The artificial intelligence (AI) community has a clear message for researchers in South Korea: Don't make killer robots. Nearly 60 AI and robotics experts from almost 30 countries have signed an open letter calling for a boycott against KAIST, a public university in Daejeon, South Korea, that has been reported to be "develop[ing] artificial intelligence technologies to be applied to military weapons, joining the global competition to develop autonomous arms," the open letter said. In other words, KAIST might be researching how to make military-grade AI weapons. According to the open letter, AI experts the world over became concerned when they learned that KAIST -- in collaboration with Hanwha Systems, South Korea's leading arms company -- opened a new facility on Feb. 20 called the Research Center for the Convergence of National Defense and Artificial Intelligence. Given that the United Nations (U.N.) is already discussing how to safeguard the international community against killer AI robots, "it is regrettable that a prestigious institution like KAIST looks to accelerate the arms race to develop such weapons," the researchers wrote in the letter.

By now, you probably already know that artificial intelligence (AI) technology is developing at a remarkably fast rate. It has been the subject of many essays and news articles that are mainly about an oncoming robot takeover, which could mean trouble for many humans in the world today. But in order for advanced AI robots to truly take over the world, they've got to first be able to think like humans. Now a group of researchers have taken the first steps to making that a reality. Japanese researchers recently published a new study titled, "Describing Semantic Representations of Brain Activity Evoked by Visual Stimuli," wherein AI technology was used to predict – with great accuracy – exactly what people were thinking when they were looking at certain pictures.

The risk for robotics and automation to displace human employees is very real, but these technologies might affect men and women differently. According to a new study from Website Builder Expert (WBE), robots will steal more jobs from women than men in certain countries and vice versa. For example, the report said, women in the US and the UK are more likely to lose their job to a robot than men in those countries are. However, female workers in Britain are "much more likely to lose their jobs to robots than American women," the report said. Men in the US are also safer from losing their jobs to automation than men in Britain.

A former US marine who lost her left arm at the shoulder in a motorcycle accident has been fitted with a bionic prosthetic arm that allows her to feel things through the fake fingers. Claudia Mitchell, 37, never thought she'd be able to do things like open water bottles or pick up items with her left thumb and forefinger again after her arm was amputated. However, through more than a decade of research trials a team at Cleveland Clinic has created a bionic prosthetic arm that allows her to do most of those things she didn't think would ever be possible. The cutting-edge technology is part of a booming field of research into prosthetics that could revolutionize movement for amputees. Claudia Mitchell, 37, lost her arm at the shoulder in a motorcycle accident in 2004.

More than 3,000 Google employees have penned an open letter calling upon the internet giant's CEO to end its controversial'Project Maven' deal. Calling the deal'business of war', they said Google boss Sundar Pichai should'cancel this project immediately'. It was revealed last month that Google is allowing the Pentagon to use some of its artificial intelligence technologies to analyze drone footage. Google employees were reportedly outraged by the project from the beginning, but took their opposition a step further by publishing the open letter. Google employees penned a letter urging CEO Sundar Pichai to step away from'Project Maven,' where the Pentagon using TensorFlow software to identify objects in drone footage Project Maven involves using Google's artificial intelligence software to analyze aerial surveillance video to look for patterns that can help military intelligence analysts. Work on the project began last April.

Scientists at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) are covering some new ground in artificial intelligence (AI) by connecting a machine with human intelligence via a neural connection. Not to worry: the research team isn't cooking up an AI system that will run the show inside a person's head. But it does have promise for both medical as well as deep machine learning systems uses, potentially in military and everyday applications. The work by ARL and the DCS Corporation recently won the Neurally Augmented Image Labelling Strategies, or NAILS, challenge at an international machine learning research competition in Tokyo, according to ARL. The goal of NAILS was to incorporate brain activity into machine learning methods that can detect if an image a person was seeing was relevant to the task at hand, as part of an effort to improve the ability of humans and machines to manage information by working together.

London/Singapore:The scandal over the alleged abuse of Facebook Inc.'s user data is unfolding a long way from China, and yet privacy regulators in Beijing have been watching intently. Their interest shows how all three big players in the technology world--the Americans, Chinese and Europeans--are feeling their way to balance the demands of consumers for privacy and of governments for security. But they're also competing to shape the rules of the game for internet companies and, for the US and China in particular, to maximize access to data for a bigger goal: to dominate artificial intelligence, the next frontier in machine learning. "All of these governments and companies are in the middle of trying to figure out what data governance should look like," said Samm Sacks, senior fellow in the technology program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. "And this is happening in a global context that will have implications for trade and for research and development in AI." New Chinese privacy standards take effect on 1 May.

WASHINGTON – Investigators on two congressional panels are looking into whether Russia acquired the data of millions of Facebook users and if companies with ties to then-2016 Republican election candidate Donald Trump's campaign played any role in providing it, three sources familiar with the inquiries said. On Tuesday, Facebook said it had deleted 70 Facebook accounts, 138 Facebook pages and 65 Instagram accounts that it said were "controlled" by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a Russian propaganda arm based in St. Petersburg. Last September, Facebook disclosed that it had suspended about 470 "inauthentic accounts" that it believed were "likely operated out of Russia" and had purchased 3,000 ads which "appeared to focus on amplifying divisive social and political messages." And on Wednesday, the social media platform said the personal information of up to 87 million users, mostly in the United States, may have been improperly shared with political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, up from a previous news media estimate of more than 50 million. Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg will testify on April 10 and 11 to Congress.

Politicians worldwide are stealing one of the US government's best ideas by drawing up ambitious plans to make the most of advances in artificial intelligence. These AI manifestos, penned in Paris, Beijing, and elsewhere, follow the example of the Obama administration, which released a report on the technology toward the end of its tenure. This report did not include funding, but it made it clear that AI should be a key focus of government strategy. The Trump administration has abandoned this vision and has no intention of devising its own AI plan, say those working there. They say there is no need for an AI moonshot, and that minimizing government interference is the best way to make sure the technology flourishes.

Treatable infectious diseases are a critical challenge for public health. Outreach campaigns can encourage undiagnosed patients to seek treatment but must be carefully targeted to make the most efficient use of limited resources. We present an algorithm to optimally allocate limited outreach resources among demographic groups in the population. The algorithm uses a novel multiagent model of disease spread which both captures the underlying population dynamics and is amenable to optimization. Our algorithm extends, with provable guarantees, to a stochastic setting where we have only a distribution over parameters such as the contact pattern between agents. We evaluate our algorithm on two instances where this distribution is inferred from real world data: tuberculosis in India and gonorrhea in the United States. Our algorithm produces a policy which is predicted to avert an average of least 8,000 person-years of tuberculosis and 20,000 person-years of gonorrhea annually compared to current policy.