Alan Winfield is Professor of Robot Ethics at the University of the West of England (UWE), Visiting Professor at the University of York, and Associate Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Alan co-founded the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, where his research is focussed on the science, engineering and ethics of cognitive robotics. Alan is an advocate for robot ethics; he chairs the advisory board of the Responsible Technology Institute at the University of Oxford and has co-drafted new standards on ethical risk assessment and transparency. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines. Robot Talk is a weekly podcast that explores the exciting world of robotics, artificial intelligence and autonomous machines.

Kara Frederick, tech director at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the need for regulations on artificial intelligence as lawmakers and tech titans discuss the potential risks. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful technology that can bring many benefits to society but also poses many challenges and risks. To ensure that the United States leads the way in seizing the opportunity and managing the risks of AI, President Biden issued a landmark executive order on October 30, 2023. The Biden administration is using the Defense Production Act, a 75-year-old law that gives the White House wide authority to regulate industries related to national security, to compel companies to tell the federal government about potential national security risks related to their AI work. This is the first executive order from the federal government that directly regulates AI, and it follows the voluntary commitments of 15 major AI companies, such as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Its technical feats are notable, with 2000 x 2040 pixel resolution per eye. That's basically a 4K resolution screen pressed right up against your face. That means it offers a more pristine image than the $1,500 Meta Quest Pro. Paired with OLED technology that brings out sharp blacks, as well as high-dynamic range colors, this is probably the most visually impressive VR device on the consumer market. It's a shame the VR medium's best traditional game, Valve's "Half-Life Alyx" may not see release on PlayStation's platform, where it could reach the potentially massive PlayStation audience.

Artificial intelligence is playing an important role in modern creative professions. There are a lot of reasons a growing number of companies are turning to AI technology. One poll showed that 61% of companies found that AI and machine learning were their best data investments. One of the industries that is evolving by adopting new AI tools in web design. Here is a fact that you should consider.

In pursuit of faster and more efficient AI system development, Intel, AMD and Nvidia today published a draft specification for what they refer to as a common interchange format for AI. While voluntary, the proposed "8-bit floating point (FP8)" standard, they say, has the potential to accelerate AI development by optimizing hardware memory usage and work for both AI training (i.e., engineering AI systems) and inference (running the systems). When developing an AI system, data scientists are faced with key engineering choices beyond simply collecting data to train the system. One is selecting a format to represent the weights of the system -- weights being the factors learned from the training data that influence the system's predictions. Weights are what enable a system like GPT-3 to generate whole paragraphs from a sentence-long prompt, for example, or DALL-E 2 to create photorealistic portraits from a caption.

According to a 2019 article in the Financial Times, a quantum computer built by Google could perform a calculation "in three minutes and 20 seconds that would take today's most advanced classical computer … approximately 10,000 years". It has been said that a fully capable quantum computer could break the most robust encryption in minutes, rendering current internet security useless. While prototypes of so-called quantum computers exist, developed by companies ranging from IBM to D-Wave, they can only perform the same tasks classical computers can, albeit quicker. Those technologies' speed of development is languid compared to the rest of the computing industry. The most significant challenge quantum computing faces today is the need to hold qubits in near absolute zero temperatures to keep them stable.

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in various applications, from self-driving autonomous vehicles to AI-assisted medical diagnoses, has accelerated in recent years. From 2018 to 2020, there was a five-fold increase globally in the percentage of organisations deploying AI. While the adoption of AI brings numerous benefits, cybersecurity threats such as hacking pose a significant threat to AI systems, especially in applications where hackers may gain access to confidential information or cause automated systems to malfunction. Answering the call to protect the integrity of AI programmes and create trust in AI solutions, a team of NTU researchers and AI leaders has launched a new standard on AI security. Unveiled on 16 March 2022 at the Al Security Standard Launch Singapore TR 99:2021 Growth opportunities for government & industry adopting trustworthy Al, and published by Enterprise Singapore's Standards Consortium, the standard was developed from research led by NTU scientists Prof Liu Yang of NTU's School of Computer Science and Engineering, former research fellow Dr Xiaofei Xie and PhD candidate Mr David Berend.

Ministers and public bodies must reveal the architecture behind algorithms that influence exam results, housing benefit allocations and pothole repairs, under new transparency standards. The UK government has published a transparency standard for algorithms, the series of instructions that a computer follows to complete a task or produce a single outcome. Algorithms have become the focus of increasing controversy, whether through their role in deciding A-level results last year or making decisions about benefit claims. Under the new approach, government departments and public sector bodies will be required to explain where an algorithm was used, why it was used and whether it achieved its aim. There will also be an obligation to reveal the architecture behind the algorithm. It will be tested by several government departments and public sector bodies in the coming months before being reviewed again and formally launched next year.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is nothing new in health care applications. AI can be seen in robotic surgeries, image and data analysis, automation of administrative tasks, and assisting clinical diagnostics. The use of this technology is helping providers offer faster service, more accurately diagnose diseases, and analyze data to identify trends or genetic information. We are now seeing these tools expand beyond the typical hospital or primary care setting to include health care providers like dentists to create a new standard of care, improve business operations, and support public health research in dentistry. I sat down with Florian Hillen, Founder and CEO of VideaHealth, an AI and machine learning company created to improve the delivery of health care services for dentistry, to hear more about how AI is impacting this field of medicine.

PC maker Dell says it has stopped shipping some versions of its powerful gaming systems to California and five other US states because the products do not meet new energy efficiency standards. Dell said in a statement sent to Reuters the regulations affected "select configurations" of its Alienware Aurora R10 and R12 gaming PCs. Gaming PCs made by Dell and others use powerful chips for cutting-edge graphics in video games. Those components mean gaming systems typically consume far more electricity than an average computer. California's toughened efficiency regulations for computers went into effect on 1 July.