A CSRA subsidiary has been awarded a 7.5 million contract to help the U.S. Air Force develop new approaches for analyses of the trust calibration process to facilitate human-machine collaborations, Military & Aerospace Electronics reported Monday. John Keller writes SRA International will develop concepts to help aircraft pilots, intelligence analysts and maintenance technicians build trust with robots. The Air Force also wants SRA to develop new methods to execute human-robot teaming exercises, calibrate trust and maintain transparency in human-machine contexts, according to the report. SRA will also work to blend human-robot teams with socio-emotional components of interpersonal team and trust dynamics, Keller reports. The company will perform work at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio through March 2023, Military & Aerospace Electronics reports.

Mario Fritz heads the Scalable Learning and Perception group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Advances in sensor technology and availability of data resources on the Web now give machines a more detailed "picture" of the real world than ever before--but machines are not yet able to acquire the rich semantic understanding that comes easily to humans. To narrow this gap, two of the group's main research themes are scalable learning, to facilitate the acquisition of large-scale knowledge representations, and scalable inference, to enable reasoning over large output spaces at test time. Progress in this direction will facilitate seamless interaction and information exchange between machines and humans, with applications in information retrieval, robotics, human-machine collaboration, and assisted living.

Top 10 most popular posts in Data Science and Machine Learning made in the month of July.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have all done it -- and now Baidu's doing it, too. The Chinese tech giant has open sourced one of its key machine learning tools, PaddlePaddle, offering the software up to the global community of AI researchers. This move has become common among tech firms as they pour more and more resources into their AI work. Open sourcing your tools is a good way to attract talent, but it also allows companies to shape the development of a field that's becoming increasingly central to consumer tech, underpinning everything from voice interfaces to auto-sorting photo galleries. Baidu's big claim for PaddlePaddle is that it's easier to use than rival programs.

Among several new trends being pushed pumped out of the Defense Department's research offices under the guise of the Third Offset strategy -- an initiative that seeks to leverage manned-unmanned teaming to counteract adversarial capabilities -- is the concept of cognitive electronic warfare. Cognitive EW seeks to leverage artificial intelligence to adapt to rapidly changing electromagnetic surroundings in the field. The Air Force Research Lab has recently released a request for information in navigation warfare research assistance from the contracting community that includes electronic attack, electronic protection and electronic support techniques for cognitive EW applications, among other similar research areas to bolster operations in environments in which communications and navigation could be degraded or disrupted. Aircraft, upon deploying for a particular mission, have a library of profiles to counter an adversary's attempt to jam its radar. However, with the proliferation and increasing proficiency of certain adversaries in this space, such as Russia, there is a growing sense of inadequacy.

Say you're interested in automation software for some customer service tasks. You visit a vendor's website, provide your contact information to request a live software demo and a sales assistant emails you to make sure you have the information you need. If you don't respond to that email, the sales assistant sends another the next day and the next -- this last one with an apology for bugging you and a smiley face. You feel a bit bad and finally answer this personable, persistent sales assistant, who, as it turns out, isn't a person at all. That scenario is already happening with virtual assistant platforms such as Conversica, and while it isn't pervasive just yet, within the next five years, there's a high probability that the "person" emailing you about a product or service you've shown interest in will be an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot thanks to leaps forward in technologies that understand customer intent and that can generate dialog to simulate natural conversations. In fact, artificial intelligence has come so far so fast in recent years, Gartner predicts it will be pervasive in all new products by 2020, with technologies including natural language capabilities, deep neural networks and conversational capabilities.

A panel of academic and industrial thinkers has looked ahead to 2030 to forecast how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might affect life in a typical North American city - in areas as diverse as transportation, health care and education--and to spur discussion about how to ensure the safe, fair and beneficial development of these rapidly emerging technologies. Titled "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030," this year-long investigation is the first product of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100), an ongoing project hosted by Stanford to inform societal deliberation and provide guidance on the ethical development of smart software, sensors and machines. "We believe specialized AI applications will become both increasingly common and more useful by 2030, improving our economy and quality of life," said Peter Stone, a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin and chair of the 17-member panel of international experts. "But this technology will also create profound challenges, affecting jobs and incomes and other issues that we should begin addressing now to ensure that the benefits of AI are broadly shared." The new report traces its roots to a 2009 study that brought AI scientists together in a process of introspection that became ongoing in 2014, when Eric and Mary Horvitz created the AI100 endowment through Stanford.

Recently I wrote about an interesting new project that's helping to deepen our understanding of the cosmos. A team from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are working on a prototype of an army of 5,000 robots that can head out into the galaxy. The machines, which are known as ProtoDESI, come in'platoons' of 10 robots and are designed to help us enhance the accuracy of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). DESI is intended to provide a 3D map of the universe and allow scientists to further explore things like dark matter. A second team, from University College London, are using machine learning techniques in their search for habitable worlds.