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A Belgian artist has devised a novel way to catch misbehaving politicians: automatically tagging the rogues who use their phones at work. Dries Depoorter is using AI to monitor YouTube videos of Flemish government meetings. When the stream starts, his software usesmachine learningto find phones in the footage, and facial recognition to identify politicians using the devices. Videos of the distracted lawmakers are then posted to theTwitterandInstagramaccounts of the project, for a bit of good old public shaming....

Scientists at Columbia University have developed a robot that mimics the facial expressions of humans to gain their trust. Named Eva, the droid uses deep learning to analyze human facial gestures captured by a camera. Cables and motors then pull on different points of the robot’s soft skin to mimic the expressions of nearby people in real-time. The effect is pretty creepy, but the researchers say that giving androids this ability can facilitate more natural and engaging human-robot interactions....

Meet the pilot of tomorrow, today: AI startupMerlin Labstoday deactivated stealth mode to announce a $25 million funding round and a partnership with Dynamic Aviation to put a fleet of 55 King Air planes in the sky without humans aboard. Merlin Labs CEO and founder Matthew George told Neural: What we’re building is software that creates a think-for-itself-pilot … fully-autonomous flight take-off to touchdown. The big idea:See a need, fill a need....

This AI tool shows which politicians and issues are getting the most TV time The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer uses computer vision to identify public figures on the idiot box AI’s risks and rewards The tool can also identify gender biases in TV coverage. In the graph below, the move towards on-air gender parity appears to havereversedsince 2015. However, this example raises one of the ethical concerns around the project....

This AI tool traced the development of Pizzagate. Next up? QAnon Collaboratively constructed, fast to form Actual conspiracies are deliberately hidden, real-life actions of people working together for their own malign purposes. In contrast, conspiracy theories are collaboratively constructed and develop in the open. Conspiracy theories are deliberately complex and reflect an all-encompassing worldview. Instead of trying to explain one thing, a conspiracy theory tries to explain everything, discovering connections across domains of human interaction that are otherwise hidden – mostly because they do not exist....