The report also identified several sectors that could benefit from increased AI adoption and development, including precision agriculture, public safety and public health. To avoid infringing on civil liberties and reductions in employment as the technology develops, however, the task force would need to be made permanent, the report says. Task force member Eugene Santos Jr., a Dartmouth College engineering professor, said the idea is to create an independent agency that government officials and the public could go to with ideas, questions and concerns about the technology.

Singapore is tapping artificial intelligence as the next part of its "Smart Nation" project, the city-state's foreign minister announced Tuesday. The strategy identifies five areas -- transportation, smart cities, healthcare, education and public safety -- where AI can be used to make big change. As part of its strategy, Singapore also announced the creation of a National AI Office to "drive the national AI agenda." The office will work to enjoin efforts underway in the city-state's research, industry and government sectors to tackle key challenges. Vivian Balakrishnan, who leads the Smart Nation Initiative for Singapore, and serves as its foreign minister, officially announced the new strategy at the opening session of Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

A Facebook civic hackathon has inspired open data leaders in Seattle to plan for new machine learning apps and algorithms for 2018. In collaboration with city government, Facebook invited teams of technologists from local tech companies like Amazon to try their hand at civic tech. The Facebook hackathon pointed the coders at the city's open data platform, and pitted teams against each other with the goal of solving the city's toughest challenges with machine learning. David Doyle, Seattle's open data program manager, said the apps that resulted have convinced the coordinators that machine learning must play an influential role in the city's open data program. "As we enter 2018, we are encouraging all departments to think about how to potentially leverage opportunities to apply machine learning to their current and future open datasets based on the two use cases that emerged from the hackathon," Doyle told StateScoop.