Pulling these threads together, recently a gaming AI defeated a US Air Force expert combat pilot in simulated combat.

Climate deniers aside, there are very few people who are not concerned about the effects of climate change. According to a poll released by Monmouth University in January, nearly 70% of respondents said "the world's climate is undergoing a change leading to more extreme weather patterns and sea level rise",[1] and a more recent poll from Gallup reported 64% of "Americans are worried a great deal and/or a fair deal about global warming" [2]. What many people are unaware of is the fact climate scientists and business leaders are increasingly turning to Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to combat climate change. In many ways, this is inevitable as the sheer amount of data required to measure the effects of climate change requires the use of next-generation analytics. For example, the large data sets used to analyze climate are often prone to generating false positives and our understanding of climate change is still in its nascent stages.

Artificial Intelligence or AI as it popularly called is surely and steadily working its way to become more like humans. We have had an AI which injured its host will fully while another AI robot ran out of its enclosure in Russia. Now another AI has successfully managed to beat an ace fighter pilot in a combat simulation. Recently, an artificial intelligence (AI) named ALPHA developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate went up against retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene Lee in a high-fidelity air combat simulator. The result, the Colonel lost. In a series of flight combat simulations, the A.I. successfully dodged Lee, and shot him down every time.

David Axe for the Daily Beast reports The U.S. Marine Corps is around six years away from putting a laser cannon on its trucks, according to one top general. The goal: to outfit ground forces with a weapon that can shoot down enemy aircraft faster and more precisely--and at lower cost--than today's guns and surface-to-air missiles.

Details of the fallout from the Brexit vote may take months to become clear, but there are concerns the UK pulling out of the European Union could lead to the loss of many low skilled migrant workers. But this apparent loss could be technology's gain, according to the findings from one think-tank. According to a new report from the Resolution Foundation, shortfalls in the human workforce could lead to a surge in robots to take their place. A new report from a think-tank says shortfalls in the workforce post-Brexit could lead to a surge in robots to take their place. According to findings from the Resolution Foundation, low-skilled jobs in agriculture and the food industry currently carried out by large numbers of EU workers could be automated.

When Donald Trump opens his mouth, the output can seem like the work of a demented Markov chain, a poorly trained algorithm trying its hand at rhetoric. Key words--"great again," "let me tell you," "we don't win anymore"--end up strung together by exceptionally weak ligaments. His syntax seems generated on the fly, word to word, each stumbling straight into the next, bound by the barest loyalty to grammar. As only he could, Trump's brought the state of political speech down to the state of the art of machine speechwriting. This past winter, a graduate student at the Technical University of Denmark earned significant attention for the politicians he was crafting in Python.

Austin Haughwout, 19, of Clinton, and his father, Bret Haughwout, are refusing to comply with subpoenas issued by the U.S. attorney's office on behalf of the FAA, saying the subpoenas violate their constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and questioning the agency's authority to regulate recreational drones. A hearing on whether the Haughwouts have to comply with the subpoenas is set for Wednesday before U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Meyer in New Haven. The case potentially has national significance because it would set a precedent on how much authority the FAA has over recreational drone use, said the Haughwouts' lawyer, Mario Cerame. One video, viewed more than 3.7 million times, shows a flying drone equipped with a handgun firing rounds. Another video, viewed nearly 600,000 times, shows a flying drone with a flamethrower lighting up a spit-roasting Thanksgiving turkey.

Each Sunday, we publish a list of top articles and other content related to manufacturing in areas like quality control, product development, supply chain management, sourcing, auditing and law. The world of manufacturing is constantly evolving. It never seems to stop. Just when one technology seems to take center stage, another one steps up. One big performer on the horizon is machine learning.

IMAGE: UMass Amherst researchers will apply recent advances in machine learning, specifically biologically inspired deep learning methods, to analyze large amounts of scientific data from laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy and hyperspectral camera... view more They are funded by a new four-year, 1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to computer scientist Sridhar Mahadevan, lead principal investigator at UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences. His co-investigators are Mario Parente, an expert in analysis of hyperspectral images at UMass Amherst, and Darby Dyar of Mount Holyoke, a specialist in planetary chemistry and geology who serves on the scientific mission team for the Mars rover. As Mahadevan explains, NASA's Curiosity rover, a car-sized robot, has been exploring a crater on Mars since August 2012 and sending back a steady stream of specialized camera images and data on the chemical composition of rocks and dust for analysis. The data range from one-dimensional spectra of rock samples to three-dimensional hyperspectral images of the Martian surface. He advises Ph.D. students Thomas Boucher, CJ Carey, Steve Giguere, Ian Gemp, Francisco Garcia and Ishan Durugkar in the Autonomous Learning Laboratory, who are exploring machine learning methods to show, for the first time, that new deep learning approaches provide a practical and useful new tool for handling large scientific data sets.

In April, a group of Finnish farmers outfitted a spindly black drone with a remote-controlled chainsaw and filmed it decapitating snowmen. They called it "Killer Drone." More formally, it was a DJI S1000. This spring, marine biologists flew a drone over the Sea of Cortez to capture samples of the fluid sprayed from the blowholes of blue whales. It was a DJI Inspire 1.