From the associate editor-in-chief July 2018

In July 2017, China's State Council put out an action plan for development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology for 2018–2020, including research in intelligent unmanned aerial vehicles as well as specifically in machine learning (ML) for other applications. In 2018, the U.S. Office of Naval Research put out a special program announcement for “Advancing Artificial Intelligence for the Naval Domain.” After that in 2018, the European Commission increased its investment in AI research to 1.5 billion for the 2018–2020 timeframe. With such a large international effort going into AI/ML research, one can expect that the first article in this issue, which addresses the use of neural networks to determine the relation between exhaust gas temperature and the revolutions per minute output of a gas turbine, will be one of many in the coming years that uses an ML technique to solve a practical problem.