Dartmouth engineering researchers have developed a new approach for detecting a speaker's intent to mislead. The approach's framework, which could be developed to extract opinion from "fake news," among other uses, was recently published as part of a paper in Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence. Although previous studies have examined deception, this is possibly the first study to look at a speaker's intent. The researchers posit that while a true story can be manipulated into various deceiving forms, the intent, rather than the content of the communication, determines whether the communication is deceptive or not. For example, the speaker could be misinformed or make a wrong assumption, meaning the speaker made an unintentional error but did not attempt to deceive.

You may not realize that among more conventional applications of artificial intelligence like apps and search engines, emerging technologies are transforming yet another unexpected area of design: materials. A fascinating new material study released by Delft University is showing how machine learning may upend our assumptions of how materials are capable of behaving. The Delft study, led by assistant professor of materials science and engineering Miguel Bessa, has developed a new meta material that transforms brittle polymer materials into ultra compressible forms--to understand what this means for the future of product design, Bessa says with an innovation like this, "everyday objects such as bicycles, dinner tables and umbrellas could be folded into your pocket." While it's difficult to imagine fitting an entire bicycle in your back pocket, the material has been developed in scales ranging from macro to nano and shows great promise. So how do researchers utilize artificial intelligence to develop new materials?