As AWS continues to support the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community with contributions to Apache MXNet and the release Amazon Lex, Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition managed services, we are also expanding our team of AI experts, who have one primary mission: To lower the barrier to AI for all AWS developers, making AI more accessible and easy to use. As Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Machine Learning at AWS, succinctly stated, "We want to democratize AI." In our Research Spotlight series, I spend some time with these AI team members for in-depth conversations about their experiences and get a peek into what they're working on at AWS. Anima Anandkumar joined AWS in November 2016, as Principal Scientist on Deep Learning. She is currently on leave from the EECS Department at UC Irvine, where she has been an associate professor since August 2010. Anima has earned several prestigious awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, and Young Investigator Research awards from the Army Research Office and the Air Force Office for Sponsored Research.

US has traditionally been the dominant force in technology but its quest to become the AI superpower seems to have taken a hit lately. The latest proposed budget released by the Trump administration plans to slash funding for a variety of government agencies that have conventionally backed artificial intelligence research in the US. The Chinese on the other hand have a solid combination of a huge talent pool, increasing government support, and capital-abundant traditional industries, all of which make them a serious competitor. Alongside government initiatives, China's private companies are also investing massively in AI and related fields. The contest has become all the more direct with China's increasing investments in US-based AI programs. Some of the examples include, Huawei's AI research partnership with the University of California, and Tencent's purchase of a stake in Tesla, which is designing self-driving cars.

The United States appears poised to heighten scrutiny of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley to better shield sensitive technologies seen as vital to U.S. national security, current and former U.S. officials tell Reuters. Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years. The worry is that cutting-edge technologies developed in the United States could be used by China to bolster its military capabilities and perhaps even push it ahead in strategic industries. The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the inter-agency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies on national security grounds. An unreleased Pentagon report, viewed by Reuters, warns that China is skirting U.S. oversight and gaining access to sensitive technology through transactions that currently don't trigger CFIUS review.

Solar panels stand at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in the Mojave Desert near Primm, Nevada in 2014. California and Arizona by far generate the most electricity with solar power in the U.S. The U.S. set a new renewable energy milestone in March, in data released Wednesday. For the first time, wind and solar accounted for 10 percent of all electricity generation, with wind comprising 8 percent and solar coming in at 2 percent. The report was published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), which collects and disseminates environmental data that is used to inform policymakers. Wind and solar generation typically peaks in the spring and fall when there is less energy demand, and the EIA expects April to continue the record-setting 10 percent trend.

For better or worse, AI will soon be integrated into almost every aspect of out lives. Meetings like these hope to make it for better. Standing on stage in front hundreds of policymakers, academics, and industry leaders in a United Nations conference room on Wednesday, Margaret Chan admitted she's probably the least knowledgeable person present on the topic of artificial intelligence. Chan, an expert in her own right as director general of the World Health Organization, was nonetheless chosen to open a panel of the first inaugural AI for Good Global Summit, a UN-hosted event that hopes to guide AI development with ethical, social, and sustainable goals in mind. And she raised some important issues about how this technology will effect society.

It could one day help humans colonize Mars, but for now, the 6-foot 2-inch humanoid is learning how to travel over treacherous terrain. NASA's Valkyrie has demonstrated that it can successfully cross a curved, uneven path in a similar fashion as a human. The robot is equip with a LIDAR sensor, which allows it to'see' the cinder blocks by illuminating them with a pulsed laser light and measuring the reflecting pulses with a sensor in order to calculate the distance between the block and its foot. It could one day help humans colonize Mars, but for now, the 6-foot 2-inch humanoid is learning how to travel over treacherous terrain. NASA's Valkyrie has demonstrated that it can successfully cross a curved, uneven path in a similar fashion as a human Valkyrie is the brainchild of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, which hopes to equip the robot named after the female spirits of Norse mythology to go to the red planet many years before astronauts are able to make the journey, for pre-deployment tasks and to maintain assets on Mars.

U.S. Representative Bob Latta, who chairs a key panel overseeing automobile regulation, called the draft legislation "an important step in establishing a framework to allow innovators to safely develop and test autonomous vehicles." He said Republicans want "to continue working with all parties in a bipartisan manner as we refine language and move toward a consensus package."

Welcome to part four of Learning AI if You Suck at Math. (Be sure to check out the other articles in this series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.) Maybe you've downloaded TensorFlow and you're ready to get started with some deep learning? But then you wonder: What the hell is a tensor? Perhaps you looked it up on Wikipedia and now you're more confused than ever. Maybe you found this NASA tutorial and still have no idea what it's talking about? The problem is most guides talk about tensors as if you already understand all the terms they're using to describe the math. I hated math as a kid, so if I can figure it out, you can too!

The US military will have more robot soldiers on the battlefield than real ones by 2025, a top British intelligence expert has claimed. John Bassett, a security consultant with a 20-year career at GCHQ, believes deadly combat robots are rapidly becoming "a reality" of modern day warfare. These state-of-the art military units will consist of human soldiers and robots and are aimed at maximizing performance on future battlefields. Combat robots will rapidly become an inherent part of US fighting forces within the next 10-15 years, defense experts say. Washington is apparently seeking to gain military edge over China, Russia and other rivals investing in research and development of robotic systems.

In our previous article on chatbots, it was stated that one does not simply create a chatbot. Artificial intelligence still poses too many challenges to go about building bots without sufficient research. One of the main problems is the ability of bots to recognize human requests. We've decided to tell you about some of the popular AI chatbots that handle this task well. In theory, the best chat bots were made to replace human services.