Whether in medicine, money, or love, technologies powered by forms of artificial intelligence are playing an increasingly prominent role in our lives. As we cede more decisions to thinking machines, we face new questions about staying safe, keeping a job and having a say over the direction of our lives. The answers to those questions might depend on your race, gender, age, behavior, or nationality. New AI technologies can drive cars, treat damaged brains and nudge workers to be more productive, but they also can threaten, manipulate, and alienate us from others. They can pit nation against nation, but they also can help the global community tackle some of its greatest challenges-from food crises to global climate change. In clear and accessible prose, global trends and strategy adviser Olaf Groth, AI scientist and social entrepreneur Mark Nitzberg, along with seasoned economics reporter Dan Zehr, provide a unique human-focused, global view of humanity in a world of thinking machines.

Computer vision seeks a process that starts with a noisy, ambiguous signal from a TV camera and ends with a high-level description of discrete objects located in 3-dimensional space and identified in a human classification. This book addresses the process at several levels. First to be treated are the low-level image-processing issues of noise removaland smoothing while preserving important lines and singularities in an image. At a slightly higher level, a robust contour tracing algorithm is described that produces a cartoon of the important lines in the image. Thirdis the high-level task of reconstructing the geometry of objects in the scene. The book has two aims: to give the computer vision community a new approach to early visual processing, in the form of image segmentation that incorporates occlusion at a low level, and to introduce real computer algorithms that do a better job than what most vision programmers use currently. The algorithms are: - a nonlinear filter that reduces noise and enhances edges, - an edge detector that also finds corners and produces smoothed contours rather than bitmaps, - an algorithm for filling gaps in contours.