The University of Southern California has unveiled a pair of programs--one in partnership with Amazon--designed to meet the tech industry's accelerating demand for engineers in the realm of artificial intelligence. On Tuesday, USC announced the launch of the new Center for Autonomy and AI at its Viterbi School of Engineering. Co-directed by USC professors Rahul Jain and Jyo Deshmukh, the center aims to study and develop AI applications ranging from self-driving cars and autonomous robots. The university also rolled out a new partnership with Amazon to launch a summer residency program for undergraduate engineering students. Amazon is sponsoring the program, which will see 30 students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines from across the U.S. work with USC faculty during an eight-week on-campus program.

To explore all newsletters, click here. By signing, you agree to the terms of service and privacy policy. Self-driving cars, single-pilot commercial planes, robotic soldiers, and widespread gene editing may still be things of the future, but a new research center in San Antonio is working to bring these and other artificial intelligence innovations to life. The University of Texas at San Antonio officially launched its newest research center, the UTSA Matrix AI Consortium, on Thursday morning via a livestream kickoff event. The consortium will bring together experts studying artificial intelligence to expand the use and deployment of AI. "This initiative is a concerted effort to promote AI innovation, something I'm a big fan about these days," UTSA President Taylor Eighmy said.

Housed administratively in the College of IST, the Center will bring together researchers from across the University to develop new AI technologies and understand their social and ethical implications. The Penn State Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence promotes the thoughtful development and application of AI and studies its impact on all areas of human endeavor. In addition to supporting research focused explicitly on AI for social good and mitigating threats from its misuse, through this center, Penn State will encourage that all AI research and development activities consider social and ethical implications as well as intended and possible unintended consequences. "Given the rapid expansion and progression of interdisciplinary research and the wide-ranging impact of artificial intelligence on society, this center will engage and enable Penn State scholars and educators to work together and use AI to address the grand challenges of our time," said Andrew Sears, dean of the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), who led the founding of the center. The endeavor will bring together researchers from diverse disciplines across the University, enabling multidisciplinary research and educational programs that will shape the future of AI.

The world of autonomous cars is coming. Maybe it's a utopian future where all the vehicles drive themselves, while traffic jams and road rage are made a thing of the past. Or maybe it's just a bunch of fancy robo-taxis (and hopefully buses) that ensure city commuting is less of a pain. No matter how it plays out, it's coming and BMW wants to be prepare, establishing its own autonomous driving campus. In Unterschleißheim (near Munich, Germany) the automaker opened the facility that it says will help with the "systematic development of highly- and fully-automated driving at the BMW Group."

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. is stepping up its artificial intelligence game with the opening of a new research center focused on machine learning. The move doesn't come too soon, because Samsung is generally perceived to be trailing its rivals when it comes to AI. The plan is for the new AI research center to be operated by two of Samsung's main businesses, namely its consumer electronics and mobile arms, the company said. Those businesses will use the center to develop new technologies, Samsung told Reuters. Most of Samsung's AI efforts thus far have been focused on its Bixby digital assistant, which was launched earlier this year.

The Golden State will soon house its own "blue-sky" bioengineering center thanks to a healthy grant from the National Science Foundation. Based at the University of California, San Francisco, the $24 million Center for Cellular Construction will be used to study and promote cellular engineering, a young discipline that aims create living machines by manipulating nature. To design these machines, researchers first have to comprehend the complexity of cells and uncover the mechanisms behind self-organization. Although cars, computers, and skyscrapers don't assemble themselves, cells in fact do. If researchers can unlock the mechanisms behind self-assembly and modify them for specific functions, they may be able to develop sophisticated, living machines -- ranging from environmentally responsive plants to intelligent medicines.

Carnegie Mellon University plans to announce on Wednesday that it will create a research center that focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence. The ethics center, called the K&L Gates Endowment for Ethics and Computational Technologies, is being established at a time of growing international concern about the impact of A.I. technologies. That has already led to an array of academic, governmental and private efforts to explore a technology that until recently was largely the stuff of science fiction. In the last decade, faster computer chips, cheap sensors and large collections of data have helped researchers improve on computerized tasks like machine vision and speech recognition, as well as robotics. Earlier this year, the White House held a series of workshops around the country to discuss the impact of A.I., and in October the Obama administration released a report on its possible consequences.

On Thursday, tech giant Google announced that it is opening a new research center in Europe, dedicated to machine learning. The new research center -- which will enable Google to realize its ambitious artificial intelligence (AI) plans by focusing on the development of AI products and research -- will be based in Google Research offices in Zurich, Switzerland. According to the details shared by Emmanuel Mogenet – chief of Google Research for Europe – in a recent blog post, the key focus of the new research group in Europe will be on three AI areas --- machine intelligence, machine perception, and natural language processing and understanding. Mogenet further specified that the main objective of the research group in Europe will be to find new ways in which machine learning infrastructure can be improved, and how the technology can be put it into practical use. In addition, the new AI-focused research group will also work for the advancement of Natural Language Understanding – that is, the capability of machines to understand and process human language – in close collaboration with linguists.