In November of 2018, the South China Morning Post reported that researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences intend to construct an underwater base in the South China Sea. According to the report, not only would the base be populated with AI robots, but the machines are expected to run it autonomously. Aside from this information, most elements of the project have remained under wraps – until now. Now, details are emerging about what could be the world's first Artificial Intelligence colony. With access to prototypes and scientific documents, New Scientists created a picture of what to expect.

NVIDIA today announced that the Italian inter-university consortium CINECA -- one of the world's most important supercomputing centers -- will use the company's accelerated computing platform to build the world's fastest AI supercomputer. The new "Leonardo" system, built with Atos, is expected to deliver 10 exaflops of FP16 AI performance to enable advanced AI and HPC converged application use cases. Featuring nearly 14,000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture-based GPUs and NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking, Leonardo will propel Italy as the global leader in AI and high performance computing research and innovation. Leonardo is procured by EuroHPC, a collaboration between national governments and the European Union to develop a world-class supercomputing ecosystem and exascale supercomputing in Europe, and funded by the European Commission through the Italian Ministry of University and Research. "The EuroHPC technology roadmap for exascale in Europe is opening doors for rapid growth and innovation in HPC and AI," said Marc Hamilton, vice president of solutions architecture and engineering at NVIDIA.

The University of Lincoln is leading on a project to create what is widely considered to be the world's first robotic farm. A consortium responsible for delivering'Robot Highways' has won a bid to create the robotic arm after Innovate UK allocated funding of £2.5 million. With an aim to be delivered by 2025 across the UK, a fleet of robots will perform a multitude of on-farm functions as one operation, powered by renewable energy. The project aims to reduce sector reliance on seasonal labour, estimating a 40% reduction in the workers required. It will also provide solutions for moving the sector toward a carbon zero future.

China's state-run Global Times described the plan as a fusion of two powerful recent technologies that could insulate help to insulate Huawei from U.S. sanctions by making the Chinese company less dependent on chips from Western providers:

The National Crime Records Bureau in India (NCRB) has conceptualized the Automated Facial Recognition System (AFRS) for India and is seeking applications for its adoption. This is an effort in the direction of modernizing the police force, information gathering, criminal identification, verification and its dissemination among various police organizations and units across the country. The Government has invited companies to bid for the project, which will be used to identify people such as criminals, missing children/persons, unidentified dead bodies and unknown traced children/persons by matching their images against a database of images. This would greatly facilitate the investigation of crime and detection of criminals and provide information for easier and faster analysis. The AFRS solution will be implemented by the solution provider selected through a bid process.

The US just took back the title for the world's fastest supercomputer. On Friday, the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee unveiled the'Summit' supercomputer that can deliver a peak performance of 200 petaflops, or about 200 quadrillion calculations per second. It managed to beat out the previous record holder that was China's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. Summit is 60% faster than the TaihuLight supercomputer, which could achieve a peak performance of 93 petaflops. The feat puts the US at the front of the top 500 supercomputers in the world -- the first time it has held such ranking since June 2013. Summit has been in development for several years now and is made up of thousands of chips.

Who will build the self-driving car of the future? Fired-up by Google's driverless prototype, carmakers such as Mercedes-Benz and Volvo are already testing autonomous vehicles on public roads. But the advanced sensors and electronics that form the building blocks of self-driving cars are often made by suppliers, not the car manufacturer. "It's all the suppliers into the industry who, in the fullness of time, will gain the power," says a senior industry analyst, who works closely with the leading carmakers. Carmakers have been gradually adding autonomous elements to their vehicles since Jaguar introduced adaptive cruise control in its XK sports car in 1996.

Japan has announced plans to build the world's fastest supercomputer, doing so to help some industries in the nation perform research vital to growth and expansion. According to the nation's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, this supercomputer will cost the equivalent of about $173 million USD; sources go on to claim that it'll be able to perform 130 quadrillion calculations every second with the project set to start as early as 2017. Assuming engineers succeed in hitting the 130 petaflops goal, Japan will outpace China's Sunway Taihulight and officially be home to the world's fastest supercomputer. Once completed, the computer will serve as a research platform for various industries, including medical, robotics, and self-driving automotive industries. The supercomputer would ultimately help the nation regain footing it has lost in an increasingly competitive market.