The Trump administration might be building walls between America and some countries, but it is eager to forge alliances when it comes to shaping the course of artificial intelligence. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a coalition of countries dedicated to promoting democracy and economic development, has announced a set of five principles for the development and deployment of artificial intelligence. The announcement came at a meeting of the OECD Forum in Paris. The OECD does not include China, and the principles outlined by the group seem to contrast with the way AI is being deployed there, especially for face recognition and surveillance of ethnic groups associated with political dissent. Speaking at the event, America's recently appointed CTO, Michael Kratsios, said, "We are so pleased that the OECD AI recommendations address so many of the issues which are being tackled by the American AI Initiative."

New research from Google shows how machine learning could one day be used to detect signs of lung cancer earlier than often occurs today. Early warning: Danial Tse, a researcher at Google, developed an algorithm that beat a number of trained radiologists in testing. Tse and colleagues trained a deep-learning algorithm to detect malignant lung nodules in more than 42,000 CT scans. The resulting algorithms turned up 11% fewer false positives and 5% fewer false negatives than their human counterparts. The work is described in a paper published in the journal Nature today.

Want to feel really depressed about the likely impact of climate change? AI can help with that. A new research paper shows how machine-learning trickery can highlight the ravages of climate change--by revealing how a property is likely to be harmed by rising sea levels, fiercer storms, and other disasters that it's expected to worsen. Changes afoot: The researchers used an increasingly popular technique to automatically conjure up submerged and damaged properties. As they write in their paper: "The eventual goal of our project is to enable individuals to make more informed choices about their climate future by creating a more visceral understanding of the effects of climate change."

Google researchers developed a way to peer inside the minds of deep-learning systems, and the results are delightfully weird. What they did: The team built a tool that combines several techniques to provide people with a clearer idea of how neural networks make decisions. Applied to image classification, it lets a person visualize how the network develops its understanding of what is, for instance, a kitten or a Labrador. The visualizations, above, are ... strange. Why it matters: Deep learning is powerful--but opaque.

Public confidence is also essential to stimulate economic growth through RAS. TechUK, which represents more than 900 technology companies (accounting for about half of all tech jobs in the UK), emphasize in their submission that innovation can only be achieved with the right'conditions and regulatory environment', in which'the UK population trusts and understands the opportunities afforded by ... UK global leadership in robotics and AI.'