"About 6,000 languages are currently spoken in the world today," says Elizabeth Salesky of MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Human Language Technology (HLT) Group. "Within the law enforcement community, there are not enough multilingual analysts who possess the necessary level of proficiency to understand and analyze content across these languages," she continues. This problem of too many languages and too few specialized analysts is one Salesky and her colleagues are now working to solve for law enforcement agencies, but their work has potential application for the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. The research team is taking advantage of major advances in language recognition, speaker recognition, speech recognition, machine translation, and information retrieval to automate language processing tasks so that the limited number of linguists available for analyzing text and spoken foreign languages can be used more efficiently. "With HLT, an equivalent of 20 times more foreign language analysts are at your disposal," says Salesky.

Awesome Con is a place to celebrate comic books, movies, television, toys, and games – and beginning this year, science and technology are joining the party at the inaugural Awesome Con Science Fair presented by Science Channel! Maybe you wanna learn more about cloning. You're probably terrified of robotics. The worlds of science fiction and science fact overlap, and we're excited to now expand Awesome Con and create new awareness, advocacy, and interest in all things nerdy, techy, wonky, and smart! The Awesome Con Science Fair presented by Science Channel's participants include Science Channel (obviously), NASA, the Smithsonian, the Department of Energy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, the Society for Science and the Public, and Nerd Nite!

Unlike robotic AIs that are being built to emulate the human brain, UNU works with existing human intelligence instead of replicating it. The platform, which is open to the public, allows a group of people to converge on an answer in real time. While a swarm of seven predicted the Oscars, the Derby decision came from 20 people. For the AMA at 1 p.m. EDT today, the group that will make political predictions is expected to range from 100 to 200 people. The participants will come from UNU's user base, which has already answered fantasy football and cooking queries.

"When we look at what's happening with artificial intelligence, we see something that is very, very powerful, very valuable for military applications, but we also see a technology that is still quite fundamentally limited," DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar said at the Atlantic Council on May 2. Aiming to define those limits, a new Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program will try to answer a singular question: "What are the fundamental limitations inherent in machine learning systems?" Through a series of research areas of interest, the Fundamental Limits of Learning, or Fun LoL, program will assess the potential of focused investigations by developing, validating and applying a theoretical framework for learning, according to the recently released request for information. The two primary research areas focus on articulating a general mathematical framework to measure learning and applying that framework to existing machine learning methods to characterize capabilities of current techniques. Machines can master chess, Jeopardy! Because complex threats require machines to adapt and learn quickly, it is important that they be able to generalize creatively from previously learned concepts.

Mandarin Chinese is a notoriously difficult language to learn -- a labyrinth of semantic tones, elaborate characters and obscure idiomatic phrases. And in China, a land of infinite linguistic diversity, the government has spent decades struggling to unify the country under that one language, not without some controversy. David Moser, the author of "A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language," who has lived in China for more than two decades, talks about the thorny politics of Mandarin Chinese, which is known in Chinese as Putonghua. There are aspects of Chinese that make it hard for foreigners to learn, and there are aspects that make it difficult for native Chinese. I think the one that gets the most press -- and is in some sense the most controversial -- is the Chinese characters.

It is sixty years since scientists gathered for their historical meeting about artificial intelligence at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. It was a month-long brainstorming session during which scientists they explored the possibilities of thinking computers, and it kick-started a field of research that we're still benefiting from today. AI is revolutionizing areas ranging from transport to translation. Can it do the same for cybersecurity? Much of the action in AI today revolves around machine learning.

Most people have heard about self-driving cars, with companies from Google to Honda developing autonomous vehicles. But driverless technology could be going beyond cars, with the testing of a self-flying helicopter. A Sikorsky S-76 commercial helicopter has now successfully taken off and flown autonomously 30 miles, before landing itself safely. The helicopter in the trial was the Sikorsky S-76 model which used Sikorsky's MATRIX system The Sikorsky Autonomy Research Aircraft (SARA), used Sikorsky's MATRIX system. This is the same system that is use in the Optionally Piloted Black Hawk (OPBH) Demonstrator.

Earlier this month, Bezos spoke at a conference sponsored by the Washington Post and said that Trump's comments were "not an appropriate way for a presidential candidate to behave." Bezos was asked again about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and elaborated on his views. He said Trump's attempts to freeze critics in the media is "not appropriate." Anyone running for president should embrace criticism, free speech, and all forms of Constitutional values, he said. A Nixon administration official threatened to put a part of Graham's anatomy through "a big, fat wringer" if the Post published a controversial story.

Facebook has built an AI system that can read text as well as a human. The new computer can read through several thousand posts per second, in more than 20 languages, and understand what they are all saying. The new tool will be used to let people get more out of the site, it said. "Understanding the various ways text is used on Facebook can help us improve people's experiences with our products, whether we're surfacing more of the content that people want to see or filtering out undesirable content like spam," it wrote in a blogpost announcing the change. Boston Dynamics describes itself as'building dynamic robots and software for human simulation'. It has created robots for DARPA, the US' military research company Deep Blue, a computer created by IBM, won a match against world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Far from the packed arenas and showy lights of the campaign trail, the education of Donald Trump has quietly begun. The unlikely Republican presidential candidate who rose to popularity as a political outsider is now preparing for a general election battle against one of the most experienced policy professionals ever to run for president, presuming Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee. So as Trump's team begins to ready the candidate for the fall debates and drafts a series of speeches, including one on the U.S. economy, the New York businessman with no elected experience is cramming to get up to speed, consulting experts, asking questions and refining his ideas in anticipation of certain assault by Democrats. The crash courses in foreign and domestic policy are a rite of passage for virtually every presidential candidate. But they carry even greater importance for Trump, who has mocked the Washington establishment as overcomplicating problems and won over many voters with simple ideas that often lack details: build a wall to stop illegal immigration, defeat Islamic State, bring back jobs, make America great again.