Omar Costilla Reyes reels off all the ways that artificial intelligence might benefit his native Mexico. It could raise living standards, he says, lower health care costs, improve literacy and promote greater transparency and accountability in government. But Mexico, like many of its Latin American neighbors, has failed to invest as heavily in AI as other developing countries. That worries Costilla Reyes, a postdoc at MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. To give the region a nudge, Costilla Reyes and three other MIT graduate students -- Guillermo Bernal, Emilia Simison and Pedro Colon-Hernandez -- have spent the last six months putting together a three-day event that will bring together policymakers and AI researchers in Latin America with AI researchers in the United States. The AI Latin American sumMIT will take place in January at the MIT Media Lab.

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) that can identify people by measuring their gait or walking pattern. The technology could be used at airport security instead of fingerprinting and eye-scanning. It can successfully verify an individual simply by analysing the footstep 3D and time-based data. The AI system, developed by researchers at University of Manchester in the UK and University of Madrid in Spain, correctly identified an individual almost 100 per cent of the time, with just a 0.7 error rate. Physical biometrics, such as fingerprints, facial recognition and retinal scans, are currently more commonly used for security purposes.