In his book, “T-Minus AI,” Michael Kanaan calls attention to the need for the U.S. to wake up to AI in the same way that China and Russia have — as a matter of national importance amid global power shifts. In 1957, Russia launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit. Kanaan writes that it was both a technological and a military feat. As Sputnik orbited Earth, suddenly the U.S. was confronted by…

Motion capture — the process of recording peoples’ movements — traditionally requires equipment, cameras, and software tailored for the purpose. But researchers at the Max Planck Institute and Facebook Reality Labs claim they’ve developed a machine learning algorithm — PhysCap — that works with any off-the-shelf DSLR camera running at 25 frames per second. In a paper expected to be…