AI Articles and Analysis about Automation and robotics

The idea of using artificial intelligence (AI) in the military scares many people in the US, especially when it comes to the Army. The US Army typically operates on the ground, and so it may be uncomfortably closer to home for some people.

The Chinese military, or People's Liberation Army, is focusing heavily on artificial intelligence. However, China's race to develop "smarter," cheaper AI technology for the military is not linear, but instead a many-pronged strategy that involved the central government, domestic companies, and international trade. Gregory Allen of the Center for a New American Security published a report on China's AI strategy, in which he said:
Chinese military leaders increasingly refer to intelligent or “intelligentized” military technology as their confident expectation for the future basis of warfare. Use of the term “intelligentized” is meant to signify a new stage of military technology beyond the current stage based on information technology.
He also reported that “total Chinese national and local government spending on AI to implement these plans is not publicly disclosed, but it is clearly in the tens of billions of dollars.”

Government contracts are notoriously hard to acquire. It takes many months of painstaking work to get through the gamut of regulations that weigh about 8.5 lb when printed out. Startups and small companies, including those developing artificial intelligence, often do not have the resources to compete for a share of this market. The US Air Force is changing that by streamlining the process in what it calls Pitch Days, the first of which was on March 6 and 7, 2019 in New York.

AI applications in healthcare are becoming more common for white-collar automation and diagnostics. However, medical robotics is an area that may be marginally underdeveloped. This is likely because of regulations concerning automated surgery.

This week, we speak with arguably one of the best-known folks in the domain of neural networks: Jurgen Schmidhuber. He's working on a lot of different applications now in heavy industry, self-driving cars, and other spaces.

Danny Lange heads up the AI efforts at Unity, one of the better-known firms in terms of simulations and computer graphics. They work in several different industries, but this week we speak mostly about automotive.

Northrop Grumman Corporation is a U.S. global technology company that provides autonomous, aerospace, cybersecurity, and defense solutions to military and commercial organizations.

The focus of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is to provide information to civilian institutions to help them solve scientific problems at home and in space. This requires a continuous stream of raw data under a constantly shifting environment.  According to a 2017 interview with Kevin Murphy, Earth Science Data Systems Program Executive at NASA, the biggest challenge now is not going where no man has gone before, but managing the data.