The man charged with administering Arizona's elections isn't concerned about the state's ability to securely hold elections. But he's going to have to persuade millions of other people to feel the same way. Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, was elected Arizona's secretary of state in 2022. A lawyer who previously worked as a prosecutor in Colorado and Arizona, and served as the Maricopa County Recorder before taking office, Fontes must now take on the role of convincing the state's voters that its elections are legitimate. Arizona is possibly the market leader in ridiculous election conspiracies and deniers.

This paper presents a framework developed for an industrial robotics system that utilises two different planning components. At a high level, a multi-robot mission planner interfaces with a fleet and environment manager and uses multiagent planning techniques to build mission assignments to be distributed to a robot fleet. On each robot, a task planner automatically converts the robot's world model and skill definitions into a planning problem which is then solved to find a sequence of actions that the robot should perform to complete its mission. This framework is demonstrated on an industrial kitting task in a real-world factory environment.

A new blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancer has been revealed by researchers in the latest study to offer hope for early detection. The test is based on DNA that is shed by tumours and found circulating in the blood. More specifically, it focuses on chemical changes to this DNA, known as methylation patterns. Researchers say the test can not only tell whether someone has cancer, but can also shed light on the type of cancer they have. Dr Geoffrey Oxnard of Boston's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, part of Harvard Medical School, said the test was now being explored in clinical trials.

Usually, AI proves very successful when its goals are focused on a single task, like playing a game with clearly defined rules. It's trying to set up a system to handle greater complexity that has proved elusive for AI. Some researchers believe studying how animals learn can open the way to more comprehensive mastery of tasks for AI. An appreciation for the cognitive abilities demonstrated by animals is the motivation for the Animal-AI Olympics. As described on its YouTube video, "Instead of providing a problem to solve, we will provide an arena in which we will test your entry for many simple cognitive abilities using methods from the animal cognition literature."

The current approach to AI and machine learning is great for big companies that can afford to hire data scientists. But questions remain as to how smaller companies, which often lack the hiring budgets to bring in high-priced data scientists, can tap into the potential of AI. One potential solution may lie in doing machine learning on edge devices. Gadi Singer, vice president of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group and general manager of architecture at Intel, said in an interview at the O'Reilly AI Conference in New York that even one or two data scientists are enough to manage AI integration at most enterprises. But will the labor force supply adequate amounts of trained data scientists to cover all enterprises' AI ambitions?

The Animal-AI Olympics, which will begin this June, aims to "benchmark the current level of various AIs against different animal species using a range of established animal cognition tasks." At stake are bragging rights and US $10,000 in prizes. The project, a partnership between the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and GoodAI, a research institution based in Prague, is a new way to evaluate the progress of AI systems toward what researchers call artificial general intelligence. Such an assessment is necessary, the organizers say, because recent benchmarks are somewhat deceiving. While AI systems have bested human grandmasters in a host of challenging competitions, including the board game Go and the video game StarCraft, these matchups only proved that the AIs were astoundingly good at those particular games.

In one of Aesop's fables, a thirsty crow finds a pitcher with a small amount of water beyond the reach of its beak. After failing to push the pitcher over, the crow drops pebbles in one by one until the water level rises, allowing the bird to have a drink. For Aesop, the fable showed the superiority of intelligence over brute strength. Two and a half millennia later, we might get to see whether AI could pass Aesop's ancient intelligence test. In June, researchers will train algorithms to master a suite of tasks that have traditionally been used to test animal cognition.

Are today's best artificial intelligence (AI) systems as smart as a mouse? A new contest aims to find out. The Animal-AI Olympics, which will begin this June, aims to "benchmark the current level of various AIs against different animal species using a range of established animal cognition tasks." At stake are bragging rights and $10,000 in prizes. The project, a partnership between the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and GoodAI, a research institution based in Prague, is a new way to evaluate the progress of AI systems toward what researchers call artificial general intelligence.

There's more open source software headed for edge computing deployments. Swim, the four-year-old San Jose-based startup whose platform for real-time analytics at the edge has been running as a proprietary product licensed to specific customers, this week announced an open source version of the platform licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. The Open Source Edge Intelligence Platform, as the project is now called, is a Java Virtual Machine extension that's used in place of a traditional stack to analyse streaming data on the fly. The software works through mesh-connected "digital twins" that utilize machine learning to predict changes in the data being created. It's used by enterprises, equipment manufacturers, and Internet of Things businesses to locally process and analyze large amounts of streaming data.

Bench, a Vancouver-based online accounting firm, has transformed its bookkeeping business with artificial intelligence. The series: We look at decision makers among Canada's mid-sized companies who took successful action in a competitive global digital economy. Whether someone grows up wanting to be a photographer, a writer or to partake in any other skilled freelance or self-employed craft, they generally don't get into it for the love of filing taxes. But that's exactly where Ian Crosby sees Bench, a Vancouver-based online accounting firm, fitting into the work landscape, helping small businesses to stay on top of their financial obligations. "They start bringing in money and all of a sudden the government is like, 'Hey, you have to do this very specific math thing or you're in big trouble,' " says the co-founder and chief executive officer of one of North America's largest bookkeeping services.