One project wants to explore the use of robots to expand habitats when they're already in space, while another plans to use a planet's atmosphere to slow down descending spacecraft to make missions more affordable. There's also one that wants to use a coating that can reflect 99.9% of the sun's energy for long-term cryogenic storage, say to transport liquid oxygen and other chemicals to Mars and other planets. While these concepts sound like they came right out of a sci-fi movie, their creators were able to demonstrate that they're quite feasible. NASA is awarding each one up to 500,000 to develop their concepts further for two more years. Who knows -- someday, our descendants might use one of NIAC's concepts to roam the universe

IBM's technology has won Jeopardy, managed companies and is now practicing law. ROSS, 'the world's first artificially intelligent attorney' powered by Watson, recently landed a position at New York law firm Baker & Hostetler handling the firm's bankruptcy practice. The machine is designed to understand language, provide answers to questions, formulate hypotheses and monitor developments in the legal system. IBM's technology has won Jeopardy, managed companies and is now practicing law. ROSS, 'the world's first artificially intelligent attorney' powered by Watson, has just landed a position at New York law firm Baker & Hostetler handling the firm's bankruptcy practice Lawyers ask ROSS research questions in natural language, just like they were talking to a colleague, and the AI'reads' through the law, gathers evidence, draws inferences and returns with a'highly relevant', evidence-based answer.

Databases in domains such as healthcare are routinely released to the public in aggregated form. Unfortunately, naïve modeling with aggregated data may significantly diminish the accuracy of inferences at the individual level. This paper addresses the scenario where features are provided at the individual level, but the target variables are only available as histogram aggregates or order statistics. We consider a limiting case of generalized linear modeling when the target variables are only known up to permutation, and explore how this relates to permutation testing; a standard technique for assessing statistical dependency. Based on this relationship, we propose a simple algorithm to estimate the model parameters and individual level inferences via alternating imputation and standard generalized linear model fitting. Our results suggest the effectiveness of the proposed approach when, in the original data, permutation testing accurately ascertains the veracity of the linear relationship. The framework is extended to general histogram data with larger bins - with order statistics such as the median as a limiting case. Our experimental results on simulated data and aggregated healthcare data suggest a diminishing returns property with respect to the granularity of the histogram - when a linear relationship holds in the original data, the targets can be predicted accurately given relatively coarse histograms.

FLINT, MI - MAY 4: President Barack Obama speaks at Northwest High School about the Flint water contamination crisis May 4, 2016 in Flint, Michigan. While in Flint, the President heard first-hand from residents about the water crisis, and received an in-person briefing on the federal efforts that are in place to help respond to the needs of the city's residents. Artificial Intelligence or AI is a hot topic today because of its potential to carry out tasks in a more impressive way. AI is fast and more accurate compared to humans. Barack Obama is planning to use AI in the government.

They could spend months on the seabed, hibernating in special pods before emerging and flying into battle. US defence chiefs have revealed radical plans for'pods' to hold naval drones on the sea bed for years at a time. If a threat emerged nearby, the pods are simply released remotely, and float to the surface to open and unleash the drone within. The Darpa'Upward Falling Payloads' concept consists of'pods' to hold naval drones on the sea bed for years at a time. If a threat emerges nearby, the pods are simply released remotely, and float to the surface to open and unleash the drone within.

Nasa has announced a new round of funding for a series of futuristic projects to get humans into deep space. Many sound like they come straight from the pages of a science fiction novel. From'magnetoshells' that can give probes a soft landing to a space habitat that puts astronauts in a deep sleep, the projects aim to increase the space agency's ability to fly farther and faster. Nasa has announced a new round of funding for a series of futuristic projects to get humans into deep space. From'magnetoshells' that can give probes a soft landing to a spacecraft that puts astronauts in a deep sleep, the projects aim to increase the space agency's ability to fly farther and faster The eight technology projects are part of Nasa's Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Program, with each receiving as much as 500,000 for a two-year study.

Ahead of the Big Data Innovation Summit, we review our predictions for the Big Data landscape in 2016 and see how many of these have been realized: - Quantum computing, combined with advanced machine learning techniques, is set to allow even faster and more agile analysis of huge amounts of different data structures. So was it all just hype? Are organizations actually managing to take full advantage of all the different sorts of data available to them? How are they securing their data so profits are not leaked? How are companies dealing with the lack of data scientists?

Despite heightened tensions between the U.S. government and Silicon Valley in the aftermath of the FBI-Apple standoff, the Department of Defense is increasingly looking to Silicon Valley to help it develop artificial intelligence capabilities. Just this week, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter made yet another trip to the Silicon Valley, the fourth such trip since he took the DoD helm last year. During this trip, Carter visited the Pentagon new Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, facility, reported the New York Times. During a speech there, Carter again discussed his Third Offset strategy, which looks to high-tech weapons to give the U.S. military an edge of China and Russia in the future. The first and second offset, in case you are wondering, refer to previous eras in which DoD used technology to compensate for a smaller military – the 1950s use of nuclear weapons to deter superior Warsaw Pact forces and the 1970s and 1980s when the Pentagon looked to improved conventional weapons technology, such as cruise missiles, to compensate for a smaller force posture.

Robots play football in a demonstration of artificial intelligence at the stand of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH) at the CeBIT Technology Fair. There is no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) plays a huge role in technology, education and research. AI is complex, but it is more efficient and reliable than humans when it comes to the workforce because it is fast and it doesn't get tired. According to new reports, AI investment continues to grow. Most of the things we see about AI springs from science fiction movies.

Just when you need Big Data, it's nowhere to be found. After Facebook made headlines this week for allegedly meddling with its Trending Topics section, several analytics firms that have provided International Business Times with social media data in the past declined to provide numbers related to the ruckus. The kerfuffle was kicked off by a Gizmodo report alleging the company's Trending Topics section suppresses conservative topics of interest, thanks to the whims of its curators. Within hours of the news, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce wrote a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg asking representatives of Facebook to travel to Washington for a briefing on its curation guidelines. And Thursday, Facebook released its full guidelines for news selection, showing the extent to which human judgment is part of the process.