Artificial intelligence researcher and Managing Director of Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, research lab Eric Horvitz has just won the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, Microsoft shared on a blog post today. The award acknowledges his groundbreaking contributions in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction as well as "his persistent focus on using those discoveries as the basis for practical applications that make our lives easier and more productive." Horvitz first got interested in practical applications of artificial intelligence when he was pursuing his Ph.D. on principles of bounded rationality, as he wanted to "understand how computing systems immersed in the real world could make the best decisions in time-critical situations." Since then, Horvitz has combined multiple computer science disciplines through his work and he has been leading the research in exploring the interrelationships between artificial intelligence and fields like decision science, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Horvitz even collaborated with NASA's Mission Control Center to help them providing flight engineers with the most valuable information about space shuttle systems under intense time pressure.

Jamie Metzl is a Senior Fellow for Technology and National Security at the Atlantic Council. After 4 billion years of evolution by one set of rules, our species is about to begin evolving by another. Overlapping and mutually reinforcing revolutions in genetics, information technology, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, and other fields are providing the tools that will make it possible to genetically alter our future offspring should we choose to do so. Nearly everybody wants to have cancers cured and terrible diseases eliminated. Most of us want to live longer, healthier and more robust lives. Genetic technologies will make that possible. But the very tools we will use to achieve these goals will also open the door to the selection for and ultimately manipulation of non-disease-related genetic traits -- and with them a new set of evolutionary possibilities.

It's a long established tradition for startup founders to fudge their numbers, exaggerate projections, and cherrypick data in meetings with investors. But Venrock health investor Bob Kocher says this approach won't fly with him. "I hear spin every day. I believe I'm lied to more often in Silicon Valley than at the White House," says Kocher, who formerly worked as a special assistant to President Obama to help shape the Affordable Care Act. "I'm looking for entrepreneurs who will level with me."

It then presents this activity to human analysts, who confirm which events are actual attacks, and incorporate that feedback into its models for the next set of data. Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the machine-learning startup PatternEx have developed an AI platform called AI2 that predicts cyber-attacks significantly better than existing systems by continuously incorporating input from human experts (AI2 refers to merging AI with "analyst intuition": rules created by living experts). The team showed that AI2 can detect 85 percent of attacks --about three times better than previous benchmarks -- while also reducing the number of false positives by a factor of 5. The system was tested on 3.6 billion pieces of data known as "log lines," which were generated by millions of users over a period of three months. To predict attacks, AI2 combs through data and detects suspicious activity by clustering the data into meaningful patterns using unsupervised (automatic, no human help) machine learning.

After being stranded in the Mediterranean for three days, fear had overcome Alou Sango. "I thought that we would all die, because there was nothing left, the petrol had finished," he says of his journey from Libya. Like thousands before him, Sango boarded an overcrowded boat to escape the country's turmoil after being unable to return to his native Mali. But after days at sea the captain lost his way and, without a GPS position to give to the Italian authorities, the 100 or so passengers were losing hope. Their rubber dinghy was finally spotted by a Chinese vessel, which picked up the migrants and took them to Italy, where Sango, now 24, is studying through a Rome-based charity, Sant'Egidio Community.

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Thursday approved a rule change that would allow U.S. judges to issue search warrants for access to computers located in any jurisdiction when their location is unknown, despite opposition from civil liberties groups who say it will greatly expand the FBI's hacking authority. U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts transmitted the rules to Congress, which will have until Dec. 1 to reject or modify the changes to the federal rules of criminal procedure. If Congress does not act, the rules would take effect automatically. U.S. officials have portrayed the change as a common-sense administrative revision that is needed because criminals increasingly use technology to hide their true locations. The U.S. Justice Department, which has pushed the rule change since 2013, has described it as a minor modification needed to modernize the criminal code for the digital age, and has said it would not permit searches or seizures that are not already legal.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, engineers started looking into the problem of aerodynamic heating; the challenge was devising a way to have a warhead launch on a missile and reenter through the Earth's atmosphere unscathed so it could explode on target. The same principle carried over into spaceflight. In the early space age, a man took the place of the warhead on those same missiles. This ultimately led to the ablative heat shields that kept Apollo astronauts safe during their fiery returns through the atmosphere before splashdown, but they were a new technology in the 1960s. That meant, that like so many piece of Apollo, it was proved during the Gemini program.

Science is slowly inching its way to discovering the secret to immortality. Human enhancement, as defined by transhumanists, is everything that "encompasses a range of approaches that may be used to improve aspects of human function." Human enhancement is currently being researched in institutions such as Stanford University, which has recently devised a mathematical algorithm, called ReFIT, that can decipher neurological signals in the brain that convey movement, speed and accuracy. While the public justification of the study is to improve "prosthetic system performance and robustness in paralyzed people," its implications are far-reaching. The FDA has approved ReFIT for human clinical trials as researchers work to create neuroprosthetics for mind–controlled robotic limbs.

When you think of artificial intelligence, the first image that likely comes to mind is one of sentient robots that walk, talk and emote like humans. It's known as machine learning, and it revolves around enlisting computers in the task of sorting through the massive amounts of data that modern technology has allowed us to generate (a.k.a. One of the places machine learning is turning out to be the most beneficial is in the environmental sciences, which have generated huge amounts of information from monitoring Earth's various systems -- underground aquifers, the warming climate or animal migration, for example. A slew of projects have been popping up in this relatively new field, called computational sustainability, that combine data gathered about the environment with a computer's ability to discover trends and make predictions about the future of our planet. This is useful to scientists and policy-makers because it can help them develop plans for how to live and survive in our changing world.

When you think of artificial intelligence, the first image that likely comes to mind is one of sentient robots that walk, talk, and emote like humans. It's known as machine learning, and it revolves around enlisting computers in the task of sorting through the massive amounts of data that modern technology has allowed us to generate (a.k.a. One of the places machine learning is turning out to be the most beneficial is in the environmental sciences, which have generated huge amounts of information from monitoring Earth's various systems -- underground aquifers, the warming climate, or animal migration, for example. A slew of projects have been popping up in this relatively new field, called computational sustainability, that combine data gathered about the environment with a computer's ability to discover trends and make predictions about the future of our planet. This is useful to scientists and policy-makers because it can help them develop plans for how to live and survive in our changing world.