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$27 million fund backs research in AI’s impact

Image: AI brain
Experts say human intelligence and artificial intelligence are likely to work together in the decades ahead. (Credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT file)

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Omidyar Network anchor a newly formed $27 million fund to support research into the social impacts of artificial intelligence.

Hoffman and Omidyar are each kicking in $10 million to get the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund started. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has committed $5 million more. And there are $1 million contributions from James Pallotta, the investor who founded the Raptor Group; and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Awards will be made from the fund to support a global cross-section of research aimed at applying the humanities, social sciences and other disciplines to the development of AI for the public interest. The MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society will serve as the initiative’s founding academic institutions.

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Waymo revs up self-driving minivans

Waymo has modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans for autonomous driving. (Fiat Chrysler Photo)
Waymo has modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans for autonomous driving. (Fiat Chrysler Photo)

Waymo, the automotive venture nurtured by Google and its Alphabet holding company, says it’ll start test-driving its autonomous minivans on public roads in Arizona and California later this month.

The company’s specially modified Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid was among the stars of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit on Jan. 8 when it shared the stage with Waymo CEO John Krafcik.

Waymo, which was spun off from Alphabet’s X lab just last month, outfitted 100 of the minivans with a sensor system that was developed in-house for self-driving applications.

About 100 more may join the fleet this year, Bloomberg News reported.

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VLT joins search for Alpha Centauri’s planets

VLT and Alpha Centauri
The ESO’s Very Large Telescope looms in the foreground of this image, and a star map has been superimposed on the sky to show the locations of Alpha Centauri and Proxima Centauri. (ESO Photo)

One of the most powerful observing instruments on Earth, the Very Large Telescope, will join the search for potentially habitable planets around the Alpha Centauri star system.

The survey will take place in 2019 under the terms of an agreement signed by the European Southern Observatory, which operates the VLT in Chile, and by the Breakthrough Initiatives.

The Breakthrough Initiatives are funded by such luminaries as Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The effort includes in a radio search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, known as Breakthrough Listen; and a plan to send swarms of nano-probes through the Alpha Centauri system, known as Breakthrough Starshot.

For months, the Breakthrough team has been working out the details for a campaign to look for worlds around Alpha Centauri, informally known as Breakthrough Watch. Such observations would complement Breakthrough Starshot.

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Obama touts clean energy in Science

Obama at solar farm
President Barack Obama delivers remarks on energy after a tour of a solar panel field at the Copper Mountain Solar 1 Facility in Nevada in 2012. (White House Photo / Lawrence Jackson)

In the closing days of his White House term, President Barack Obama argues that the push toward renewable energy is unstoppable, and that it’s a valid strategy for economic growth.

The substance of Obama’s argument isn’t as surprising as where it was made: in a commentary for Science, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.

“The mounting economic and scientific evidence leave me confident that trends toward a clean-energy economy that have emerged during my presidency will continue,” Obama writes, “and that the economic opportunity for our country to harness that trend will only grow.”

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Amazon wins share of Golden Globes spotlight

Jeff Bezos at Golden Globes
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laughs during the Golden Globes, with supporting-actor nominee Simon Helberg at left and presenter Matt Damon at right. (NBC / Golden Globes via YouTube)

Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, is becoming a regular at Hollywood award ceremonies like tonight’s Golden Globes, and now he’s becoming an inspiration for the jokes as well.

Bezos is attending the free-wheeling festivities by virtue of the 11 nominations that Amazon Studios picked up this year, including five for its TV shows and five more for “Manchester by the Sea,” an Amazon-backed theatrical release. Another movie with an Amazon connection, “The Salesman,” was up for best foreign-language film.

One of the video productions, “Goliath,” picked up a best-actor award early in the evening for Billy Bob Thornton’s portrayal of a washed-up lawyer trying to redeem himself. Toward the end of the show, “Manchester” star Casey Affleck won the Golden Globe for best actor in a dramatic movie.

But for Bezos, the biggest nod of the night may well be the joke that Golden Globes host Jimmy Fallon shot his way.

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SpaceX delays launch due to weather

SpaceX Falcon 9 at Vandenberg
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands at Vandenberg Air Force Base before its launch in January 2016 to put NASA’s Jason-3 satellite into orbit. (SpaceX / NASA Photo)

SpaceX has postponed the return to flight for its Falcon 9 rocket until Jan. 14 at the earliest, due to a gloomy weather forecast for the next few days at its California launch site.

The launch of 10 Iridium Next telecommunications satellites had been scheduled for Jan. 9 from Vandenberg Air Force Base. But in a series of tweets, Iridium and SpaceX said the liftoff had to be put off due to a combination of windy, rainy weather and scheduling conflicts.

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Balloons for Stephen Hawking’s 75th birthday

Near-space balloon for Stephen Hawking
Party balloons and a spacey view: Not a bad way to mark Stephen Hawking’s birthday. (NEAR via YouTube)

Famed British physicist Stephen Hawking has long wanted to go into space, so what better way to celebrate his 75th birthday than sending him a greeting from near-space?

The greeting comes courtesy of a stratospheric balloon experiment, executed at the Idaho-Oregon border by an Boise-based amateur science group called Near Space Education and Research, or NEAR.

The balloon-borne platform was festooned with a “Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking,” plus a couple of party balloons for the occasion.

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Boeing reports a holiday rush in jet sales

Boeing 737
Boeing’s first 737 MAX jet makes its way through the production line at the Renton assembly plant. Most of the orders that Boeing booked in 2016 were for 737 jets. (Boeing Photo)

The Boeing Co. says it delivered 748 commercial jets last year and booked net orders for 668 aircraft, including a burst of 202 orders in December.

As furious as that pace was, it didn’t quite match Boeing’s performance in 2015 or analysts’ year-end expectations for 2016. Nevertheless, the count seems likely to leave Boeing ahead of its European rival, Airbus, which is due to report its final 2016 figures next week.

Boeing’s tally doesn’t include its multibillion-dollar sale to Iran, which is still contingent on financing, but it does take 180 canceled orders into account. The company said its order backlog remains at roughly seven years’ worth of production at current rates.

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New batteries give a boost to space station

Astronaut Shane Kimbrough
NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough flashes a smile for a selfie during a spacewalk at the International Space Station. (NASA Photo)

The International Space Station got a power upgrade today when spacewalkers hooked three new lithium-ion batteries into the electrical system.

NASA astronauts Shane Kimbrough and Peggy Whitson spent about six and a half hours outside the orbital outpost to do the installation.

For the past several days, the station’s crew has been using the Dextre robotic arm system to shift old nickel-hydrogen batteries into storage and get the new batteries ready for installation. The lithium-ion battery packs arrived at the station last month aboard a robotic Japanese cargo ship.

Each battery pack is about as big as a coffee table, weighs 400 pounds and is designed to last at least 10 years. They’re made by Aerojet Rocketdyne, and provide 50 percent more energy storage capability than the packs they replace.

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Amazon exec worries about state laws on drones

Paul Misener
Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of global innovation policy and communications, speaks at the CES show in Las Vegas. (GeekWire Photo / Monica Nickelsburg)

By Alan Boyle and Monica Nickelsburg

A patchwork of state laws governing drone operations would pose a “real problem” for aerial delivery systems like the one that Amazon is developing, one of the executives in charge of the company’s drone program says.

Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president of global innovation policy and communications, discussed the regulatory issues facing delivery drones today during a panel at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Amazon began using drones to make deliveries to a handful of customers in England last month, and the Seattle-based company is expected to ramp up U.S. drone operations in the next couple of years.

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