Culture remains one of the biggest hurdles to successful implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies at the Defense Department, according to DOD leaders at multiple events this week. Some DOD officials believe people are becoming more comfortable using the term AI, but when it comes to understanding what AI really is, and the practical applications of it, not so much. According to Col. Mike Teter, Chief Data Officer and Deputy Director of Digital Superiority and J6 C4/Cyber Directorate at U.S. Space Command, building cultural trust really comes through educating and training, but it also changes the paradigm and timelines associated with traditional reporting up the chain. When you have the ability to have everyone in the chain from the lowest unit all the way to the president can see the same thing at the same time at scale, then it's really a cultural shift on both sides, Teter said during ATARC's ATARC's Ethical Uses of AI with the Federal Government event. "You're not going to have all the answers right away when you see something in the data," he said.

Retailers are under increasing pressure to cut down on unnecessary packaging, and some shops are showing what a plastic-free, tech-enabled future could look like. It's a sad fact that plastic debris in our oceans is killing marine wildlife at a staggering rate. With plastics pollution spiralling out of control, shops are under pressure to cut down on their use of unnecessary packaging. Some of the greatest culprits in generating harmful waste that often ends up in the oceans or landfill are cosmetics companies – just think about how many bottles and pots of shampoo, conditioner, moisturiser, shower gels and other grooming products the average person keeps in their bathroom and it's easy to see how it very quickly adds up. The increased awareness of the problem among consumers means that this is a commercial opportunity for those offering environmentally friendly alternatives, however.

While it may lack the special effects-laden sophistication of its portrayal on the big screen, artificial intelligence (AI) is already permeating our daily lives. Described as one of this century's most important technological revolutions, 63% of us use AI such as predictive typing every day without even realising it, according to a recent survey. And AI is already changing the way many of us work, too. AI has progressed to a stage where it can viably aid us with everyday tasks, with an array of niche applications entering the workplace. Notably, Boomerang's'Respondable' tool gives advice on the tone and structure of your emails, making them more likely to gain a reply.

Lush combines three languages in one: a very simple to use, loosely-typed interpreted language, a strongly-typed compiled language with the same syntax, and the C language, which can be freely mixed with the other languages within a single source file, and even within a single function. Lush has a library of over 14,000 functions and classes, some of which are simple interfaces to popular libraries: vector/matrix/tensor algebra, linear algebra (LAPACK, BLAS), numerical function (GSL), 2D and 3D graphics (X, SDL, OpenGL, OpenRM, PostScipt), image processing, computer vision (OpenCV), machine learning (gblearning, Torch), regular expressions, audio processing (ALSA), and video grabbing (Video4linux). If you do research and development in signal processing, image processing, machine learning, computer vision, bio-informatics, data mining, statistics, or artificial intelligence, and feel limited by Matlab and other existing tools, Lush is for you. If you want a simple environment to experiment with graphics, video, and sound, Lush is for you. Lush is Free Software (GPL) and runs under GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Irix.