AI-powered drones will ensure birds steer clear of airports

Most airports are working to keep drones away, but a new AI-powered breed could help to improve safety by steering birds clear of airspace. While rare, birds can pose a serious problem to aircraft – from broken windshields to engine failures. That’s not to say bird strikes themselves are uncommon. Between 1990-2015, there were 160,894 bird strikes on US aircraft. Each year, bird strikes cost US airlines an estimated $1.2 billion. Only .025% (40) of those strikes resulted in an accident....

8 August 2018 | Drones

AI slashes cancer treatment plan creation to ‘mere hours’

Treating cancer is a race against time. Each moment which passes is an opportunity for it to spread and become untreatable. How long it takes for radiation therapy plans to be created today can take days. Individual maps need to be created for each patient to determine where tumours need to be targeted. This lengthy process is frustrating for the patient, their loved ones, and medical professionals who’d love nothing more than to spend time saving lives instead of creating...

2 August 2018 | Healthcare

Booz Allen secures $885m Pentagon defense AI contract

While many private companies are shying away from providing their AI expertise for defense purposes, Booz Allen has secured a $885M Pentagon contract. Under the contract, Booz Allen will help the Department of Defense and the intelligence community to “rapidly employ artificial intelligence, neural, and deep neural networks.” The company notes how today’s intelligence environment necessitates the US government maintains unprecedented amounts of Intelligence Surveillance...

1 August 2018 | Government

AI can determine your personality through eye movements

A global team of scientists have discovered AI can tell an individual’s personality traits by analysing their eye movements. The scientists used machine learning to discover a link between eye movements and the personality of a person earlier this year. Armed with this information, the researchers deployed AI to analyse the eye movements of 42 students. The results were announced last week. In psychology, there are five basic personality traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Openness,...

31 July 2018 | Machine Learning

Amazon expert suggests AI regulation after ACLU’s bias findings

An expert from Amazon has suggested the government should implement a minimum confidence level for the use of facial recognition in law enforcement. Dr. Matt Wood, GM of Deep Learning and AI at Amazon Web Services, made the suggestion in a blog post responding to the ACLU’s (American Civil Liberties Union) findings of a racial bias in the ‘Rekognition’ facial recognition algorithm by Amazon. In their findings, the ACLU found Rekognition erroneously labelled those with darker skin...

30 July 2018 | Amazon

ACLU finds Amazon’s facial recognition AI is racially biased

A test of Amazon’s facial recognition technology by the ACLU has found it erroneously labelled those with darker skin colours as criminals more often. Bias in AI technology, when used by law enforcement, has raised concerns of infringing on civil rights by automated racial profiling. A 2010 study by researchers at NIST and the University of Texas in Dallas found that algorithms designed and tested in East Asia are better at recognising East Asians, while those designed in Western...

27 July 2018 | Amazon

Google promises its call center AI is not designed to replace humans

Not content with its impressive(ly creepy) Duplex demo, Google promises it’s not wanting to replace call centers with its latest AI demonstration. During the Google Cloud Next 18 conference, Google Chief AI Scientist Dr. Fei-Fei Li demonstrated a new AI system called Google Contact Center AI which – much like Duplex – sounded incredibly natural in its responses to human queries. Google seems to have learned its lesson from its Duplex demonstration and wanted to iterate that it’s not...

25 July 2018 | Google

China plans new era of sea power with unmanned AI submarines

China is planning to upgrade its naval power with unmanned AI submarines that aim to provide an edge over the fleets of their global counterparts. A report by the South China Post on Sunday revealed Beijing’s plans to build the automated subs by the early 2020s in response to unmanned weapons being developed in the US. The subs will be able to patrol areas in the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean that are home to disputed military bases. While the expected cost of the submarines has not...

23 July 2018 | China

AI robots will solve underwater infrastructure damage checks

Robots will be paired with a versatile AI that can quickly adapt to unpredictable conditions when examining underwater infrastructure. Some of a nation’s most vital infrastructure hides beneath the water. The difficulty in accessing most of it, however, makes important damage checks infrequent. Sending humans down requires significant training and can take several weeks to recover due to the often extreme depths. There are far more underwater structures than skilled divers to inspect...

20 July 2018 | Robotics

Scientists pledge not to build AIs which kill without oversight

Thousands of scientists have signed a pledge not to have any role in building AIs which have the ability to kill without human oversight. When many think of AI, they at least give some passing thought of rogue AIs seen in sci-fi movies such as the infamous Skynet in Terminator. In an ideal world, AI would never be used in any military capacity. However, it was almost certainly be developed one way or another because of the advantage it would provide to an adversary without similar...

18 July 2018 | Ethics