The U.S. spends 270 billion on incarceration each year, has a prison population of about 2.2 million and an incarceration rate that's spiked 220 percent since the 1980s. But with the advent of data science, White House officials are asking experts for help. On Tuesday, June 7, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's Lynn Overmann, who also leads the White House Police Data Initiative, stressed the severity of the nation's incarceration crisis while asking a crowd of data scientists and artificial intelligence specialists for aid. "We have built a system that is too large, and too unfair and too costly -- in every sense of the word -- and we need to start to change it," Overmann said, speaking at a Computing Community Consortium public workshop. She argued that the U.S., a country that has the highest amount incarcerated citizens in the world, is in need of systematic reforms with both data tools to process alleged offenders and at the policy level to ensure fair and measured sentences.

When IBM's deep blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess in 1997, researchers thought it would take computers decades to beat humans at Go: a 2000 year old board game and even as early as last year, researchers thought we were at least 10 years away. But in early 2016, Google's DeepMind, using advances in Deep Learning, beat Lee Sedol the world champion of Go. In addition to games, Deep Learning is opening new business opportunities in various areas which were simply not possible a few years back. Come listen to leaders from Nervana Systems, Natural Selection, Mtell, and Netradyne who will be sharing their personal experiences of starting an AI company, opportunities that exist for starting AI based businesses and lessons learned throughout their career. Alex has a decade of experience in large-scale machine learning and the industrial IoT.

More details have emerged about the sweeping scope of Google/DeepMind's ambitions for pushing its algorithmic fingers deep into the healthcare sector -- including wanting to apply machine learning processing to UK NHS data within five years. New Scientist has obtained a Memorandum of Understanding between DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust in London, which describes what the pair envisage as a "broad ranging, mutually beneficial partnership, engaging in high levels of collaborative activity and maximizing the potential to work on genuinely innovative and transformational projects". Envisaged benefits of the collaboration include improvements in clinical outcomes, patient safety and cost reductions -- the latter being a huge ongoing pressure-point for the free-at-the-point-of-use NHS as demand for its services continues to rise yet government austerity cuts bite into public sector budgets. The MoU sets out a long list of "areas of mutual interest" where the pair see what they dub as "future potential" to work together over the five-year period of collaboration envisaged in the memorandum. The document, only parts of which are legally binding, was signed on January 28 this year.

I met up with founder Ali Parsa at the recent unveiling of a new AI based triage service that aims to make it easier and more effective for patients to take those first steps towards good health. The service was tested both live against experienced doctors and nurses on the day and over a more prolonged period and featured strongly on both occasions. Indeed, the AI system was found to be both more accurate and considerably faster (and therefore cheaper) than human based triage services.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as the old saying goes, and that's just as true in cybersecurity as it is in health. So believes Cylance, a startup that uses AI to detect and prevent cyberattacks. On Wednesday, Cylance announced that it just raised a whopping US 100 million in Series D funding. It will use the new infusion to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering programs. Dubbed CylanceProtect, the company's flagship product promises AI-based endpoint security while using a fraction of the system resources required by the approaches used in most enterprises today.

Cylance, an Irvine, California-based cybersecurity startup that taps machine-learning and artificial intelligence (A.I.) to thwart malware, has raised 100 million in a Series D round led by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities and Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors. The company was founded in 2012 by Stuart McClure, who sold an Internet security firm to McAfee for 86 million eight years ago and came on board as McAfee's chief technology officer (CTO). Prior to this round, Cylance had already raised about 77 million, including a 42 million round last July and 20 million the previous year. McClure has an interesting background -- his venture into the security realm was influenced by a deadly plane crash he was involved in back in 1989, one which resulted in the death of nine passengers. The event was apparently caused by a flaw in the Boeing 747's locking mechanism -- a known fault that the company ignored.

The top U.S. vehicle safety regulator said on Wednesday the government needs to be more nimble in designing rules for self-driving vehicles. The industry "is on version 238.32 by the time we get regulations out," National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) administrator Mark Rosekind said during an appearance at an industry conference in suburban Detroit. U.S. Department of Transportation guidelines expected in July will offer different approaches to oversight of self-driving, or autonomous, vehicle technologies, Rosekind said. Regulations that remain static for years "will not work for this area," Rosekind said. "We will have something different in July."

The dream of Americans flying inside a drone just moved one step closer. Ehang 184, the eponymous giant, 500-pound drone first introduced at CES 2016 in Las Vegas, is returning to Nevada for potential test flights, according to The Las Vegas Review Journal. While the size of a small airplane, the Ehang 184 is truly a drone. Passengers get in the one-seater, enter their destination and the Ehang 184 -- essentially a flying robot -- does the rest. SEE ALSO: Is the Valkyrie Co50 a test case for the FAA's willingness to innovate?

One of the lesser-known projects being pursued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the development of software that learns automatically to find patterns in scientific data. Now, the project could get its computer hardware from an oddly familiar source: the agency's former chief, Dan Goldin, who founded a startup making chips to better handle those calculations The company, KnuEdge, has modeled its computer chip on the human brain in an attempt to increase the speed of programs that fall under the umbrella of machine learning. The new chip could be plugged into data centers to teach itself such jobs as sorting images, understanding language, and following trends in streams of data. Goldin founded the company in 2005, keeping its operations secret until he revealed the new chip on Monday morning, along with voice recognition software that excels in noisy environments. Over the last 10 years, he has supervised the slow process of building the new chip from scratch.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display