Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, research lab was awarded the ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award for groundbreaking contributions in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Horvitz's work has primarily been focused on exploring the interrelationships between artificial intelligence and fields like decision science, cognitive science and neuroscience. The Newell award is given to a researcher whose work falls within the field of computer science or spans multiple disciplines. Horvitz's coworkers describe his impact as "immeasurable", and describe him as "an epic example of those brilliant researchers who have this huge confidence -- not over-confidence, but just confidence -- to keep pushing forward,". His research is described as delving into the ideas of how artificial intelligence can help to augment human intelligence, focusing on concept such as the principles of bounded rationality, and how computing systems immersed in the real world could make the best decisions in time-critical situations.

Armored tanks are built to protect, but they weren't designed to manoeuvre through rough terrain or avoid incoming threats. New concept vehicles have dropped the extra thick steel padding, allowing future machines to travel over 95 percent of available terrain and with more speed. Created by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the Ground X-Vehicle Technology program is working to produce'nimble, fast and smart' combat trucks that are able to shield themselves from enemies and deflect targeted missiles. A new concept design drops the extra thick steel padding from the machines, allowing the future fighting vehicles to travel over 95 percent of available terrain and with more speed. Created by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA), the Ground X-Vehicle Technology program is working to produce'nimble, fast, smart' combat trucks that can shield itself and deflect missiles Survivability through Agility--Autonomously avoid incoming threats without harming occupants through technologies that enable, for example, agile motion and active repositioning of armor.

Citing the All Writs act as a way to give the government the power to compel companies to redesign or reimplement their electronic products to government specifications represents a threat to everyone's civil liberties. This U.S. federal statute, first adopted in 1789 and updated in 1911, today plays a pivotal role in the FBI vs. Apple legal battle in which a federal magistrate in California ordered Apple, at the behest of the FBI, to create and sign a new version of Apple's iOS operating system. In a related court filing, the Justice Department said all information on an electronic device must be accessible to police under court warrant. Does that mean the government has the authority to obtain a court order to compel Apple to redesign its next generation of iPhones so it can break into and read any encrypted information? Moreover, can it prohibit importation of, say, Samsung smartphones for which Samsung has no ability to break in or read encrypted information?

After years of gridlock, a bill that would help legalize Internet poker in California advanced out of a legislative committee on Wednesday after its author said there has been "serious progress toward consensus" between many competing interests in the gambling industry. The measure by Assemblyman Adam Gray (D-Merced) would allow Internet poker websites to be operated by Native American tribes that operate casinos in partnerships with card clubs. Federal approval would also be required. It would give at least 60 million annually to the horse-racing industry to compensate it for being excluded from Internet poker and for losing revenue to tribal gambling casinos. The provision on subsidizing the horse-race industry removes one stumbling block that has prevented an agreement in the past.

Visualization of high-dimensional data, such as text documents, is useful to map out the similarities among various data points. In the high-dimensional space, documents are commonly represented as bags of words, with dimensionality equal to the vocabulary size. Classical approaches to document visualization directly reduce this into visualizable two or three dimensions. Recent approaches consider an intermediate representation in topic space, between word space and visualization space, which preserves the semantics by topic modeling. While aiming for a good fit between the model parameters and the observed data, previous approaches have not considered the local consistency among data instances. We consider the problem of semantic visualization by jointly modeling topics and visualization on the intrinsic document manifold, modeled using a neighborhood graph. Each document has both a topic distribution and visualization coordinate. Specifically, we propose an unsupervised probabilistic model, called Semafore, which aims to preserve the manifold in the lower-dimensional spaces through a neighborhood regularization framework designed for the semantic visualization task. To validate the efficacy of Semafore, our comprehensive experiments on a number of real-life text datasets of news articles and Web pages show that the proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art baselines on objective evaluation metrics.

If you had the opportunity to vote for a politician you totally trusted, who you were sure had no hidden agendas and who would truly represent the electorate's views, you would, right? What if that politician was a robot? Futures like this have been the stuff of science fiction for decades. And, if so, should we pursue this? Recent opinion polls show that trust in politicians has declined rapidly in Western societies and voters increasingly use elections to cast a protest vote.

The size of the digital universe will grow to 176 zettabytes by 2025–leading to a future of machine learning that could have significant ramifications for the defense and intelligence communities, officials said. Speaking at an event hosted by DefenseOne, James Harris, chief technology officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Jason Matheny, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), said speed and automation will be key to the future of intelligence collection and analysis. DIA is testing machine learning to understand the full range of capabilities. One example is a machine that runs through all of the resumes a company has received, and matches the resumes with job vacancy announcements, said Harris. While this is a small-scale example, it opens up the possibility of machines running all open-source data.

A brood of sidewalk drones could be rolling around the nation's capital within a year, if a District of Columbia Council member has her way. Executives from Starship Technologies, with roots in Estonia and London, say their goal is to unleash a platoon of "smart, friendly robots" that will ply sidewalks along with pedestrians to make local deliveries of groceries or small packages "almost free." The company is led by Skype co-founders Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis, and launched the effort in November. Councilwoman Mary Cheh and company officials sought to make a splash by promising one of the squat vehicles on Wednesday would deliver legislation to the council authorizing self-driving delivery robots. The little white device, which looks like an ice chest rolling on six wagon wheels, did indeed scoot its way into Council Secretary Nyasha Smith's office with the three-page bill in its compartment and reporters on its tail.

A new article in ScienceDaily reports, "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. 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."

Robots just helped shed light on a maritime tragedy. The US Coast Guard, National Transportation Safety Board and Woods Hole Oceanographic have used both an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and a fiber-controlled craft to find the voyage data recorder of the El Faro, a cargo ship that sank near the Bahamas during Hurricane Joaquin last October. That's no mean feat when its remains are 15,000 feet deep, and the recorder is roughly the size of a coffee can. The recovery should not only help explain the exact circumstances of the El Faro's final moments, but provide some closure to the families of the 33 crew members that lost their lives.