https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/technology/artificial-intelligence-china-united-states.html

By JOHN MARKOFF and MATTHEW ROSENBERGFEB. 3, 2017

The Chinese-designed multicore processor of the Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest supercomputer. The new supercomputer is thought to be part of a broader Chinese push to begin driving innovation. Credit Li Xiang/Xinhua, via Associated Press

Robert O. Work, the veteran defense official retained as deputy secretary by President Trump, calls them his “A.I. dudes.” The breezy moniker belies their serious task: The dudes have been a kitchen cabinet of sorts, and have advised Mr. Work as he has sought to reshape warfare by bringing artificial intelligence to the battlefield.

Last spring, he asked, “O.K., you guys are the smartest guys in A.I., right?”

No, the dudes told him, “the smartest guys are at Facebook and Google,” Mr. Work recalled in an interview.

Now, increasingly, they’re also in China. The United States no longer has a strategic monopoly on the technology, which is widely seen as the key factor in the next generation of warfare.

The Pentagon’s plan to bring A.I. to the military is taking shape as Chinese researchers assert themselves in the nascent technology field. And that shift is reflected in surprising commercial advances in artificial intelligence among Chinese companies.

Last year, for example, Microsoft researchers proclaimed that the company had created software capable of matching human skills in understanding speech.

Although they boasted that they had outperformed their United States competitors, a well-known A.I. researcher who leads a Silicon Valley laboratory for the Chinese web services company

Baidu gently taunted Microsoft, noting that Baidu had achieved similar accuracy with the Chinese language two years earlier.

That, in a nutshell, is the challenge the United States faces as it embarks on a new military strategy founded on the assumption of its continued superiority in technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.

First announced last year by Ashton B. Carter , President Barack Obama’s defense secretary, the “Third Offset” strategy provides a formula for maintaining a military advantage in the face of a renewed rivalry with China and Russia.

Well into the 1960s, the United States held a military advantage based on technological leadership in nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, that perceived lead shifted to smart weapons, based on brand-new Silicon Valley technologies like computer chips. Now, the nation’s leaders plan on retaining that military advantage with a significant commitment to artificial intelligence and robotic weapons.

But the global technology balance of power is shifting. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the United States carefully guarded its advantage. It led the world in computer and material science technology, and it jealously hoarded its leadership with military secrecy and export controls.

In the late 1980s, the emergence of the inexpensive and universally available microchip upended the Pentagon’s ability to control technological progress. Now, rather than trickling down from military and advanced corporate laboratories, today’s new technologies increasingly come from consumer electronics firms. Put simply, the companies that make the fastest computers are the same ones that put things under our Christmas trees.

As consumer electronics manufacturing has moved to Asia, both Chinese companies and the nation’s government laboratories are making major investments in artificial intelligence.

The advance of the Chinese was underscored last month when Qi Lu, a veteran Microsoft artificial intelligence specialist, left the company to become chief operating officer at Baidu, where he will oversee the company’s ambitious plan to become a global leader in A.I.

And last year, Tencent, developer of the mobile app WeChat, a Facebook competitor, created an artificial intelligence research laboratory and began investing in United States-based A.I. companies.

Rapid Chinese progress has touched off a debate in the United States between military strategists and technologists over whether the Chinese are merely imitating advances or are engaged in independent innovation that will soon overtake the United States in the field.

“The Chinese leadership is increasingly thinking about how to ensure they are competitive in the next wave of technologies,” said Adam Segal, a specialist in emerging technologies and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In August, the state-run China Daily reported that the country had embarked on the development of a cruise missile system with a “high level” of artificial intelligence. The new system appears to be a response to a missile the United States Navy is expected to deploy in 2018 to counter growing Chinese military influence in the Pacific.

Known as the Long Range Anti- Ship Missile , or L.R.A.S.M., it is described as a “semiautonomous” weapon. According to the Pentagon, this means that though targets are chosen by human soldiers, the missile uses artificial intelligence technology to avoid defenses and make final targeting decisions.

The new Chinese weapon typifies a strategy known as “remote warfare,” said John Arquilla, a military strategist at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. The idea is to build large fleets of small ships that deploy missiles, to attack an enemy with larger ships, like aircraft carriers.

“They are making their machines more creative,” he said. “A little bit of automation gives the machines a tremendous boost.”

Whether or not the Chinese will quickly catch the United States in artificial intelligence and robotics technologies is a matter of intense discussion and disagreement in the United States.

Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, said the United States may be too myopic and self-confident to understand the speed of the Chinese competition.

“There are many occasions of something being simultaneously invented in China and elsewhere, or being invented first in China and then later making it overseas,” he said. “But then U.S. media reports only on the U.S. version. This leads to a misperception of those ideas having been first invented in the U.S.”

Photo

Robert O. Work, left, the deputy secretary of defense, with James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, center, and Marcel Lettre, under secretary of defense for intelligence, in November. Mr. Work is trying to bring artificial intelligence to the battlefield. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

…

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/02/06/amazon-supermarket-could-operate-with-just-3-employees.html

Amazon supermarket could operate with just 3 employeesBy Matthew Humphries

Published February 06, 2017

File photo. (REUTERS/Rick Wilking)

In December last year, Amazon unveiled its vision of grocery shopping called Amazon Go. It involves no lines or registers, just you, an app, and a completely automated shopping experience that should appeal to just about everyone. Here at PCMag we have a few reservations, but a test store in Seattle is planned to open this year to prove it can work.

Beyond that, Amazon is apparently toying with the idea of opening larger supermarkets. According to the New York Post, a two-story store of between 10,000 and 40,000 square feet is under consideration. Where as the Amazon Go store is for convenience, a supermarket would cater to your entire weekly shop.

A store that big would offer 4,000 items for sale. However, unlike a typical supermarket manned by dozens of staff, Amazon's version requires only three human employees to function and a maximum of 10 employees per shift.

Such a small number of staff is made possible due to two of Amazon's key pieces of technology: automation and robots. As we saw in December, Amazon isn't interested in customers lining up to pay for their goods. Amazon Go automates that entire experience.

The New York Post explains that the few staff required will be split across restocking shelves, signing up customers to Amazon Fresh, manning a drive-thru window for order collection, and helping robots bag groceries. I'd imagine the number of staff would vary with how busy the store got at different times of the day and week, but it would still never exceed 10.

…

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/02/02/hater-dating-app-helps-people-find-love-based-hate/

This dating app helps people find love - based on what they both hate Hater bills itself as "the first dating app that matches people on the things they hate" CREDIT: HATER

Cara McGoogan

2 February 2017 • 10:32am

A sign of the times, the latest dating app to enter the busy scene matches people based on the things they hate, rather than their similar interests. 

Be it a hatred of the "liberal elite" or "alt-right", or mild distaste for slow walkers and gluten-free food, Hater wants its users to bond over the things that get them riled. 

Hater bills itself as an app that will help you "meet someone who hates the same stuff as you". It encourages users to express their opinions on a wide range of topics from Donald Trump to camping to paying for extra guacamole.

Unlike the politicised app Remainder, which launched in the wake of the Brexit vote, Hater is not only focused on political views. In fact, it can ensure people fed up of hearing about the political world find someone who will steer clear of Trump and Brexit. 

Users are encouraged to pick express their opinions on thousands of topics CREDIT: HATER

To express their opinions, users are asked to swipe in different directions to indicate if they love, hate, like, dislike or are indifferent to a person, activity or concept. Hater then builds a profile of its users based on their opinions and starts connecting them with like-minded people - who hate the same things. 

The app, which is currently available as a beta and will be released on February 8 in time for Valentine's Day, contains 2,000 topics of interest at the moment, with a plan to add more user-created ones. …

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2814660/mark-zuckerberg-funds-bid-to-record-humans-thoughts-and-alter-their-behaviour/

READ YOU LIKE A FACEBOOK

Mark Zuckerberg funds bid to develop mind-reading brain implantsBillionaire pays for research into 'neural recording', a creepy-sounding technique which could change the lives of people suffering serious illnesses

by JASPER HAMILL

8th February 2017, 12:39 pm

FACEBOOK founder Mark Zuckerberg is funding the development of technology with the potential to read humans’ minds.

The billionaire has just pledged to hand over £40 million to researchers working to combat deadly diseases.

Zuck and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have teamed up in a mission to rid the world of ALL diseases

Mark Zuckerberg’s firm already holds an astonishing amount of info on its users

This cash will be distributed by the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, an organisation which aims to “enable doctors to cure, prevent or manage all diseases during our children’s lifetime”.

Some of the projects are likely to ring alarm bells among paranoid people who fear technological progress will come at the expense of human freedom.

One of the researchers who will receive funding is Dr. Rikky Muller, CEO and founder of a firm called Cortera.

She is working to develop “clinically viable and minimally invasive neural interfaces” designed to be used by people suffering severe disabilities.

Dr. Muller hopes that recording brain activity will allow paralysed people to control prosthetic limbs.

,,,

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/science/sleep-memory-brain-forgetting.html

The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say

Carl Zimmer

FEB. 2, 2017

A PET scan of a brain during normal sleep. Two scientists say sleep may help the brain prune back unneeded synapses. Credit Hank Morgan/Science Source

Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep.

Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste. Still others have proposed that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators.

A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day.

In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks.

In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise.

In the years since, Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli, along with other researchers, have found a great deal of indirect evidence to support the so-called synaptic homeostasis hypothesis.

It turns out, for example, that neurons can prune their synapses — at least in a dish. In laboratory experiments on clumps of neurons, scientists can give them a drug that spurs them to grow extra synapses. Afterward, the neurons pare back some of the growth.

Other evidence comes from the electric waves released by the brain. During deep sleep, the waves slow down. Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli have argued that shrinking synapses produce this change.

Four years ago, Dr. Tononi and Dr. Cirelli got a chance to test their theory by looking at the synapses themselves. They acquired a kind of deli slicer for brain tissue, which they used to shave ultrathin sheets from a mouse’s brain.

Luisa de Vivo, an assistant scientist working in their lab, led a painstaking survey of tissue taken from mice, some awake and others asleep. She and her colleagues determined the size and shape of 6,920 synapses in total.

The synapses in the brains of sleeping mice, they found, were 18 percent smaller than in awake ones. “That there’s such a big change over all is surprising,” Dr. Tononi said.

The second study was led by Graham H. Diering, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Diering and his colleagues set out to explore the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis by studying the proteins in mouse brains. “I’m really coming at it from this nuts-and-bolts place,” Dr. Diering said.

In one experiment, Dr. Diering and his colleagues created a tiny window through which they could peer into mouse brains. Then he and his colleagues added a chemical that lit up a surface protein on brain synapses.

…

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2017/02/06/how-drones-lit-up-sky-in-lady-gagas-super-bowl-halftime-show.html

How drones lit up the sky in Lady Gaga's Super Bowl halftime showPublished February 06, 2017

An Intel Shooting Star drones fleet lights up the sky in an American Flag formation during the Pepsi Zero Sugar Super Bowl LI Halftime Show on Sunday, Feb. 5, 2017. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

Some 300 drones lit up the sky in a spectacular synchronized display during Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show Sunday.

The stunning light show kicked off Lady Gaga’s eagerly-anticipated performance with the drones creating eye-catching formations in the night sky. At one point the drones looked like twinkling stars before transforming into red and blue moving stars, creating an American flag.

Specially-designed for the entertainment industry, the drones are the brainchild of tech giant Intel. The quadcopters are equipped with LED lights that can create over 4 billion color combinations and can be easily programmed to create any animation, according to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based firm.

“Lady Gaga and the Super Bowl creative team wanted to pull off something that had never been done before and we were able to combine Intel drone innovation with her artistry to pull off a truly unique experience,” said Josh

Walden, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s New Technology Group, in a press release. “The potential for these light show drones is endless and we hope this experience inspires other creatives, artists and innovators to really think about how they can incorporate drone technology in new ways that have yet to even be thought of.”

However, with a Federal Aviation Administration drone ban in place over Houston's NRG Stadium during the Super Bowl, Wired reports that the display was filmed earlier in the week, well before the big game.

,,,

https://www.painscience.com/microblog/spectacularly-unreliable-mri-results.html

Spectacularly unreliable MRI “results”Paul Ingraham • February 1 2017

There have been so many site updates lately, dozens in January alone, that it’s tough to choose one to focus on for the blog. But the results of this late 2016 study (Herzog   et   al ) blew my mind more than anything else I’ve read recently. If I’m judging by WTF-factor, this item wins hands-down.

I already knew MRI is misleading — everyone knows that, if they know anything about medical imaging and back pain. But it may be worse than I thought…

CT scan of a literal loose screw in my wife’s titanium spinal implants… which the radiologist missed. He also missed the other one.

If you send the same patient to get ten different MRIs, interpreted by ten different radiologists from different facilities, apparently you get ten markedly different explanations for her symptoms. A brave 63-year-old volunteer with sciatica allowed herself to be scanned again and again and again for science. The radiologists — who did not know they were getting the “secret shopper” treatment — cooked up forty-nine distinct “findings.” Sixteen were unique; not one was found in all ten reports, and only one was found in nine of the ten. On average, each radiologist made about a dozen errors , seeing one or two things that weren’t there about missing about ten things that were.

That’s a lot of errors, and not a lot of reliability. The authors clearly believe that some MRI providers are better than others, and that’s probably true, but we also need to ask the question: is any MRI actually reliable?

,,,

http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/07/technology/car-data-value/index.html

Your car's data may soon be more valuable than the car itselfby Matt McFarland   @mattmcfarland February 7, 2017: 9:05 AM ET

Riding a self-driving Uber around San Francisco

The most valuable thing about tomorrow's cars is something you'll never even see.*** the key here is to generate a dynamic vocabulary – can’t have linear connection from measurement to ‘information’ – have to be able to generate information for unforeseen uses from the vocabulary – but can’t store all the data ***

Forget the engine. Or the shiny rims. The money is in vehicles' data.

People have made fortunes selling cars and trucks. For many of us, a car is the second most expensive thing we'll ever buy. (A home being Number 1.)

But experts say the value of vehicles will likely pale in comparison to the riches from our cars' data.

"Data is the currency of the digital age," said Jim Barbaresso, who leads Intelligent Transportation Systems at HTNB. "Vehicle data could be the beginning of a modern day gold rush."

The gold rush analogy is a common one, made by everyone from Barbaresso to the CEO of Daimler. Here's why there's so much potential:

Cars increasingly have sensors and cameras to track their performance and their surroundings. Vehicle sensors, for example, can better tell when an engine part is in need of replacement. A back-up camera doesn't just help us park, it can tell how many pedestrians or vehicles are on a block.

These sensors generate data, which can be analyzed to make money. (If you doubt the way data can be turned into money, just look at the success of Google ( GOOG ) and Facebook ( FB , Tech30 ). They offer free services to billions, and make a fortune off the data they collect.)

A self-driving car can generate 1 gigabyte of data per second, according to Tom Coughlin, the founder of Coughlin Associates, which does data storage consulting. At that rate, about 30 seconds of driving would fill up the memory on a typical iPhone.

More data means more potential money. All sorts of creative business opportunities will arise.

"By collecting data from vehicles, you effectively digitize the public space, unlocking potential safety, security, municipal and commercial benefits," Eran Shir, CEO of Nexar, a vehicle communication company, told CNNTech.

Some uses are already emerging, according to Ben Volkow, the CEO of otonomo, an Israeli startup that sells vehicle data. The information is of interest to parking apps, for example. A car driving down a street can identify open parking spaces thanks to its cameras and sensors. Knowing the location of the nearest open parking spot is valuable for anyone parking in a crowded city.

,,,

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/world/middleeast/donald-trump-yemen-commando-raid-questions.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=a-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Raid in Yemen: Risky From the Start and Costly in the EndBy ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGERFEB. 1, 2017

Photo

Officials, including Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, left Washington for Dover Air Force Base on Wednesday to meet the family of an American commando killed in Yemen. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Just five days after taking office, over dinner with his newly installed secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President Trump was presented with the first of what will be many life-or-death decisions: whether to approve a commando raid that risked the lives of American Special Operations forces and foreign civilians alike.

President Barack Obama’s national security aides had reviewed the plans for a risky attack on a small, heavily guarded brick home of a senior Qaeda collaborator in a mountainous village in a remote part of central Yemen. But Mr. Obama did not act because the Pentagon wanted to launch the attack on a moonless night and the next one would come after his term had ended.

With two of his closest advisers, Jared Kushner and Stephen K. Bannon, joining the dinner at the White House along with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., Mr. Trump approved sending in the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, hoping the raid early last Sunday would scoop up cellphones and laptop computers that could yield valuable clues about one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups. Vice President Mike Pence and Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, also attended the dinner.

As it turned out, almost everything that could go wrong did. And on Wednesday, Mr. Trump flew to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to be present as the body of the American commando killed in the raid was returned home, the first military death on the new commander in chief’s watch.

The death of Chief Petty Officer William Owens came after a chain of mishaps and misjudgments that plunged the elite commandos into a ferocious 50-minute firefight that also left three others wounded and a $75 million aircraft deliberately destroyed. There are allegations — which the Pentagon acknowledged on Wednesday night are most likely correct — that the mission also killed several civilians, including some children. The dead include, by the account of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Qaeda leader who was killed in a targeted drone strike in 2011.

Mr. Trump on Sunday hailed his first counterterrorism operation as a success, claiming the commandos captured “important intelligence that will assist the U.S. in preventing terrorism

against its citizens and people around the world.” A statement by the military’s Central Command on Wednesday night that acknowledged the likelihood of civilian casualties also said that the recovered materials had provided some initial information helpful to counterterrorism analysts. The statement did not provide details.

But the mission’s casualties raise doubts about the months of detailed planning that went into the operation during the Obama administration and whether the right questions were raised before its approval. Typically, the president’s advisers lay out the risks, but Pentagon officials declined to characterize any discussions with Mr. Trump.

A senior administration official said on Wednesday night that the Defense Department had conducted a legal review of the operation that Mr. Trump approved and that a Pentagon lawyer had signed off on it.

Mr. Trump’s new national security team, led by Mr. Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a retired general with experience in counterterrorism raids, has said that it wants to speed the decision-making when it comes to such strikes, delegating more power to lower-level officials so that the military may respond more quickly. Indeed, the Pentagon is drafting such plans to accelerate activities against the Qaeda branch in Yemen.

But doing that also raises the possibility of error. “You can mitigate risk in missions like this, but you can’t mitigate risk down to zero,” said William Wechsler, a former top counterterrorism official at the Pentagon.

In this case, the assault force of several dozen commandos, which also included elite soldiers from the United Arab Emirates, was jinxed from the start. Qaeda fighters were somehow tipped off to the stealthy advance toward the village — perhaps by the whine of American drones that local tribal leaders said were flying lower and louder than usual.

Through a communications intercept, the commandos knew that the mission had been somehow compromised, but pressed on toward their target roughly five miles from where they had been flown into the area. “They kind of knew they were screwed from the beginning,” one former SEAL Team 6 official said.

,,,