What do animals and galaxies have in common? The similarity is now helping conservationists monitor endangered animals that are often targeted by poachers. By deploying small drones with infrared cameras attached, scientists are developing tools for wildlife officials to watch these wild animals without disturbing them. At night, when poachers are most likely to strike, wildlife guards have a difficult time spotting animals in the dark. But on infrared cameras, they're impossible to miss.

If not regulated or controlled soon, artificial intelligence (AI) could become an "immortal dictator" and there will be no escape for humans, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has warned. In a new documentary on AI, Musk said: "At least when there's an evil dictator, that human is going to die. But for an AI there would be no death. It would live forever, and then you'd have an immortal dictator, from which we could never escape". "If AI has a goal and humanity just happens to be in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it. No hard feelings," Musk told Chris Paine, the director of the new documentary titled "Do You Trust This Computer?"

Machine Learning, a subset of Artificial Intelligence has been growing in the last 5 years. The intersection of advanced software and acceleration in hardware capabilities has provided an inflection point for AI systems. Evidently, AI systems can now learn faster, predict with more accuracy and perform tasks that they haven't tried yet. AI and ML is a natural solution for any knowledge-driven industry wherein a large amount of new data is repeatedly produced. New data requires standardization, classification, summarization and storage, all of which are tasks best suited for AI/ML implementation.

U.S. cars are twice as fuel-efficient today as they were 40 years ago. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards are a major reason why. These standards are in the news because the Trump administration plans to scale back increases scheduled under President Barack Obama that require automakers to double fuel economy by 2025. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt now says that this standard is too high. This announcement has rightfully sparked debate – not just about narrow costs and benefits of fuel economy standards, but also over the U.S. role in shaping a global industry that faces a trio of radical transformations via electrification, self-driving cars and ride-sharing.

Students at The University of Texas at Dallas are using artificial intelligence to stop mass shootings before they start. "It's something that we haven't had before," said Ashlesha Nesarikar, a UT Dallas computer science major. The early-warning system the 19-year-old and her team developed is called iNotify -- it instantly analyzes security camera video to identify weapons and real threats. "We can add this extra level of context to, in real time, recognize whether someone is wielding a weapon and posing a threat to people in the community," Nesarikar said. The successful test flight from Virgin Galactic's spaceship, the VSS Unity, could be the first step for tourists wanting to take a quick trip to space.

In our work at Civis, we build a lot of models. Most of the time we're modeling people and their behavior because that's what we're particularly good at, but we're hardly the only ones doing this -- as we enter the age of "big data" more and more industries are applying machine learning techniques to drive person-level decision-making. This comes with exciting opportunities, but it also introduces an ethical dilemma: when machine learning models make decisions that affect people's lives, how can you be sure those decisions are fair? A central challenge in trying to build fair models is quantifying some notion of'fairness'. In the US there is a legal precedent which establishes one particular definition. However, this is also an area of active research.

Apple could be working on AR displays for its upcoming autonomous cars. A patent application by the Cupertino giant reveals details about an AR system that's designed to present 3D models of the road ahead on the windshield. Apple Insider reported Thursday that it has spotted a new patent application by Apple, entitled "Adaptive Vehicle Augmented Reality Display Using Stereographic Imagery." In the documentation that the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published late last week, it is stated there that Apple is thinking of an AR system that generates imagery of sceneries based on a pre-generated 3D model of the world. According to the Apple-centric news site, the patent could be hinting at an AR display for the upcoming Project Titan car. The possible purpose of having the AR system around is to provide the autonomous vehicle with information about the road ahead, including things that may be out of the driver's vision.

Facebook faces the dilemma of losing trust and even users in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica data leak. Consumer privacy groups are filing a complaint with the FTC that Facebook is violating a privacy decree by failing to get consent from users before it scans their photos to identify them. Already under siege over loose privacy controls and Russian manipulation, Facebook is about to be challenged on another issue: facial recognition. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and several other consumer groups plan Friday to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking for an investigation into the network's use of facial recognition technology. Facebook for years has used the technology to help users in tagging photos, but it has failed to gain proper consent for linking biometric markers with individual users, the technology watchdog groups say.

London/Singapore:The scandal over the alleged abuse of Facebook Inc.'s user data is unfolding a long way from China, and yet privacy regulators in Beijing have been watching intently. Their interest shows how all three big players in the technology world--the Americans, Chinese and Europeans--are feeling their way to balance the demands of consumers for privacy and of governments for security. But they're also competing to shape the rules of the game for internet companies and, for the US and China in particular, to maximize access to data for a bigger goal: to dominate artificial intelligence, the next frontier in machine learning. "All of these governments and companies are in the middle of trying to figure out what data governance should look like," said Samm Sacks, senior fellow in the technology program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "And this is happening in a global context that will have implications for trade and for research and development in AI." New Chinese privacy standards take effect on 1 May.

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try) to disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. In early 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, an AI chatbot that was supposed to mimic the behavior of a curious teenage girl and engage in smart discussions with Twitter users. The project would display the promises and potential of AI-powered conversational interfaces. However, in less than 24 hours, the innocent Tay became a racist, misogynist and a holocaust denying AI, debunking--once again--the myth of algorithmic neutrality. For years, we've thought that artificial intelligence doesn't suffer from the prejudices and biases of its human creators because it's driven by pure, hard, mathematical logic.