Scientists and activists are calling for a ban on making robots that could kill humans, which some tech companies are racing to develop. But that call hasn't been met with a blanket "yes", especially from some players in the Artificial Intelligence industry. So far, the United States and Russia have resisted signing up to the ban.

Google has set up an external AI ethics council to guide the tech giant away from morally questionable uses of its technology and encroaching on the privacy of its customers. It will advise the search giant on matters relating to the development and application of its artificial intelligence research. Google has been embroiled in past controversies regarding the use of its AI, as well as the way it protects the data it gathers. It established an internal AI ethics board in 2014 when it acquired DeepMind but this has been shrouded in secrecy with no details ever released about who it includes. The firm is a world-leader in many aspects of AI and the eight people recruited for the advisory board will'consider some of Google's most complex challenges'.

The US government says a Chinese gaming company's ownership of the gay dating app Grindr poses a national security risk, according to a report from Reuters. Beijing Kunlun Tech acquired a 60 percent stake in Grindr in 2016 and bought the rest in 2018. But, Reuters reports, the Chinese firm didn't clear the acquisition with the agency known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which evaluates the national security impacts of foreign investments in US companies. Kunlun is now seeking to sell Grindr following the CFIUS assessment, according to Reuters. Grindr declined to comment; CFIUS and Kunlun did not respond to requests for comment.

And one vote on those specifics of those rules appears to have been decided on the basis of MEPs who approved them by accident. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view. The MEPs turned down an amendment that would have allowed them to specifically reject those parts of the law, by a very thin margin, in advance of the main vote. But now some of those politicians say they mistakenly voted the wrong way – and enough of them that it would have swung the vote.

The popular gay dating app Grindr represents a national security risk under its current Chinese ownership, according to the US government. Gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech Co is seeking to sell the app after being told the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) has concerns about its ownership. It is understood to have told Kunlun it considers its involvement with Grindr a national security risk, although it has not been determined what specific issued it raised. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view. However, the US has begun to place more scrutiny on app developers and the security of data they hold, particularly if that may include details of US military and intelligence personnel.

Russia has been manipulating global satellite positioning (GPS) locations on a vast scale in order to protect Vladimir Putin from drones, according to a report. The Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a Washington-based research organisation, undertook a year-long investigation ending in November 2018 into the manipulation of GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). Their report, which drew upon publicly available satellite data, found that the tactic was used in Russia, the Ukraine and Syria, with some incidents of spoofing, correlating closely with the movements of Putin. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

Since its launch in 2015, the Apple Watch has evolved with new features and capabilities. Now, thanks to a just-released software update, the latest model of Apple Watch, called Series 4, is capable of advanced heart measurements. These features have been available to Watch users in the United States for the last few months but have now been cleared by authorities in Europe as well. From today, in 19 European countries including the UK, Watch wearers can take an electrocardiogram right on their wrist. Apple has always had a strong interest in health and wellness, but the emphasis has grown in recent years and Apple Watch has been at the forefront.

Apple Watch users across Europe can now measure their heart health after Apple turned on one of the smart watch's headline new features. After being regulatory approval, the company has flipped the switch that means the watch can take electrocardiogram, or ECG, readings. The update will arrive for anyone who has the latest watch as well as being updated to the most recent version of the software. While the technology to power the ECG feature has been present in all Series 4 Watches since they were released, Apple hasn't been able to turn it on because it has not been approved. That means a new update will be able to switch it on, without any extra work from owners.

Although AI offers vast implications for engineering, production, supply chain, customer experience, and mobility services, progress in AI-driven transformation has been sluggish and uneven due to lingering roadblocks. The number of automotive companies deploying AI at scale has grown from 7% in 2017 to 10% today, with OEMs generally making better progress than suppliers or dealers. Geographically, the US, where 25% of companies implement AI at scale, is leading the way in terms of progress, followed by the UK (14%) and Germany (12%). In terms of pronounced growth, China is making huge strides, having nearly doubled its share of scaled AI implementations, from 5% to 9%. The new report by the Capgemini Research Institute, Accelerating automotive's AI transformation: how driving AI enterprise-wide can turbo-charge organizational value, surveyed 500 executives from large automotive organizations in eight countries and interviewed a number of industry experts and entrepreneurs to understand how progress in deploying AI at scale can be accelerated.

Meta-learning methods leverage past experience to learn data-driven inductive biases from related problems, increasing learning efficiency on new tasks. This ability renders them particularly suitable for sequential decision making with limited experience. Within this problem family, we argue for the use of such approaches in the study of model-based approaches to Bayesian Optimisation, contextual bandits and Reinforcement Learning. We approach the problem by learning distributions over functions using Neural Processes (NPs), a recently introduced probabilistic meta-learning method. This allows the treatment of model uncertainty to tackle the exploration/exploitation dilemma. We show that NPs are suitable for sequential decision making on a diverse set of domains, including adversarial task search, recommender systems and model-based reinforcement learning.