The Washington PostAngle-of-attack sensors that Boeing was ordered to replace following the near-crash of an Airbus A321 in 2014 are drawing fresh scrutiny after two recent Boeing 737 disasters, including last week's deadly crash in Ethiopia. Experts say the risks posed by a defective angle-of-attack sensor are exacerbated by the increasing role of cockpit software. According to the experts, errors in how software interprets sensor readings can lead to unpredictable complications. The […]

The Wall Street JournalNew technologies will enable autocrats to tighten their grip on citizenry, undermine basic rights, and spread illiberal practices outside of their own countries. Microtargeting is poised to spread beyond commercial aims, with artificial intelligence (AI)-driven apps expected to allow authoritarians to analyze patterns in a population's online activities, identifying persons most susceptible to propaganda and targeting them more precisely. Lisa-Marie Neudert with the […]

South China Morning PostChina's ambitions to become unparalleled in artificial intelligence (AI) and other advanced technologies, and transform the country's economy by making high-tech industries world-class, are reflected in Chinese children's increasing enrollment in coding classes. Interest in coding classes has risen in the past decade as China's online populace and mobile phone user base expanded into the world's largest, buoyed by government policies encouraging the development of […]

USC Viterbi School of EngineeringResearchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have developed a bio-inspired algorithm that enabled a robotic limb to learn a new walking task by itself after only five minutes of unstructured activity, and then adapt to other tasks without additional programming. This breakthrough is similar to the natural learning that happens in babies, as the robotic limb was first allowed to understand its environment in a process of free play, known as "motor […]

Optical Society of AmericaScientists at the Ecole Normale Superieure in France have repurposed an algorithm developed for Netflix's 2009 movie preference prediction challenge for high-speed acquisition of classical Raman spectroscopy biological-tissue images. The researchers demonstrated imaging speeds of a few tens of seconds for an image that would usually take minutes to obtain, and they think sub-second speeds could be realized in the future. Said Ecole Normale Superieure's Hilton de […]