capture the data and images that have offered researchers insight into space.

If we truly want to go to Mars, then we really need to know what it's made of -- it's hard to bring everything you need from Earth. NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has been using specialized AI software to zap soil and rocks on the planet this past year to discover what each is made of. The software that guides the rover's efforts is called AEGIS, or Autonomous Exploration for Gathering Increased Science. AEGIS allows the rover to get more science of this nature done while Curiosity is out of contact with its human controllers, according to a new paper published by NASA in Science Robotics. "Time is precious on Mars," said lead system engineer Raymond Francis in a statement.

But a startup from San Francisco called BabelOn is working on a particularly unique offshoot of this technology. In a nutshell, BabelOn wants to make it a trivial matter to translate your own voice into another language, even if you don't speak that language yourself. The company says its combo of software and custom-built hardware can analyze what makes up your voice and then use that to recreate speech that sounds just like you, in a language of your choosing. Initially, the company wants to use its technology for things like improving dubbed films or localizing video games, but eventually it wants to be able to translate your speech in real time, say while you're on a Skype call. Microsoft has done this for a while, translating Skype voice calls on the fly, but BabelOn promises that its translations will sound like you, not an anonymous Siri- or Cortana-like digital voice.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump offered support for emerging technologies including unmanned aerial vehicles and next-generation wireless networks in a meeting on Thursday with the chiefs of AT&T Inc and General Electric Co and other business leaders.