Citing successes other police departments across the country have seen using drones, the Los Angeles Police Commission said it would allow the LAPD to deploy unmanned aircraft on routine emergency calls. The civilian oversight body approved an updated policy Tuesday allowing drones to be used in more situations, including "calls for service." The new guidelines listed other scenarios for future drone use -- "high-risk incident, investigative purpose, large-scale event, natural disaster" -- and transferred their command from the Air Support Division to the Office of Special Operations. Previously, the department's nine drones were restricted to a narrow set of dangerous situations, most involving barricaded suspects or explosives. Bryan Lium told commissioners the technology offers responding officers and their supervisors crucial, real-time information about what type of threats they might encounter while responding to an emergency.

The MIT School of Engineering and Pillar VC today announced the MIT-Pillar AI Collective, a one-year pilot program funded by a gift from Pillar VC that will provide seed grants for projects in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science with the goal of supporting translational research. The program will support graduate students and postdocs through access to funding, mentorship, and customer discovery. Graduate students and postdocs will aim to emerge from the program having built minimum viable products, with support from Pillar VC and experienced industry leaders. "We are grateful for this support from Pillar VC and to join forces to converge the commercialization of translational research in AI, data science, and machine learning, with an emphasis on identifying and cultivating prospective entrepreneurs," says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "Pillar's focus on mentorship for our graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and centering the program within the Deshpande Center, will undoubtedly foster big ideas in AI and create an environment for prospective companies to launch and thrive."

Modern military operations, whether it be combat, medical or disaster relief, require complex decisions to be made very quickly, and AI could be used to make them. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched a new program aimed at introducing artificial intelligence into the decision making process. This is because, in a real world emergency situation, that might require instant choices between who does and doesn't get help, the answer isn't always clear and people disagree over the correct course of action - AI will make a quick decision. The latest DARPA initiative, called'In the Moment', will involve new technology that could take difficult decisions in stressful situations, using live analysis of data, such as the condition of patients in a mass-casualty event and drug availability. It comes as the U.S. military increasingly leans on technology to reduce human error, with DARPA arguing removing human bias from decision making will'save lives'.

We consider a class of visual analogical reasoning problems that involve discovering the sequence of transformations by which pairs of input/output images are related, so as to analogously transform future inputs. This program synthesis task can be easily solved via symbolic search. Using a variation of the `neural analogical reasoning' approach of (Velickovic and Blundell 2021), we instead search for a sequence of elementary neural network transformations that manipulate distributed representations derived from a symbolic space, to which input images are directly encoded. We evaluate the extent to which our `neural reasoning' approach generalizes for images with unseen shapes and positions.

It's hard to explain the mix of emotions that spark upon seeing a photo of Frederick Douglass come alive with the click of a button. And yet, there he is, blinking and nodding as if he were just alive yesterday, as if he hadn't died in 1895, years before film recording became commonplace. His animated image and others like it -- at the same time unsettling, emotional, and a bit fantastical, are made possible by Deep Nostalgia, an artificial intelligence program from the genealogy platform MyHeritage. As far as AI-animated images go, the technology behind these Harry Potter-esque photos isn't particularly complex. Users are invited to supply old photos of their loved ones, and the program uses deep learning to apply predetermined movements to their facial features.

The increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in transportation has got further recognition as Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy has announced the launch of a new executive education program focusing on this subject. The new program, Managing AI in Transportation, has been developed by the experts at Heinz College's Traffic21 Institute and will explore critical areas that are required for breaking down public and private organizational barriers and understanding how managing AI can benefit key stakeholders throughout the transportation industry. "We're excited to offer this new program to our already strong roster of executive education," says David Ulicne, senior director of Heinz College Executive Education. "As the transportation industry continues to rapidly evolve, and the influence of AI in the field continues to grow, this new program will provide managers the opportunity to expand their knowledge and keep pace with the latest technological advancements." Managing AI in Transportation will debut as a five-day virtual bootcamp in May 2021.

One of the most common potential scenarios involving autonomous cars is using them as driverless taxis; both Uber and Lyft have made self-driving cars a big part of their future strategies. The possibility of hopping into a ride without a driver just got a little closer, at least in California -- as spotted by The Verge, California approved two new autonomous driving programs last week that let companies charge fares for autonomous rides. The two new programs are the "Drivered Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Program" and the "Driverless Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Program," both of which allow approved participants to offer "passenger service, shared rides, and accept monetary compensation for rides in autonomous vehicles." Naturally, interested companies need to get the necessary permits and show the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) that they're taking the proper safety measure. They'll need to get a AV Deployment Permit from California's DMV as well as one of two permits issued by CPUC.

BEGIN ARTICLE PREVIEW: According to doctors, the new program has helped patients receive the care they need, shorten hospital stays, and created better outcomes. COLUMBIA, S.C. — The Dorn VA Hospital in Columbia has started a new program with robotic surgery that’s making a big difference for patients. Doctor Kurt Fichtner is a surgeon at the Dorn VA Hospital in Columbia. He says they started their robotic surgery program earlier on in the year. “The robot was brought in November/December time frame last year. We underwent training and began doing some of our first cases in the January/February time frame,” said Dr. Fichtner. Even with the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Fichtner says he’s had 50 total cases himself and another five or six cases for the other surgeon who’s a part of their progr

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence called for the creation of two new talent initiatives that would help "fundamentally re-imagine" the way the federal government builds its digital workforce in Congressional testimony Tuesday. Members of the NSCAI, led by Eric Schmidt, former chief executive officer of Google, provided an interim review of the commission's work in testimony to a House Armed Services subcommittee Tuesday. In addition to urging lawmakers to legislate the U.S. Digital Service Academy and National Reserve Digital Corps workforce initiatives, NSCAI outlined provisions in five areas included in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act the commission views as "crucial." But it was Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., who brought the hearing down to earth. The former intelligence analyst and Defense Department official asked NSCAI commissioners a pointed question: How can DOD turn the commission's ambitious dreams into realities?

When a new program is introduced to a community, it naturally takes some time to get used to. This is the case with TensorFlow, a relatively new program designed to assist machine learning engineers with their coding and programming. Thankfully, the community has begun to work out the kinks in the TensorFlow system, and things are looking up for engineers and programmers looking to try out the new software for themselves. Google's very own machine learning team has chosen to move forward with TensorFlow, and this is a great sign. There are still some problems, of course, so here are a handful of the pros and cons of using TensorFlow.