Officials in San Francisco have voted to give the city's police the power to use potentially lethal, remote-controlled robots in emergency situations. The 8-3 vote in favour of the move followed an emotionally charged two-hour debate and came despite strong objections from civil liberties and other police oversight groups in the city on the west coast of the United States. Supervisor Connie Chan, a member of the committee that forwarded the proposal to the full board, said she understood concerns over use of force but that "according to state law, we are required to approve the use of these equipments. So here we are, and it's definitely not an easy discussion." The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) has said it does not have pre-armed robots and has no plans to arm robots with guns.

New developments in artificial intelligence and technology could help humans communicate with their pets and any other animal species that calls Earth home. Outside of the field of science, the idea of two-way human-animal communication has existed in pop culture since at least as far back as 1967, when the original "Doctor Dolittle" movie came out. But the idea is no longer just a far-fetched movie plot; it's nearing reality.Scientists have uncovered successful methods of understanding animal language, including the complexities of their various sounds and actions together. The research into talking to animals goes back years, but in 2017, scientists figured out one crucial factor in their AI based endeavor: Languages, both human and animal, can be visualized as shapes, and these shapes are way easier for AI technologies to decipher and decode."You ask the AI to build a shape that represents a language," said Aza Raskin, co-founder and president of Earth Species Project. "You could take English, you could take Japanese, and you could rotate one shape on top of the other, and the word that is dog ends up in the same spot in both. In the animal domain, when we want to translate animal communication that you can then translate, say, from behavior to what the animals are saying, from what the animals are saying to another dialect of another animal."SEE MORE: Cats Know Your Voice And Can Tell When You're Talking To ThemRaskin and the California based non-profit Earth Species Project is on a mission to decode animal communication based on the advances in AI combined with the growing understanding of how, why, and when animals make certain sounds and actions. Raskin told Newsy about a recent breakthrough development in AI technology that's brought humans closer than ever to talking to furry friends."You can put in three seconds of anyone's voice my voice, your voice and the computer will continue to speak in your voice after those three seconds are up, so it'll continue saying what you were saying," Raskin said. "It'll say it with your diction, with your prosody, with your identity, and it'll maintain semantic coherence for five, six, seven, eight seconds. One of the realizations then is that that means that the next 12, 36, 48 months, we will be able to do this with animal communication."That means humans might be able to directly ask their dogs why it's barking or why a cat is meowing, and the pets could theoretically understand the human's words, beyond just …. See more videos about Videos, Zoology, Technology, Nature, Biology, Animals.

Data science is a joint branch of mathematics, business and IT that deals with extracting valuable and meaningful information from large data sets. It allows you to assess the quality of your data and understand patterns and relationships to predict future outcomes. There are four main types of analytics: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive. You are constantly collecting and analysing data. But what does that data mean?

A machine-learning tool that combines genetic and clinical data can distinguish, with a high level of accuracy, between fast- and slow-progressing Parkinson's patients, a study reported. The tool could be used to predict those patients who are more likely to progress over the short term -- and who could be the target population for clinical trials of therapies aiming to slow disease progression. "If clinicians are able to enroll in trials only those patients predicted to progress, they can get much faster results and move this field along more quickly," Ali Torkamani, PhD, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of molecular and experimental medicine at the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said in an institute press release. "Right now, [Parkinson's] clinical trials are large and tend to take two to three years. We're hoping to empower smaller trials that are on the order of a one-year time frame," Torkamani added.

Digital life is augmenting human capacities and disrupting eons-old human activities. Code-driven systems have spread to more than half of the world's inhabitants in ambient information and connectivity, offering previously unimagined opportunities and unprecedented threats. Now the question is, As emerging algorithm-driven artificial intelligence (AI) continues to spread, will people be better off than they are today? Although all these are just predictions and taking count of some tech movies, is it possible that AI will rule the future? While Hollywood creates many science fiction movies that depict AI as human-like robots that will take over the world and rule humans in the future, the current evolution of AI technologies isn't like that or quite that intelligent.

At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced Amazon DataZone, a new data management service that can help enterprises catalog, discover, share and -- most importantly -- govern their data. The nifty part here is that AWS is using machine learning to help businesses build these data catalogs and generate the metadata to make it searchable. "To unlock the full power, the full value of data, we need to make it easy for the right people and applications to find, access and share the right data when they need it -- and to keep data safe and secure," AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in today's keynote. The tool will provide users with fine-grained controls to manage and govern this data. That's long been a major problem for enterprises, but it has only gotten harder as the amount of data has increased, ensuring that the right users have access to the right data, without compromising personally identifiable information, for example.

We've all seen those scenes from sci-fi movies where a scientist runs a program and then an artificial intelligence (AI) model magically appears to provide some mind-blowing results. It would be great if we could simply ask our AI model to provide us with output without having to first provide it with a data set. However, this is not how AI works. In order for an AI model to provide us with the desired product, it must first be trained on a data set. Data is a critical component of AI and deep learning that provides the foundation needed to create robust AI and predictive models. Sometimes, real data can be insufficient or inaccurate.

Andrew Rickman, CEO of Rockley explains why wearables will be at the heart of a healthcare revolution in 2023. A revolution is coming to healthcare--and soon. Over the next year, wearable devices and the advanced sensors and AI technologies that work with them will transform healthcare for millions of patients, enabling them to avoid many serious health conditions and better diagnose and manage a range of chronic illnesses. Deloitte Global forecasts that 320 million health and wellness wearables will ship to consumers worldwide in 2022. By 2024, it says, that number will rise to almost 440 million as new devices are released, and healthcare providers grow more comfortable with them.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are the part of computer science that are correlated with each other. These two technologies are the most trending technologies which are used for creating intelligent systems. Although these are two related technologies and sometimes people use them as a synonym for each other, but still both are two different terms in various cases. "AI is a bigger concept to create intelligent machines that can simulate human thinking capability and behavior, whereas, machine learning is an application or subset of AI that allows machines to learn from data without being programmed explicitly." Artificial intelligence is a field of computer science that makes a computer system that can mimic human intelligence.

Frontier Airlines has dropped its customer service line in favor of a chat bot, social media, and other text-based methods of communicating. As reported by NPR on Saturday, a company spokesperson said that "the airline found that most customers preferred communicating through online channels." As a consumer, what do you prefer? The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to handle customer service issues is on the rise. What are the benefits and drawbacks?