Search Results for: military

1 - Barack Obama: Now Is the Greatest Time to Be Alive

President Obama was generous enough to take time out of his (still) busy schedule to guest-edit Wired's November issue, also contributing an opening essay that articulates his thoughts on why this is the best time to be alive (regardless of what's touted in news and social media) and how he sees our current and future generations continuing to make leaps in scientific and technological progress. In his goal for the issue, he says,
That’s why I centered this issue on the idea of frontiers—stories and ideas about what’s over the next horizon, about what lies on the other side of the barriers we haven’t broken through yet.

What is artificial intelligence (AI)? We take the term for granted, but how might we phrase a formal definition? And are the technologies that we have today really reflective of all that this term implies?

Security is a broad term, and in industry and government there are a myriad of "security" contexts on a variety of levels - from the individual to nation-wide. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are being applied and developed across this spectrum.

As the term "machine learning" has heated up, interest in "robotics" (as expressed in Google Trends) has not altered much over the last three years. So how much of a place is there for machine learning in robotics?

Episode Summary: Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) are often seen as different trends, but there is a lot of overlap in these areas, where you might not expect. Lucid VR's CTO Adam Rowell speaks today about how AI plays a role in making VR work, augmenting the accuracy of images and making a more immersive and convincing experience for users. Rowell also touches on non-gaming VR apps that he and his company are excited about launching in the future.

1 - DARPA Challenge Tests AI as Cybersecurity Defenders

In August, seven teams will compete in DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge, pitting autonomous AI systems against threats and attacks from other network servers and patching up proprietary software errors in the process. The U.S. military agency hopes to promote programs that can work side by side with humans examining crash reports and assessing network vulnerabilities. Network protection can be implemented in the form of either 'binary armor' or through the finding and correcting of software malfunctions. In addition to a $2 million prize, the winning team will compete against human hackers at the DEF CON 2016 conference taking place in Las Vegas at the same time, marking the first time that a completely automated system will go 'head to head' with human experts.

1 - Announcing SyntaxNet: The World’s Most Accurate Parser Goes Open Source

On Thursday, Google released SyntaxNet, its open-source neural network framework through TensorFlow that serves as a base building block for natural language understanding (NLU) systems. Parsing human languages has been historically challenging for computers, in big part due to the ambiguity of syntactic structures. The system's neural networks are successful in helping better train systems. In addition to a comprehensive set of code for training new SyntaxNet models on proprietary data, users also have access to 'Parsey McParseface', a machine learning-based parsing system trained to analyze English text. Parsey is the most accurate model of its kind to date, and will help further research involving automatic extraction of information, translation, and other capabilities of the NLU.

1 - Diffbot Raises $10M Series A to Become Leading Arms Dealer in Coming AI Wars

Episode Summary: Over the last decade, many first-world militaries have developed, and in some cases deployed, autonomous “killer”  robots. Some proponents believe that such robots will save human lives, but another side believes that an accidental arms race of this type would yield long-term detriments that outweigh any good. University of Sheffield’s Dr. Noel Sharkey stands by the latter argument.

1 - Elon Musk Nominated for 'Luddite' of the Year Prize over Artificial Intelligence Fears