The White House has issued a report on, and recommendations for, the development of artificial intelligence (AI). "Intelligent computer systems have long been the subject of science fiction," the administration said in releasing the report, as well as a strategic plan for research and development. "Now, we are entering an era in which AI is having broad and deep impacts on our daily lives." "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence" was released a day before the president is scheduled to speak at the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh. The science and technology conference is cohosted by Carnegie Melon University and the University of Pittsburgh.

These are our top favorite artificial intelligence movies.

Shootings are an epidemic in the US, but federal funding for research into gun violence has been in a deep freeze since 1996, thanks in part to the NRA-backed Dickey Amendment, which prevents the Center for Disease Control from pursuing research "to advocate or promote gun control." Basically, humans can't get money to research the problem of gun violence in the US. To get around this, some scientists want machines to do the job. On September 25, University of Pennsylvania computer scientists Ellie Pavlick and Chris Callison-Burch unveiled a new, human-annotated database of gun violence incidents in the US at the Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange Conference in New York. The database was created by workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, and carefully highlights information from thousands of news articles over the course of several years, Pavlick told me in an interview.

What do you do if your autonomous housecleaning robot breaks your stuff while it's cleaning or throws out valuable items along with clutter because it considers those actions shortcuts to its prime directive of efficiency? Those are some of the complex challenges policy officials will have to unravel as artificial intelligence blooms in the U.S. in the coming decades. The issues aren't as trivial as they sound because they are wrapped up in security and safety issues, according to a new White House report. Titled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence," the report outlines possible future directions and considerations for AI technology development over the next 50 years. It was released a day ahead of the White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh on Oct. 13 and unveiled in a blog post by Deputy U.S. CTO Ed Felten and Terah Lyons, policy adviser to the U.S. CTO. The report recommends that the White House convene a study of automation and the economy that results in a public report released by the end of the year, according to Felten and Lyons.

While the future of artificial intelligence is probably going to be driven by Silicon Valley, the folks in Washington, DC want their say about how it will work, too. In two official reports today, the White House outlined its strategy for promoting artificial intelligence research and development in the US. While most of the bigger questions were punted to future legislators ("more research is needed" is a key phrase), the executive branch did draw some lines in the sand. And most importantly to the research community, the White House is not pushing for AI to be broadly regulated--instead, the use of the technology will be held to specific standards in the automotive, aviation, and finance industries. Three key guiding philosophies were presented across the reports, titled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence" and "National Artificial Intelligence Research and Development Strategic Plan": AI needs to augment humanity instead of replacing it, AI needs to be ethical, and there must be an equal opportunity for everyone to develop these systems.

Consider one of the more common applications of A.I. today, identifying faces in pictures. The task it is replacing is a painstaking, laborious one: go through photos, and see if a face matches an already-known face. When done by A.I., there is a front-end process of training the algorithm by having it learn millions of faces. Then, once trained, the algorithm can, with rapid speed, look at a new picture and see if the faces in it match any in its already existing deep knowledge of faces. The skill needed to do this the old-fashioned way is mostly patience and a good memory.

Federal agencies should be individually exploring how artificial intelligence could improve their operations, a White House report suggests. Agencies should consider building "DARPA-like organizations" for "high-risk, high-reward AI research and its application" in government, said the report, which outlined opportunities and challenges for the technology. The report was released Wednesday, months after the White House hosted a series of public workshops, including one focused on AI applications for social good. That document incorporated discussions from the workshops, and recommended the Executive Office of the President publish a second report by the yearend to delve deeper into the effects of AI on the U.S. job market and outline recommended policy responses. The White House recommended federal agencies prioritize open training data and open data standards for artificial intelligence so those systems could be trained to analyze government data sets.

The Obama administration may be headed for the exits, but it continues to focus on the impact of artificial intelligence on the economy and the nation at large. Artificial intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term for a group of technologies--including machine learning--that enable computers to learn new skills and capabilities based on the data they are exposed to, among other factors. The just-released report, titled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence," does not downplay potential job loss due to the advent of ever-smarter computers, but still posits that the technology will open up new career opportunities for those versed in it or who have higher-level skills. It also holds that public policy, especially re-training programs, can mitigate the negative impact of increasing automation by preparing displaced workers for other jobs. Prepared for the White House by the National Science and Technology Council's Subcommittee on Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, the report reiterates the conventional wisdom that AI-fueled automation will take over more jobs that could not be automated in the past.

A UK parliamentary committee has urged the government to act proactively -- and to act now -- to tackle "a host of social, ethical and legal questions" arising from growing usage of autonomous technologies such as artificial intelligence. "While it is too soon to set down sector-wide regulations for this nascent field, it is vital that careful scrutiny of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions of artificially intelligent systems begins now," says the committee. "Not only would this help to ensure that the UK remains focused on developing'socially beneficial' AI systems, it would also represent an important step towards fostering public dialogue about, and trust in, such systems over time." The committee kicked off an enquiry into AI and robotics this March, going on to take 67 written submissions and hear from 12 witnesses in person, in addition to visiting Google DeepMind's London office. Publishing its report into robotics and AI today, the Science and Technology committee flags up several issues that it says need "serious, ongoing consideration" -- including: "[W]itnesses were clear that the ethical and legal matters raised by AI deserved attention now and that suitable governance frameworks were needed," it notes in the report.

IMAGE: Brown researchers have trained a computer algorithm to spot in laboratory samples a cellular transition associated with more aggressive cancers. Brown University researchers have developed a new image analysis technique to distinguish two key cancer cell types associated with tumor progression. The approach could help in pre-clinical screening of cancer drugs and shed light on a cellular metamorphosis that is associated with more malignant and drug-resistant cancers. The epithelial-mesenchymal transition, or EMT, is a process by which more docile epithelial cells transform into more aggressive mesenchymal cells. Tumors with higher numbers of mesenchymal cells are often more malignant and more resistant to drug therapies.