On June 27, the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a Request For Information on Artificial Intelligence (RFI). The RFI seeks public input on the tools, technologies, and training needed to further research and implementation of artificial intelligence (AI). Public feedback on these important questions will enable the OSTP to develop guidance on how the law should balance AI's potential benefits with its numerous threats. For example, self-driving cars could improve driving safety and provide mobility for people with disabilities. Likewise, the use of AI in healthcare has the potential to dramatically improve the quality and accuracy of medical care.

A judge in Connecticut Wednesday said he planned to rule within a week in a father and son's case against the Federal Aviation Administration over YouTube videos of gun-toting, flame-throwing drones. Austin Haughwout, 19, of Clinton, and his father, Bret Haughwout, produced the videos. They've refused 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. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Meyer gave both sides a deadline of Monday, July 11 to file any additional documents. One of the Haughwouts' videos, viewed more than 3.7 million times, shows a flying drone equipped with a handgun firing rounds.

SUMMARY: Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offer great promise for creating new and innovative products, growing the economy, and advancing national priorities in areas such as education, mental and physical health, addressing climate change, and more. Like any transformative technology, however, AI carries risks and presents complex policy challenges along a number of different fronts. The Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is interested in developing a view of AI across all sectors for the purpose of recommending directions for research and determining challenges and opportunities in this field. The views of the American people, including stakeholders such as consumers, academic and industry researchers, private companies, and charitable foundations, are important to inform an understanding of current and future needs for AI in diverse fields. The purpose of this RFI is to solicit feedback on overarching questions in AI, including AI research and the tools, technologies, and training that are needed to answer these questions.

A park ranger treads carefully through the trees, stopping to listen for signs of the poacher he's tailing. Killed for skins, medicine and trophy hunting, the worldwide population of tigers has been reduced to near-extinction at about 3,200. The scale of destruction is increasing, and it will take a three-pronged approach to battle the corruption and financial incentives driving the illegal trade: tackling the source, transmission and demand for wild animal products. Supply could be dealt with by park rangers catching the poachers before they attack, but finding a single poacher in thousands of square kilometers can be almost impossible, and in the poorest areas, resources are so constrained that poachers are not being intercepted at all. Artificial intelligence and game theory are the surprising elements in the arsenal of weapons used to combat this problem.

Across the world there is an estimated 285 million visually impaired people, and 39 million of these are blind. Conditions like age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy can be picked up is using digital screenings, which are highly complex and take a lot of time to analyse. Now Google's DeepMind Health is teaming up with a London eye hospital to investigate how machine learning could help analyse these scans efficiently and effectively. Moorfields Eue Hospital in London has announced a new medical research partnership with Google's DeepMind Health that could revolutionise the way professionals carry out eye tests and lead to earlier detection of common eye diseases Diabetes is on the rise. It's estimated that 1 in 11 of the world's adult population are affected.

Factory workers are about to get super-human strength thanks to Nasa's'Robo-Glove'. The glove helped scientists control Robonaut 2, a humanoid that provided engineering and technical assistance on space mission just like Star Wars' R2-D2. But now it has been given power-boosting technologies thanks to a partnership between General Motors and medical technology company Bioservo, who hope that it will help workers on factory floors. The Robo-Glove wraps around a worker's hand essentially, takes on the hard work for them. An assembly operator in a factory may use 15- to 20 pounds of force to hold a tool during an operation.

Apparently, a crash related to Tesla's autopilot feature was material, before it wasn't. On Tuesday, Fortune reported that Elon Musk and Tesla Motors may have withheld a material fact from shareholders when it failed to disclose that a driver had died using the semi-self driving "autopilot" feature in one of the company's vehicles. The fatal accident, the first known case related to the autopilot feature, occurred 11 days before Musk and Tesla sold 2 billion shares in an offering on May 18. Yet the company made no mention of the crash in its offering documents. The news of the accident didn't come out until last week, when it was reported by federal highway authorities--six weeks after the offering.

DeepMind, Google's London-based artificial intelligence company, has started training neural networks to recognise the signs of eye disease in medical images. A partnership with Moorfields Eye Hospital in London has given the company access to about a million anonymised retinal scans, which DeepMind will feed into its artificial intelligence software. The project will target two of the most common eye diseases – age related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy. More than 100 million people around the world have these conditions. The information that Moorfields is providing includes scans of the back of people's eyes, as well as more detailed scans known as optical coherence tomography (OCT). The idea is that the images will let DeepMind's neural networks learn to recognise subtle signs of degenerating eye conditions that even trained clinicians have trouble spotting.

Your job may end up being done by a computer in the not-so-distant future, according to participants in a White House-hosted discussion on Tuesday. The discussion addressed how the future of automation can provide many social and economic advantages, but could also be a major disadvantage for those who would lose their jobs to robots. "There are fantastic things to be very excited about," said Martin Ford, author of two books on the future of automation. He cautioned that increased automation could have major detriments for the labor market. "Almost any kind of work that is on some level routine and predictable is very highly susceptible to [automation]."

Darktrace uses machine learning to identify and fight threats without the need for human input. A British cybersecurity startup has raised 65 million in funding as part of its ongoing global expansion efforts. Darktrace, which applies machine learning to enable networks to automatically self-defend against potential threats, has secured the financing from a group led by global investment firm KKR. Additional support comes from existing investor global growth equity firm Summit Partners, along with new backers in the form of TenEleven Ventures and SoftBank-affiliated SB ISAT Fund. Mathematics-based cyberdefence firm claims Antigena can teach itself to fight off new malicious intrusions -- without human involvement.