Three years ago, Customs and Border Protection placed an order for self-flying aircraft that could launch on their own, rendezvous, locate and monitor multiple targets on the ground without any human intervention. In its reasoning for the order, CBP said the level of monitoring required to secure America's long land borders from the sky was too cumbersome for people alone. To research and build the drones, CBP handed $500,000 to Mitre Corp., a trusted nonprofit Skunk Works that was already furnishing border police with prototype rapid DNA testing and smartwatch hacking technology. They were "tested but not fielded operationally" as "the gap from simulation to reality turned out to be much larger than the research team originally envisioned," a CBP spokesperson says. This year, America's border police will test automated drones from Skydio, the Redwood City, Calif.-based startup that on Monday announced it had raised an additional $170 million in venture funding at a valuation of $1 billion.

Clinton Township, Michigan--(Newsfile Corp. - March 1, 2021) - Resgreen Group (OTC PINK: RGGI) ("RGGI"), a leading mobile robot company, today announced the development of Atlas, its new Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) for demanding industrial and mission critical 24/7 applications. The vehicle can use either natural feature or magnetic tape guidance to navigate through manufacturing facilities and warehouses. The natural feature or free guidance requires no wires, tape or navigation marks. Instead, the vehicle uses advanced lasers to scan its surroundings, and then determines its position based on the mapped features along its path. "Atlas mobile robot was designed to meet a wide variety of customers' needs, whether it's free navigation requiring no modification to your facility or more cost-effective magnetic tape guidance," said Parsh Patel, CEO of RGGI. "We also understand industrial customers require a rugged vehicle that is built to last and moves heavy loads easily." It features 5G communications and operates using an Android or iOS application in manual mode and WiFi in automatic mode.

The reputation and bottom line of a company can be adversely affected if defective products are released. If a defect is not detected, and the flawed product is not removed early in the production process, the damage can be costly – and the higher the unit value, the higher those costs will be. And worst of all, dissatisfied customers can demand returns. To mitigate these costs, many manufacturers install cameras to monitor their products as they move along their production lines. However, the data obtained may not always be useful – or more appropriately said, the data is useful, but existing machine vision systems may not be able to accurately assess it at full production speeds.

The New York police department has acquired a robotic police dog, known as Digidog, and has deployed it on the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and, most recently, the Bronx. At a time that activists in New York, and beyond, are calling for the defunding of police departments – for the sake of funding more vital services that address the root causes of crime and poverty – the NYPD's decision to pour money into a robot dog seems tone-deaf if not an outright provocation. As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, put it on Twitter: "Shout out to everyone who fought against community advocates who demanded these resources go to investments like school counseling instead. Now robotic surveillance ground drones are being deployed for testing on low-income communities of color with underresourced schools." There is more than enough evidence that law enforcement is lethally racially biased, and adding an intimidating non-human layer to it seems cruel.

"Ordinary people here in China aren't happy about this technology but they have no choice. If the police say there have to be cameras in a community, people will just have to live with it. So says Chen Wei at Taigusys, a company specialising in emotion recognition technology, the latest evolution in the broader world of surveillance systems that play a part in nearly every aspect of Chinese society. Emotion-recognition technologies – in which facial expressions of anger, sadness, happiness and boredom, as well as other biometric data are tracked – are supposedly able to infer a person's feelings based on traits such as facial muscle movements, vocal tone, body movements and other biometric signals. It goes beyond facial-recognition technologies, which simply compare faces to determine a match. But similar to facial recognition, it involves the mass collection of sensitive personal data to track, monitor and profile people and uses machine learning to analyse expressions and other clues. The industry is booming in China, where since at least 2012, figures including President Xi Jinping have emphasised the creation of "positive energy" as part of an ideological campaign to encourage certain kinds of expression and limit others. Critics say the technology is based on a pseudo-science of stereotypes, and an increasing number of researchers, lawyers and rights activists believe it has serious implications for human rights, privacy and freedom of expression. With the global industry forecast to be worth nearly $36bn by 2023, growing at nearly 30% a year, rights groups say action needs to be taken now. The main office of Taigusys is tucked behind a few low-rise office buildings in Shenzhen. Visitors are greeted at the doorway by a series of cameras capturing their images on a big screen that displays body temperature, along with age estimates, and other statistics. Chen, a general manager at the company, says the system in the doorway is the company's bestseller at the moment because of high demand during the coronavirus pandemic. Chen hails emotion recognition as a way to predict dangerous behaviour by prisoners, detect potential criminals at police checkpoints, problem pupils in schools and elderly people experiencing dementia in care homes. Taigusys systems are installed in about 300 prisons, detention centres and remand facilities around China, connecting 60,000 cameras. "Violence and suicide are very common in detention centres," says Chen. "Even if police nowadays don't beat prisoners, they often try to wear them down by not allowing them to fall asleep.

Since 2019, government-sponsored initiatives around AI have proliferated across Asia Pacific. Such initiatives include the setting up of cross-domain AI ethics councils, guidelines and frameworks for the responsible use of AI, and other initiatives such as financial and technology support. The majority of these initiatives builds on the country's respective data privacy and protection acts. This is a clear sign that governments see the need to expand existing regulations when it comes to leveraging AI as a key driver for digital economies. All initiatives to date are voluntary in nature, but there are indications already that existing data privacy and protection laws will be updated and expanded to include AI.

The ACM Conference for Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) has decided to suspend its sponsorship relationship with Google, conference sponsorship co-chair and Boise State University assistant professor Michael Ekstrand confirmed today. The organizers of the AI ethics research conference came to this decision a little over a week after Google fired Ethical AI lead Margaret Mitchell and three months after the firing of Ethical AI co-lead Timnit Gebru. Google has subsequently reorganized about 100 engineers across 10 teams, including placing Ethical AI under the leadership of Google VP Marian Croak. "FAccT is guided by a Strategic Plan, and the conference by-laws charge the Sponsorship Chairs, in collaboration with the Executive Committee, with developing a sponsorship portfolio that aligns with that plan," Ekstrand told VentureBeat in an email. "The Executive Committee made the decision that having Google as a sponsor for the 2021 conference would not be in the best interests of the community and impede the Strategic Plan. We will be revising the sponsorship policy for next year's conference."

There have been predictions that Robots will take over our jobs. As of today, that prediction is rapidly coming to pass. Our imagination may tell us these robots are hardware, machines made of metal or carbon fibre. This is not quite the case, as these Robots are software called bots. Bots are programmed to repetitively automate operational and transactional tasks without the need for human input.

Artificial intelligence, which was once considered to have the potential to impact lives everywhere is actually affecting thousands of lives every day in reality. AI algorithms are used in almost every sector – criminal justice, recruitment, news media, manufacturing, banking, military, law enforcement, etc. With AI being used in diverse areas, there is a growing worry among researchers that bias in AI can threaten human rights and society, coming in the way of free speech, right to resources and information, to name a few. With such risks, the need for ethical, responsible, and transparent AI is obvious. In 2019, the AI Ethicist role was established as top 5 hires for companies that want to succeed in the digital domain.

The importance of considering distributive justice in climate policy motivates research in AI-based decision support to search for balanced alternatives across multiple sectors, regions, and generations and counteract existing asymmetries in policy design. This PhD position is one of the four PhD positions in the Hippo Lab (Hyper-heuristics for interpretable public policy analysis), which is part of the TU Delft Artificial Intelligence initiative to channel expertise in AI foundations to tackle societal and scientific challenges. With its excellent education and research at the intersection of technology, society and policy, the Faculty of TPM contributes to solving complex technical-social issues, such as energy transition, mobility, digitalisation, water management and (cyber) security. Stay updated on last news about Artificial Intelligence. Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.