Some of society's brightest minds have warned that artificial intelligence (AI) may lead to dangerous unintended consequences, yet leaders of the U.S. intelligence community--with its vast budgets and profound capabilities--have yet to decide who within these organizations is responsible for the ethics of their AI creations. When a new capability is conceived or developed, the intelligence community does not assign anyone responsibility for anticipating how a new AI algorithm may go awry. If scenario-based exercises were conducted, the intelligence community provides no guidelines for deciding when a risk is too great and a system should not be built and assigns no authority to make such decisions. Intelligence agencies use advanced algorithms to interpret the meaning of intercepted communications, identify persons of interest and anticipate major events within troves of data too large for humans to analyze. If artificial intelligence is the ability of computers to create intelligence that humans alone could not have achieved, then the U.S. intelligence community invests in machines with such capabilities.

The 2016 Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA) is part of a joint effort between other major conferences and academic events targeting work towards the computational recreation of human-level intelligence.– "It is actually the first time we had approximately 250 participants all together, certainly this shows a steady progress over many years," Samsonovich said on Monday. John Laird, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan, told Sputnik the conference is unique in that it involves collaboration between numerous experts and universities. "I think that's one of the unique things that's happened this year is these three or four conferences coming together and making it possible for people that are interested in different sort of sides of it to come together," Laird said. "I think that's been a unique experience and from what I've heard people talking about it, it's been very successful."

Cortana is set to fly the friendly skies thanks to a new partnership between Microsoft and Boeing, bring the Microsoft intelligent assistant closer still to the domain of its namesake. Microsoft and Boeing announced a partnership today to move Boeing's suite of digital aviation offerings over to Azure, and the end result is that said servers are going to begin to get smarter, according to Microsoft. "Centralizing Boeing's digital aviation applications on Azure will allow Boeing to analyze a large set of data provided from multiple sources," a Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch via email, explaining how the partnership is set to make Boeing's offerings better for airlines that use them. "Boeing could use the Cortana Intelligence Suite to help airline operators more effectively manage inventory, more efficiently schedule pilots and cabin crews, or proactively schedule maintenance that might otherwise delay a flight based on the data intelligence they gather from the cloud." That means that first, this is a very early partnership – the focus here is on the potential to expedite certain tasks in the future.

Chatbots are rising in popularity. As artificial intelligence has increased in popularity, so have these bots. Bots are responsible for responding to queries, troubleshooting important customer service problems, assisting users to find products and more. Chatbots are computer programs that interact with the users in natural languages. The chatbot technology began in 1960s.

CES--Volvo Cars will use the NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2 deep learning- based computing engine to power a fleet of 100 Volvo XC90 SUVs starting to hit the road next year in the Swedish carmaker's Drive Me autonomous-car pilot program, NVIDIA announced today. Autonomous technology is an important contributor to Volvo's Vision 2020 -- its guiding principles for creating safer vehicles. This work has resulted in world-leading advancements in autonomous and semi-autonomous driving, and a new safety benchmark for the automotive industry. "Our vision is that no one should be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo by the year 2020," said Marcus Rothoff, director of the Autonomous Driving Program at Volvo Cars. "NVIDIA's high-performance and responsive automotive platform is an important step towards our vision and perfect for our autonomous drive program and the Drive Me project."

The history of technology is the history of human interaction with machines. Millions of years ago, we started with SOUND (voice), and soon came the WORD (text). The touchscreen made redundant the mechanical keyboard. However, 90% of human communication still happens through voice because it is natural. Unfortunately, technology progress took the time to catch up with it.

That burrito in your hands--so warm, so gooey, the richness cut by cilantro and red-hot spice. Before you take a bite, you'd better take a picture. Multiply that impulse by tens of thousands and you get Yelp's database of images, drawn from burrito joints, cocktail bars, and more. Until recently, Yelp was dependent on users to tag their images with search-friendly metadata. But now, using the kind of deep learning techniques that are transforming the field of AI, Yelp is starting to see the business benefits of using software intelligence to power its listing pages and user recommendations.

Professor Fei Fei Li invests her time researching computer sciences at the Stanford University. She is Director of the Stanford AI Lab, Researcher in AI, computer vision, machine learning and cognitive neuroscience. We particularly loved her latest appearance on this TED Talks event about how systems learn how physical objects look and wanted to share this with you. YouTube: "Fei Fei Li: How we're teaching computers to understand pictures" by TED Talks

The ortho giant's purchase of French surgical robotics firm Medtech could give competitor Mazor Robotics a run for its money, according to one analyst. Zimmer Biomet has officially entered the surgical robotics market with its acquisition of a majority of shares in the French firm Medtech, maker of a robotics platform for neurological and spine procedures. The Warsaw, IN-based company, a leader in the musculoskeletal space, announced July 18 that it had purchased almost 59% of shares in Medtech and also intends to mount an all-cash simplified tender offer to acquire the remaining shares. Zimmer Biomet will continue to operate Medtech out of its current headquarters in Montepellier, France, which will also serve as a "center of excellence" for Zimmer Biomet's surgical robotics development efforts, according to a joint press release from the companies. With the Medtech acquisition, Zimmer Biomet gains the Rosa platform, which is currently used in 20 hospitals in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East, according to the company's website.

BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems Integration, Technology Solutions-Advanced Information Technologies, Burlington, Massachusetts, has been awarded a 9,402,650 cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for software and reports. The contractor will provide development and integration of the latest advancements in machine learning that benefit this effort as well as architectural enhancements that increase the flexibility and agility of applying analytics to solve space situational awareness problems and take full advantage of high-performance computing capabilities and multiple forms of visualization of the reasoning performed by the analytics involved in this effort. This includes demonstration of new capabilities over three-year spirals that progressively demonstrate detection of increasingly complex scenarios and improved detection and prediction capabilities. Work will be performed in Burlington, Massachusetts, and Arlington, Virginia, and is expected to be complete by July 15, 2019. This award is the result of a competitive acquisition, with two offers received.