A security guard stands in front of Google's booth at the China International Import Expo earlier this month in Shanghai. A security guard stands in front of Google's booth at the China International Import Expo earlier this month in Shanghai. Several Google employees have gone public with their opposition to the tech giant's plans for building a search engine tailored to China's censorship demands. The project, code-named Dragonfly, would block certain websites and search terms determined by the Chinese government -- a move that, according to a growing number of workers at Google, is tantamount to enabling "state surveillance." "We are among thousands of employees who have raised our voices for months. International human rights organizations and investigative reporters have also sounded the alarm, emphasizing serious human rights concerns and repeatedly calling on Google to cancel the project," said the letter's signatories, whose group initially numbered nine employees but has ballooned since its publication on Medium.

Just weeks after Google employees walked out of offices to protest the way the company dealt with claims of sexual misconduct, Google is bracing itself for another worldwide protest. This time, it's over Google's ominous Project Dragonfly, and human rights organization Amnesty International is throwing its whole weight behind it. Project Dragonfly has already received global backlash, with Google employees themselves calling publicly for an ethics review into the proposed censored Chinese search engine. According to leaked documents, the search app will automatically identify websites blocked by China's so-called Great Firewall. This includes information on free speech, current affairs and political opposition, plus historical references to specific events (such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre) and books that negatively feature authoritarian governments.

A group of Google employees published an open letter on Tuesday calling on their employer to cancel its plans to build a censored search engine for China, the latest expression of worker unrest at a company that earlier this month saw thousands stage walkouts over its handling of sexual misconduct cases. Google's plan for returning to China, which is known as Project Dragonfly and would reportedly allow the Chinese government to blacklist certain search terms and control air quality data, has garnered significant backlash internally since it was first reported on in August. More than 1,400 Google employees signed an internal petition criticizing the lack of transparency around the project, and at least one employee resigned in protest. But Tuesday's letter, which was initially signed by nine current Google employees, is a bold step for employees of a company that prizes internal transparency but considers leaking information to be not "Googley". Organizers of the letter said they would continuously update the letter as more employees signed on; by midday there were more than 50 signers.

This is the Frankenstein breakthrough that the medical world has long been dreading. A Chinese scientist yesterday declared that he has changed the fundamental genetic code of human babies, using methods that are banned in most of the world. The potential consequences are as alarming as they are unpredictable. No less an authority than Professor Stephen Hawking feared such experiments would one day create a race of'super-humans', ending mankind as we know it. Researchers have already discovered that gene editing may cause a host of cancers as a result of interfering in a genetic code so complex we will perhaps never be capable of understanding it fully.

Nasa's brand new Mars lander has sent back the first stunning of the surface of the red planet, taken at the end of a terrifying journey. As well as showing the dusty red ground that is now the InSight lander's home, the photo marks a successful close to a journey that took seven months from Earth, and culminated with a nervy few hours as InSight blasted through the Martian atmosphere. The photograph, which shows the InSight spacecraft in the front and the Martian surface further on, is an incredible look at a world that has killed most of the landers that have tried to journey there. From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset This image of an area on the surface of Mars, approximately 1.5 by 3 kilometers in size, shows frosted gullies on a south-facing slope within a crater. The image was taken by Nasa's HiRISE camera, which is mounted on its Mars Reconaissance Orbiter The Soyuz TMA-15M rocket launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, Nov. 24, 2014, carrying three new astronauts to the International Space Station.

This process, which is far more challenging than most researchers acknowledge, has driven the market capitalization of many Chinese tech companies far beyond that of the American peers they were once accused of "copying." Visionary research will always be important to A.I., which means that China still has much to learn from the United States. But as practical implementation increasingly becomes the name of the game, the United States now has much to learn from China, too. Analysts in the West often acknowledge the areas in which China has an advantage in A.I., but they tend to misunderstand the nature of China's strength in each one. With regard to China's abundant data, analysts often point to the sheer size of China's population (which owns 1.1 billion mobile internet devices) and claim that lax privacy laws allow a free-for-all with user data.

The Thorp nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, Cumbria, has recycled its final batch of reactor fuel. But it leaves behind a hugely toxic legacy for future generations to deal with. So how will it be made safe? Thorp still looks almost new; a giant structure of cavernous halls, deep blue-tinged cooling ponds and giant lifting cranes, imposing in fresh yellow paint. But now the complex process of decontaminating and dismantling begins.

The world's first ever underwater Artificial Intelligence colony will be created on the South China sea bed, Chinese President Xi Jinping claims. The base has been described as a'deep sea Atlantis' and will be used for unmanned submarine science and defence operations. Chinese officials and scientists familiar with the plans say that the deep sea station will analyse samples from the sea bed and send reports to the surface. Xi urged the scientists and engineers to'dare to do something that has never been done before' on a recent visit to the deep sea research institute in Hainan Province. China's unmanned submarine vehicle Qianlong III, pictured, could help to drive a subsea exploration programme and herald the arrival of an AI colony on the South China Sea bed, Chinese scientists and officials say'There is no road in the deep sea, we do not need to chase after other countries, we are the road,' President Xi said.

Distributed learning systems have enabled training large-scale models over large amount of data in significantly shorter time. In this paper, we focus on decentralized distributed deep learning systems and aim to achieve differential privacy with good convergence rate and low communication cost. To achieve this goal, we propose a new learning algorithm LEASGD (Leader-Follower Elastic Averaging Stochastic Gradient Descent), which is driven by a novel Leader-Follower topology and a differential privacy model. We provide a theoretical analysis of the convergence rate and the tradeoff between the performance and privacy in the private setting. The experimental results show that LEASGD outperforms state-of-the-art decentralized learning algorithm DPSGD by achieving steadily lower loss within the same iterations and by reducing the communication cost by 30%. In addition, LEASGD spends less differential privacy budget and has higher final accuracy result than DPSGD under private setting.

Generalized Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) has been shown to be a powerful approach to solve the ambiguity resolution problem. However, with its close relationship to number theory, study in this area is mainly from a coding theory perspective under deterministic conditions. Nevertheless, it can be proved that even with the best deterministic condition known, the probability of success in robust reconstruction degrades exponentially as the number of estimand increases. In this paper, we present the first rigorous analysis on the underlying statistical model of CRT-based multiple parameter estimation, where a generalized Gaussian mixture with background knowledge on samplings is proposed. To address the problem, two novel approaches are introduced. One is to directly calculate the conditional maximal a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation of residue clustering, and the other is to iteratively search for MAP of both common residues and clustering. Moreover, remainder error-correcting codes are introduced to improve the robustness further. It is shown that this statistically based scheme achieves much stronger robustness compared to state-of-the-art deterministic schemes, especially in low and median Signal Noise Ratio (SNR) scenarios.