Human patrols serve as the most direct form of protection of endangered animals, especially in large national parks. However, protection agencies have limited resources for patrols. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Army Research Office, researchers are using artificial intelligence (AI) and game theory to solve poaching, illegal logging and other problems worldwide, in collaboration with researchers and conservationists in the U.S., Singapore, Netherlands and Malaysia. "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active, and habitual," according to Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at the University of Southern California (USC). Fang is part of an NSF-funded team at USC led by Milind Tambe, professor of computer science and industrial and systems engineering and director of the Teamcore Research Group on Agents and Multiagent Systems.

In the Army's Emergent Leader Immersive Training Environment, or ELITE, Soldiers hone their basic counseling skills through practice with virtual humans like virtual Staff Sergeant Jessica Chen. New research aims to get robots and humans to speak the same language to improve communication in fast-moving and unpredictable situations. Scientists from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies are exploring the potential of developing a flexible multimodal human-robot dialogue that includes natural language, along with text, images and video processing. "Research and technology are essential for providing the best capabilities to our Warfighters," said Dr. Laurel Allender, director of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory Human Research and Engineering Directorate. "This is especially so for the immersive and live-training environments we are developing to achieve squad overmatch and to optimize Soldier performance, both mentally and physically."

Research funded by the National Science Foundation may have found an ingenious solution to poaching: applying game theory and computer science to real-life situations. One of the biggest factors in why there are so many endangered animals today is poaching – a centuries-old problem. The dwindling tiger population is one of the most glaring examples of this. Whether for sport, medicine, pelts or other body parts, poaching remains a huge threat to wildlife. Patrols have long been the most direct form of human intervention in wildlife protection.

See Sea Hunter hunt submarines. Was it really only December that DARPA told us it was building a submarine-hunting drone-ship for the Navy? Well, get ready to be surprised. Just four months after we learned of the existence of the Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel program, or ACTUV, it's already complete -- and afloat. Last week, the Pentagon's mad scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency unveiled the ACTUV prototype in Portland, Ore., christening the vessel Sea Hunter.

The traditional approach to science involves collecting data, analyzing the data and publishing the findings in a paper. Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon have been making remarkable progress developing artificial intelligence systems. Neither the motivations of DARPA nor OpenAI explain exactly why these commercial technology companies are open sourcing their AI code. Open-sourcing AI serves these companies' broader goals of staying at the cutting edge of technology.

The world's biggest technology companies are handing over the keys to their success, making their artificial intelligence systems open-source. Traditionally, computer users could see the end product of what a piece of software did by, for instance, writing a document in Microsoft Word or playing a video game. But the underlying programming -- the source code -- was proprietary, kept from public view. Opening source material in computer science is a big deal because the more people that look at code, the more likely it is that bugs and long-term opportunities and risks can be worked out. Openness is increasingly a big deal in science as well, for similar reasons.

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.

This week it became more clear than ever that the Apple-FBI fight was just the beginning of a new wave of encryption fights. Vibes announced that it would enable encryption by default for its 700 million users--and since it's a foreign company, Congress won't be able to do a thing about it. Oh, and that San Bernadino iPhone that caused all the fuss? Sounds like the FBI paid over a million bucks to a third party to access it. There were also hearings about encryption on Capitol Hill this week, though whatever legislation Congress does come up with would be much more informed if the Office of Technology Assessment hadn't been axed 20 years ago.

A group of MIT researchers has sketched out a way to address a gap in cybersecurity that exists between human and machine. Human-made rules, which are meant to alert the system of an attack, don't work unless an attack exactly matches one of those rules. Machine-learning measures typically rely on anomaly detection. Consequently, false alarms aren't uncommon and the system starts to distrust itself. Combine these two forces - man and machine - and that's when magic can happen, according to a group of researchers out of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).

China's Nasdaq-listed internet search engine giant Baidu Inc. said Friday it has formed a team in Silicon Valley dedicated to its self-driving car efforts. The announcement comes as Chinese officials rush to set up a road map for incorporating highway-ready, self-driving cars within three to five years. Baidu's Silicon Valley team will grow to more than 100 researchers and engineers, focused on research, development and testing, by the end of 2016, the company said in a statement Friday. The Beijing-headquartered firm is looking to work on areas "integral to self-driving car development, including planning, perception, control and systems." The team in Silicon Valley will be part of the company's newly created Autonomous Driving Unit.