AI with AI

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has released its first edition of Ethically Aligned Design (EAD1e), a nearly 300-page report involving thousands of global experts; the report covers 8 major principles including transparency, accountability, and awareness of misuse. DARPA announces the Artificial Social Intelligence for Successful Teams program, which will attempt to help AI build shared mental models and understand the intentions, expectations, and emotions of its human counterparts. DARPA also announced a program to design chips for Real Time Machine Learning (RTML), which will generate optimized hardware design configurations and standard code, based on the objectives of the specific ML algorithms and systems. The U.S. Army awarded a $152M contract to QinetiQ North America for producing “backpack-sized” robots; the common robotic system individual (CRS(I)) is a remotely operated, unmanned ground vehicle. The White House has launched a site to highlight AI initiatives. Anduril Industries gets a Project MAVEN contract to support the Joint AI Center. And the 2019 Turing Award goes to neural network pioneers Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio. Researchers at Johns Hopkins demonstrate that humans can decipher adversarial images; that is, they can “think like machines” and anticipate how image classifiers will incorrectly identify unrecognizable images. A group of researchers at MIT, Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard demonstrate “particle robots” inspired by biological cells; these robots can’t move, but can pulsate from a size of 6in to about 9in, and as a collective, they can demonstrate movement and other collective behavior (even with a 20% failure of the components). Researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology and Machine State University control a swarm of “microbots” (here, single grains of hematite) through application of different magnetic fields. And researchers use honey bees (in Austria) and zebrafish (in Switzerland) to influence each other’s collective behavior through robotic mediation. A report from the Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute released a report on AI in law enforcement, from a recent meeting organized by INTERPOL. DefenseOne publishes a report from Tucker, Glass, and Bendett, on how the U.S. military services are using AI. An e-book from Frontiers in Robotics and AI collects 13 papers on the topic of “Consciousness in Humanoid Robots.” Andy highlights a book from 2007, “Artificial General Intelligence,” which claims to be the first to codify the use of AGI as a term-of-art. MIT Tech Review’s EnTech Digital 2019 has released the videos from its 25-26 March event. And DARPA has released more videos from its AI Colloquium. The U.N. Group of Governmental Experts is meeting in Geneva to discuss lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). A short story from Husain and Cole describes a hypothetical future war in Europe between Russian and NATO forces. And Ian McDonald pens a story that captures the life of military drone pilots in Sanjeev and Robotwallah.