A protester holds up a sign targeting Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff outside the company's headquarters in San Francisco on Monday. A protester holds up a sign targeting Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff outside the company's headquarters in San Francisco on Monday. Tech workers from Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been putting pressure on their CEOs to cut ties and end contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, and other government agencies. It's a rare occurrence for employees to tell their bosses to turn away business. But there is a growing concern among tech workers that the cutting-edge tools they create can be used in immoral ways.

Researchers have developed a fully integrated computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system that detects, segments and classifies masses from mammograms using deep learning and a deep convolutional neural network (CNN), according to a new study published by the International Journal of Medical Informatics. The authors used a proven regional deep learning model, You-Only-Look-Once (YOLO), for detecting potential masses in the breast tissues of patient data taken from a publicly available dataset. They provided a number of reasons in their analysis. "First, YOLO has a robust ability to detect the masses directly from entire mammograms," wrote author Mugahed A. Al-antari, PhD, of Kyung Hee University in Yongin, South Korea, and colleagues. "Second, detected bounding boxes via YOLO accurately align the masses, thereby, a low rate of false positives is achieved compared with other studies. Third, it can even detect challenging cases where the masses exist either over pectoral muscles or inside dense regions. Fourth, the running time of the testing and required memory are extremely low compared to other more complex deep learning models."

Since man hunted and got a taste for the meat of the Auroch, later domesticated into the ancestors of modern cattle breeds, the market for beef has grown steadily. The last 10 years have not been so kind, with plummeting beef consumption and higher prices. There is some light, as meat intense diets like paleo and keto have turned some consumers back to beef, but just at the point when the cattle industry has become more consolidated, sophisticated and consumer focused it is ironically facing some of the greatest existential threats to its 10,000 years existence. Touted as sustainable, welfare friendly or conversely dismissed as'fake meat' the clear intent of growing meat on petri dishes is to displace the consumption of red-meat. Despite concerns of how'friendly' the technology really is, meat producers such as Cargill and Tyson foods have invested in startups in this market. Environmentalists advocating'Meatless Mondays' and other initiatives at consumer level have been unremitting in their attacks on the meat industry. These action groups have used sometimes dubious data to support their contention that cattle, and specifically beef uses more water, more resources and emits more greenhouses gases then other human choices. Their relentless attack appears to be having an effect on red meat consumption in the US and Europe.

Slime molds are among the world's strangest organisms. Long mistaken for fungi, they are now classed as a type of amoeba. As single-celled organisms, they have neither neurons nor brains. Yet for about a decade, scientists have debated whether slime molds have the capacity to learn about their environments and adjust their behavior accordingly. Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

As technology gets smarter, humanity faces major questions about the future. Will computers become superhuman computers become superhuman and so intelligent that they can tackle any task and do it better than a human counterpart? Not in the next few decades, but rapid advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI) fields means that such a scenario could happen. Humans could in fact create their own obsolescence, and approximately half of all current jobs could be automated. That's without the availability of a super intelligence to oversee disparate AI-driven technologies.

A recent AT Kearney 2018 Global Cities Report measured business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience and political engagement. While the top of the list is dominated by cities you'd expect– New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, Singapore–six cities in China were added to the list. Their progress was a result of "initiatives that have focused on business, governmental, and cultural activities, providing improvements that boost the quality of life for residents, increase the ease of doing business, and attract more investment and attention from global companies."

If you didn't catch the big news of yesterday, it was the first public firing of a robot. Amelia was launched last year by Swedish bank Nordnet, with the aim of speeding up customer onboarding and improving customer satisfaction. Apparently, she achieved neither and so was sacked for underperformance. It's interesting as the software behind Ameila, IPSoft, is an award-winning artificial intelligence (AI) engine that is also used by Swedish bank SEB. In tehri case, they got an award for their deployment and the nuances of Amelia's sacking in Nordnet implies they didn't train her properly.

Probably the biggest single driver of change in the industry is the increasing advance of technology. Everyone has read about the perceived threat of artificial intelligence (AI) and how it's set to take lawyers' jobs – and although Michael Skapinker of the Financial Times wrote recently that, like plumbers, lawyers are not yet approaching their'Uber' moment and remain largely a "disruption-free profession", other commentators take a slightly different view. Richard Susskind, for one, might disagree – having written in his book Tomorrow's Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future: "AI will disrupt not just the world of practising lawyers but also our common perception of the legal process." It's important to note that artificial intelligence isn't something to be afraid of; adopted in the right way, it will enable lawyers to perform their work more effectively. It's clearly crucial in any law firm or corporate legal department for work to be resourced appropriately – and if some of this work can be done by a machine more quickly and more efficiently than by a human, then of course that option should be considered.

In April 2018, the Nobel Prize Inspiration Initiative and 3M hosted the lecture, Climate Change: Science and Policy with Dr. Mario Molina. Molina won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his scientific discovery of the chemistry of the stratospheric ozone layer and its susceptibility to human-made activities. He co-authored research in 1974 in Nature magazine on the threat to the ozone layer from chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gasses being used in spray cans. Molina has also served on the United States President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology from 1994 to 2000 and again in 2010-2016. "Science doesn't tell you what to do. Science isn't either good or bad so you can not give Nobel prizes in science to good people, you do that in principle for the science," said Molina.

French technology consulting firm Atos has launched an artificial intelligence (AI) software suite for businesses across the world, which intends to make it simpler for teams to build AI-based applications using a combination of intellectual properties, a report said. Called Atos Codex AI Suite, the software package also intends to make it easier for teams of developers and data scientists to collaborate on the development and training of AI models, The Economic Times reported. The report also added that, with the help of the suite, the apps can be deployed and relocated across multiple environments like public cloud, on-premises or edge computing. "Atos Codex AI Suite tackles new enterprise, scientific and industry challenges, such as precision medicine, advanced prescriptive maintenance and prescriptive security, with a new generation of cognitive applications," said Arnaud Bertrand, senior vice-president, strategy and innovation BDS (Big Data and cybersecurity), Atos. Atos Codex AI Suite can either be purchased as a standalone software platform or together with a server infrastructure, the company added. According to the LinkedIn profile, Atos is a European Big Data, cybersecurity, high-performance computing and digital company.