Artificial Intelligence

The research conducted at the country's National Laboratories is usually highly classified and specifically aimed at solving national security problems. But sometimes you get a swords-into-ploughshares moment. That's the case here, as a startup called WaveSense looks to apply technology originally developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory to detect buried mines and improvised explosive devices for use in self-driving cars.

L33tdawg: "basically ten 1080 Tis dedicated to doing one thing: artificial intelligence," <--- Sounds awesomely tasty!

Ahead of Nvidia's pre-Gamescom keynote on Monday, Internet retailers spilled the beans on the existence of the company's next consumer-grade graphics cards: the RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti.

In late July, a group of high-ranking Facebook executives organized an emergency conference call with reporters across the country. That morning, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, explained, they had shut down 32 fake pages and accounts that appeared to be coordinating disinformation campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. They couldn’t pinpoint who was behind the activity just yet, but said the accounts and pages had loose ties to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which had spread divisive propaganda like a flesh-eating virus throughout the 2016 US election cycle.

UK authorities used facial recognition technology to identify two suspects in the nerve agent poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter earlier this year, CNN reported on Thursday.

Police discovered two "fresh identities" on surveillance camera footage who are believed to be involved in the Novichok poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March, the network reported, citing an unnamed source. The footage, taken at UK airports and Salisbury, was analyzed by facial recognition software, the source said.

NASA's Opportunity Mars rover has done many great things in its decade-plus of service—but initially, it rolled 600 feet past one of the initiative’s biggest discoveries: the Block Island meteorite. Measuring about 67 centimeters across, the meteorite was a telltale sign that Mars' atmosphere had once been much thicker, thick enough to slow down the rock flying at a staggering 2km/s so that it did not disintegrate on impact. A thicker atmosphere could mean a more gentle climate, possibly capable of supporting liquid water on the surface, maybe even life.

By now, most of us are familiar with Moore’s Law, the famous maxim that the development of computing power follows an exponential curve, doubling in price-performance (that is, speed per unit cost) every 18 months or so. When it comes to applying Moore’s Law to their own business strategies, however, even visionary thinkers frequently suffer from a giant “AI blind spot.”

For years, the semiconductor world seemed to have settled into a quiet balance: Intel vanquished virtually all of the RISC processors in the server world, save IBM’s POWER line. Elsewhere AMD had self-destructed, making it pretty much an x86 world. And Nvidia, a late starter in the GPU space, previously mowed down all of it many competitors in the 1990s. Suddenly only ATI, now a part of AMD, remained. It boasted just half of Nvidia’s prior market share.

When former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was asked about Elon Musk’s warnings about AI, he had a succinct answer: “I think Elon is exactly wrong.”

“He doesn’t understand the benefits that this technology will provide to making every human being smarter,” Schmidt said. “The fact of the matter is that AI and machine learning are so fundamentally good for humanity.”

French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Washington highlighted how differently our two nations are thinking about the future. In March, the French government unveiled a national strategy for artificial intelligence technology that has a clear goal: make France a global leader in AI. In the last year, China and the European Union have taken similar steps. If we’re serious about having a prosperous economy for decades to come, the United States should do the same.

Facial recognition may not be the high-tech policing solution it's purported to be, with new figures showing facial-recognition software used by the UK's Metropolitan Police returned incorrect matches in 98 percent of cases.

According to figures published by The Independent (based on data obtained under freedom of information), only two of the 104 alerts generated by the facial-recognition software used by Met Police were found to be accurate matches.