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Small drones will be allowed to fly over people and at night in the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday, a significant step toward their use for widespread commercial deliveries. Small drones will be allowed to fly over people and at night in the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said on Monday, a significant step toward their use for widespread commercial deliveries.

Defense contractor displays new artificial intelligence-powered military hardware, techniques that it says will shape the battlefield of the future The Rafael defense contractor on Sunday unveiled a number of new weapons and systems, including miniature drones and a robotic dog, which it plans to sell to the Israel Defense Forces and foreign militaries and that it claims will change the face of modern warfare. The company, one of the country’s leading weapons manufacturers, sees these technological developments as a step toward a more interconnected and intelligent future battlefield, one in which many of the impediments to proper communication between various...

Alphabet Inc.'s Google this year moved to tighten control over its scientists' papers by launching a "sensitive topics" review, and in at least three cases requested authors refrain from casting its technology in a negative light, according to internal communications and interviews with researchers involved in the work. Google's new review procedure asks that researchers consult with legal, policy and public relations teams before pursuing topics such as face and sentiment analysis and categorizations of race, gender or political affiliation, according to internal webpages explaining the policy. "Advances in technology and the growing complexity of our external environment are increasingly...

The New York Police Department’s new robot dog will receive a special robotic arm for opening doors and moving objects next month, according to a new report from ABC7 in New York. The existence of the NYPD’s robot was first revealed in late October after it assisted in the apprehension of a suspect in Brooklyn. But details about what the Boston Dynamics robot actually did during that arrest remain a mystery. “This dog is going to save lives, protect people, and protect officers, and that’s our goal,” Frank Digiacomo, the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit Inspector, told ABC7 in a...

In the current era of artificial intelligence (AI), the use of robots in the military is no longer an idea relegated to science fiction movies. Today, robots and intelligent machines are increasingly being used in military operations for a wide range of tasks ranging from surveillance, intelligence, reconnaissance, bomb disposal, and search and rescue operations. But that’s not all. Military professionals are starting to envision future battlefields consisting of intelligent robot teammates that can understand and follow orders without constant supervision thanks to the widespread adoption of IoT technologies. In this article, we’ll look at the rush to weaponize AI...

A trio of researchers at Johannes Kepler University has used artificial intelligence to improve thermal imaging camera searches of people lost in the woods. In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, David Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi and Oliver Bimber, describe how they applied a deep learning network to the problem of people lost in the woods and how well it worked. When people become lost in forests, search and rescue experts use helicopters to fly over the area where they are most likely to be found. In addition to simply scanning the ground below, the researchers use binoculars...

The audio on the otherwise shaky body camera footage is unusually clear. As police officers search a handcuffed man who moments before had fired a shot inside a pizza parlor, an officer asks him why he was there. The man says to investigate a pedophile ring. Incredulous, the officer asks again. Another officer chimes in, “Pizzagate. He’s talking about Pizzagate.”In that brief, chilling interaction in 2016, it becomes clear that conspiracy theories, long relegated to the fringes of society, had moved into the real world in a very dangerous way.Conspiracy theories, which have the potential to cause significant harm, have...

NSA security software – turned election software) voting software ran an algorithm that gave Biden a 3% vote advantage in: Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona.

Full title: Online game developed by Cambridge psychologists teaches players to sniff out 'fake news' by encouraging them to use tactics like trolling to sabotage elections and undermine democracy The game is called Breaking Harmony Square and is set in a fictional small town Players are recruited as the Chief Disinformation Officer to sow discord in town The aim is to be as evil as you can and disrupt every day life and local elections It works like an inoculation by exposing users to a controlled dose of fake news and how it is spread in the hope of helping...

The U.S. military radically changed warfare over the past two decades with its pioneering use of armed drones on the battlefield. That revolution in conflict, however, has sparked an urgent new mission for the Pentagon: to defend against the other guy’s drones. As “unmanned aerial vehicles” become exponentially faster, cheaper, more deadly and more widespread around the globe, U.S. military planners are racing to develop a viable defense for suddenly vulnerable troops, tanks and ships.

Sydney - Artificial Intelligence tanks, fly by wire planes, drones, weapons systems, you name it; they’re here, and the question is what they can do. A lot of facts are forming a rather large mess. Nobody’s too sure where AI weapons will go. The sheer volume of rhetoric and shill-like babble about military AI is already gigantic. The constant stream of new AI in military roles is making headlines every day. Everyone has an opinion; answers to questions, maybe not. The likely effect of super-lethal AI-operated weapons is one of those questions. “Slaughter” is the more usual answer. This is...

Technology in sports is a beautiful thing, but sometimes even the greatest inventions can go wrong. This happened over the weekend in a soccer game in Scotland, when an AI-controlled camera got confused, and thought a lineman’s bald head was the ball. ...To make matters worse Scotland is under strict social distancing measures. With no fans in attendance this was the only ways for fans of Iverness and Ayr United to watch the match, and instead they were treated to 90 minutes of head watching.

The annual conference is hosted by Great Wall Club (GWC), a group comprised of executives from Chinese companies such as Tencent and their Silicon Valley counterparts. This collaboration, however, poses a national security threat and runs the risk of intellectual property theft and espionage per the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Tencent, for example, has been characterized by the U.S. State Department as a “tool of the Chinese government” with “no meaningful ability to tell the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ‘no’ if officials decide to ask for their assistance,”and is among the bevy of Chinese companies banned or on track...

The war between Azerbaijan and Armenia is already dubbed “the first loitering systems war”. And to that one should add “Israeli-made loitering systems.” What until some years ago was considered a “luxury” item for a fighting unit, is now almost a baseline demand. Loitering weapon systems are in high, very high demand and the Israeli defense industries are working hard to provide that demand. It can be said without any doubt that the “big leap” started some five years ago. Until that time the only operational loitering weapon system made in Israel was the Harop, developed by Israel Aerospace Industries...

Facebook's computer-vision algorithm flagged an innocuous advert for onions posted on its social media platform for being "overtly sexual." The Seed Company by EW Gaze, a Canadian garden store, wanted to advertise its Walla Walla onion seeds on the social network, but its attempt was shot down after the image used in the advert was deemed too naughty by Facebook's software. Although most would argue that there's nothing remotely sexy about a close-up shot of onions in a basket, Facebook's automated software clearly disagreed. A screenshot posted by the company said the image was classified as having "overtly sexual positioning"....

An international team of scientists said Monday it had joined forces to combat the spread of anti-Semitism online with the help of artificial intelligence. The project Decoding Anti-Semitism includes discourse analysts, computational linguists and historians who will develop a "highly complex, AI-driven approach to identifying online anti-Semitism," the Alfred Landecker Foundation, which supports the project, said in a statement Monday. "In order to prevent more and more users from becoming radicalized on the web, it is important to identify the real dimensions of anti-Semitism - also taking into account the implicit forms that might become more explicit over time," said...

US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper reiterated the importance of ethical principles for the American military as it seeks to become a dominant player in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). “We approach AI as we have other high-tech breakthroughs throughout our department’s history — with rigorous standards for testing and fielding capabilities and the highest ethical expectations,” Esper said at the virtual Joint Artificial Intelligence Center symposium Wednesday. Acknowledging the strides other countries have made in AI technology, Esper said the US can’t afford to cede ground in this field to the “revisionist” powers, as it’s key to the...

How will AI strategy in the enterprise be changed by the widespread attention to systemic racism? Like a lot of complicated topics, the discussion of racism in AI systems tends to be filtered through events that make headline news -- the Microsoft chatbot that Twitter users turned into a racist, the Google algorithm that labeled images of Black people as gorillas, the photo-enhancing algorithm that changed a grainy headshot of former President Barack Obama into a white man's face. Less sensational but even more alarming are the exposés on race-biased algorithms that influence life-altering decisions on who should get loans...

Iam not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas! Empathy machines: what will happen when robots learn to write film scripts? Read more The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as...

Electronic skins that perform the same sensory functions as human skin could mean big things for the fields of robotics and medical devices, and scientists are not solely focused on just the pleasant ones. Researchers in Australia have succeeded in developing an artificial skin that responds to painful stimuli in the same way real skin does, which they see as an important step towards intelligent machines and prosthetics. It mightn’t seem like the most practical of goals, but researchers have been working to develop electronic skins that allow robots and prostheses to feel pain for quite some time. These technologies...