GitHub's annual Octoverse report is out today. It found that Microsoft's Visual Studio Code or VSCode (19.1K), Azure Docs (14K), and Flutter (13K) were the top open source projects in total contributors on GitHub in the last year, followed by projects like Google's TensorFlow (9.9K), Kubernetes (6.9K), and the React Native framework created by Facebook. The annual report that looks at trends and milestones for the code repository acquired by Microsoft last year also found that repositories with topics like "deep learning," "natural language processing," and "machine learning" grew in popularity over the course of the past year. GitHub is now used by more than 40 million developers worldwide, a statistic it first shared this summer.

Chinese military contractors have already started to sell dangerous, autonomous killer robots to customers in the Middle East. For instance, a Chinese company called Ziyan is actively marketing its Blowfish A3 -- an autonomous helicopter-like drone armed with a machine gun -- to international buyers, according to Defense One. While several countries have been working towards this tech for years, this news means we're finally, and unfortunately, living in the era of killer robots. While Ziyan works to sell its autonomous killbots to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the Chinese government is already entrenched in the killer robot trade. "As we speak, the Chinese government is already exporting some of its most advanced military aerial drones to the Middle East, as it prepares to export its next-generation stealth UAVs when those come online," said Defense Secretary Mark Esper, per Defense One.

This post was originally produced for Forbes. "I am on a mission to provide clean and affordable energy to women and girls in African rural communities through the use of modern technologies like AI," says Monique Ntumngia, 29, founder of the Green Girls Organisation working in Sub-Saharan Africa. The organization uses a unique scoring algorithm called MNKB92 to optimize energy strategies for villages where they train women and girls to assemble and sell solar lamps and to deploy biodigesters to create methane for cooking and organic fertilizer for crops. The organization provides the materials for free but receives a 40% cut of the revenue from the sale of fertilizer and solar lamps. The organization helps women find markets for the fertilizer.

"China can Enslave Humanity with Artificial Intelligence, Robotics & Drones on 5G Network," says The AI Organization What are the inter-connections between AI, U.S, China, Big Tech and the world's use of Facial Recognition, Bio-Metrics, Drones, Smart Phones, Smart Cities, IoT, VR, Mixed Reality, 5G, Robotics, Cybernetics, & Bio-Digital Social Programming? The book will cover present, emerging and future threats of Artificial Intelligence with Big Tech, including technology that can be used for assassination or to control humanity's ability to have free formed thoughts without AI Bio-Digital Social Programming. The book will cover Cyborgs, Super Intelligence and how it can form, and in what ways it can travel undetected through The AI Global Network as it connects with the internet and the Human Bio-Digital Network. Over 50 Companies and Organizations are discussed, such as Huawei, Facebook, Nearalink, Google, Baidu, Megvii Face, and Alibaba. This book takes the reader in a simple way to understand what is Artificial Intelligence, and step by step, it takes the average reader through a process to understand very difficult concepts in a simplistic way.

Sir Martyn Lewis and I met back in April to discuss the impact of technology on humanity at The Club at The Ivy in London. It was a well-received debate, so we reconvened to tackle a new subject last month. As education is one of the key industries being disrupted by technology, and a subject both Martyn and I feel passionate about, it felt apt to put it on the agenda for the evening's discussion. The'Fourth Industrial Revolution' will see an increase in workforce automation. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that over the next 10 to 20 years, "14 percent of jobs are at high risk of being fully automated, while another 32 percent at risk of significant change".

Quadratic regression involves modeling the response as a (generalized) linear function of not only the features $x^{j_1}$ but also of quadratic terms $x^{j_1}x^{j_2}$. The inclusion of such higher-order "interaction terms" in regression often provides an easy way to increase accuracy in already-high-dimensional problems. However, this explodes the problem dimension from linear $O(p)$ to quadratic $O(p^2)$, and it is common to look for sparse interactions (typically via heuristics). In this paper, we provide a new algorithm - Interaction Hard Thresholding (IntHT) which is the first one to provably accurately solve this problem in sub-quadratic time and space. It is a variant of Iterative Hard Thresholding; one that uses the special quadratic structure to devise a new way to (approx.) extract the top elements of a $p^2$ size gradient in sub-$p^2$ time and space. Our main result is to theoretically prove that, in spite of the many speedup-related approximations, IntHT linearly converges to a consistent estimate under standard high-dimensional sparse recovery assumptions. We also demonstrate its value via synthetic experiments. Moreover, we numerically show that IntHT can be extended to higher-order regression problems, and also theoretically analyze an SVRG variant of IntHT.

Artificial intelligence has already started to shape our lives in ubiquitous and occasionally invisible ways. In its new documentary, In The Age of AI, FRONTLINE examines the promise and peril this technology. AI systems are being deployed by hiring managers, courts, law enforcement, and hospitals -- sometimes without the knowledge of the people being screened. And while these systems were initially lauded for being more objective than humans, it's fast becoming clear that the algorithms harbor bias, too. It's an issue Joy Buolamwini, a graduate researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, knows about firsthand. She founded the Algorithmic Justice League to draw attention to the issue, and earlier this year she testified at a congressional hearing on the impact of facial recognition technology on civil rights. "One of the major issues with algorithmic bias is you may not know it's happening," Buolamwini told FRONTLINE.

GRAVE NEW WORLD: The U.S. needs to tackle the challenges of adapting artificial intelligence systems for modern warfare, the same way the "titans of industry" transformed Detroit into an "arsenal of democracy" during World War II, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said at a conference hosted by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. "Mastering artificial intelligence will require similar vision, ambition and commitment," Esper said. "We need the full force of American intellect and ingenuity working in harmony across the public and private sectors." Artificial Intelligence, sometimes called "machine learning," refers to advanced computer algorithms that can use data to "learn" and therefore make choices without human input. Last week a Pentagon advisory board released proposed guidelines for the ethical deployment of AI-enabled weapons on the battlefield.

Two doctors are using data analysis and predictive algorithms to stretch healthcare resources in South Africa and help millions of people live with HIV. Dr. John Sargent and Dr. Ernest Darkoh co-founded BroadReach in 2003 to make the healthcare system more efficient and treat more patients. In 2010, the two developed Vantage, a data analysis platform and recommendation engine that runs on Microsoft Azure. The initial idea was to use the platform to manage and improve the public-private partnerships that support many healthcare services in Africa. The two realized that the analytic work could also improve access to healthcare in countries where there are many more people than doctors.

Prescient are the entrepreneurs who predicted data would become the new oil, like Ali Ghodsi, Andy Konwinski, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, and Scott Shenker. They're the cofounders of Databricks, a San Francisco-based company that provides a suite of enterprise-focused scalable data science and data engineering tools. Since 2013, the year Databricks opened for business, it's had no trouble attracting customers. But this week kicked into high gear the company's uninterrupted march toward market domination. Databricks this morning announced that it's closed a $400 million series F fundraising round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Microsoft, Alkeon Capital Management, BlackRock, Coatue Management, Dragoneer Investment Group, Geodesic, Green Bay Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, T. Rowe Price, and Tiger Global Management.