The government plans to propose basic rules for the research and development of artificial intelligence at a Group of Seven meeting of ministers in charge of information and communication technology later this month, sources said Friday. The envisioned proposal is expected to seek the establishment of eight principles, including the importance of respecting human dignity and protecting privacy when developing computer science that gives machines humanlike intelligence. Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Sanae Takaichi is expected to present the eight principles at the two-day G-7 meeting starting on April 29 in Takamatsu, Kagawa Prefecture, and call for deeper discussions involving international organizations such as the OECD. Artificial intelligence has advanced to the point where Google's AI program AlphaGo was recently able to defeat a Go grandmaster for the first time. AI technologies are expected to generate an economic return of around 121 trillion in Japan by 2045, according to an estimate that the government plans to present to the G-7 meeting.

Mauro Maggioni has been named the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Data Intensive Computation at Johns Hopkins in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Mathematics and the Whiting School of Engineering's Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics. He will join Johns Hopkins from Duke University, where in 2012 he was promoted from assistant professor to full professor of mathematics, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science. Maggioni is the 20th Bloomberg Distinguished Professor appointed across Johns Hopkins. The professorships are supported by a 350 million gift to the university by Johns Hopkins alumnus, philanthropist, and three-term New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The majority of this gift is dedicated to creating 50 new interdisciplinary professorships, galvanizing people, resources, research, and educational opportunities to address major world problems.

The simple machines are explosives with triggers, set in the ground primed and ready for someone to set them off. For humans, war does, and the landmines that once marked the front line between warring factions can change instead to deadly artifacts, a lethal trap for anyone who wanders unknowingly into danger. Getting rid of landmines is a humanitarian concern. To solve it, scientists from the University of Bristol are enlisting the help of drones. One of the major dangers with landmines is that, while they're waiting in the ground to blow up, the vegetation around them isn't, and after a few seasons, plants can grow over the bombs, hiding them from human eyes. But there are other ways to detect them, says John Day of Bristol's School of Physics: Living plants have a very distinctive reflection in the near infrared spectrum, just beyond human vision, which makes it possible to tell how healthy they are.

When viewed on a cosmic scale, humanity lives on a tiny grain of sand floating in an unimaginably-deep ocean. Huge expanses of space separate even the closest stars, ensuring that, should any sufficiently intelligent life form want to spread across the galaxy, it would take a momentous effort to launch across the interstellar seas. As we look toward the stars, hoping that we may visit them some day, many would argue that interstellar travel is impossible. After all, the nearest-known star system is over 4 light-years away. Let's think about that for a moment: It takes light 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the sun's surface to our planet's atmosphere.

"Criminal" is more violent than it needs to be, but it also has some unexpectedly involving elements. Half science-fiction tale, half espionage thriller, it's a pleasantly far-fetched endeavor that moves along so briskly that it leaves no time to consider its implausibilities, which are many. Directed by Ariel Vroman ("The Iceman") and written by Douglas Cook & David Weisberg, who scripted Michael Bay's "The Rock" back in the day, "Criminal" has a premise that's hard to wrap your head around: that the memories and feelings of one person can be implanted into another person's brain. Some high profile acting names were intrigued enough by this Frankenstein-ish notion to sign on, including Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, the once and future Wonder Woman Gal Gadot and, in a crucial but unbilled role, Ryan Reynolds. But it's Kevin Costner, the actor playing against type in the title role, who does the most to hold our interest.

The Journalism Department at Emerson College and the Emerson Engagement Lab recently invited William Li to give a talk to introduce machine learning to journalism and communications students. This is a live blog account of the talk by Catherine D'Ignazio. William Li is a 2015–2016 Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a 2016 PhD computer science graduate from MIT. He develops and applies machine learning methods to answer social science questions computationally and to promote public understanding of law, politics, and public policy. His projects include predicting the authors of unsigned Supreme Court opinions, visualizing the complexity of our laws, and discovering ideas from large collections of public comments on proposed regulations. William has also worked on recommender systems, speech recognition, and user activity prediction at Apple and Mitsubishi Electric. He did his master's degrees at MIT in computer science and the Technology and Policy Program, founded the MIT Assistive Technology Club, and has taught classes that involve civic collaborations with organizations such as the Massachusetts Committee for Public Counsel Services, Greater Boston Legal Services, and the Cambridge Commission for People with Disabilities. William Li introduces the topic and that he wants to make the session very interactive.

The last time Microsoft released a "bot" onto the internet, it quickly became a Donald Trump-supporting, Nazi-sympathising, conspiracy theory-believing racist . It has unveiled a website called CaptionBo t, which uses clever algorithms to recognise images. Users are asked to give a star rating to reflect its accuracy, letting the bot learn from its mistakes and improve its skills. "I can understand the content of any image and I'll try to describe it as well as any human," the bot said. If you look at the tweets above, you'll see what happened to Tay, Microsoft's last creation. It was supposed to be a "chill" machine, but ended up getting tricked into spouting racist rhetoric, praising Hitler and calling for Mexico to build a wall to keep migrants out of the US.

Now that the 2016 edition of the interactive festival is a thing of the past, here are the main ideas and trends that will shape both technology and the media in the coming years. On the one hand, we are told that things evolve fast and that the future is already upon us; on the other hand, there are claims that this digital revolution is just barely beginning and that there is a lot more to come. What's counts most may not be so much being able to differentiate sociology and foresight but instead to confront one's own ideas and take in the ideas of others. Multiplatform is one of the major trends that made a very prominent mark on this year's festival. It's a question of designing one's content to suit each broadcasting platform instead of adapting one's preformatted content to the platforms in question.

And now, the technology is being harnessed to streamline the United States Air Force acquisitions process -- an effort that will be undertaken by a small Lawrence business. Lawrence-based KalScott Engineering Inc. announced Wednesday it was selected to finish building artificial intelligence, called SOPHIA, for the Air Force. KalScott, owned by two Kansas University graduates, was chosen last summer to do some preliminary work training a supercomputer -- or "cognitive thinking machine" -- that could understand Defense Department contracting rules and answer questions about them audibly. Suman Saripalli, a co-owner of KalScott, said Wednesday the firm received the final go-ahead to complete the work. The announcement came with 750,000 more in funding. The finished product -- which will act as a "very intelligent assistant," Saripalli said -- is intended to help businesses and government employees navigate the Air Force's complex procurement process, which has been found to discourage small and innovative businesses from partnering with the federal government.

A United Nations meeting this week in Geneva is debating the future of autonomous weapons--the controversial weapons systems capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. Delegates from about 90 countries are discussing the far-reaching technical, legal, and ethical questions that these robotic weapons raise, and at the end of the week-long meeting they hope to agree on what to do next. For a group of arms control activists that has long been concerned about autonomous weapons, the next step countries should take is clear: they should ban these weapons. That's the goal of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of non-governmental organizations that was formed in late 2012 and whose steering committee includes groups like Human Rights Watch and the International Committee for Robot Arms Control. On Monday Human Rights Watch released a memorandum to the delegates in Geneva calling for countries to "adopt an international, legally binding instrument that prohibits the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons."