ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) could wipe out thousands of jobs in the country's fast-growing business process outsourcing (BPO) sector, but the industry can address this threat through innovation and training, Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said on Wednesday. "One solution to this technology's threat is to modify and remodel the existing jobs' nature. Another way is the organization of groups necessary in the infusion of science and technology to other fields or areas for the realization of establishing a comprehensive network," Lopez said. The most important aspect, he said, is to conduct training and related activities. "In simpler terms, we will endeavor to make this new technology work for them," Lopez said.

America's agricultural sector faces an unprecedented crisis. Native honeybees, one of the most prolific pollinators in the animal kingdom, are dying off at an unprecedented rate from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), threatening an ecosystem service worth about $15 billion. Supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the "RoboBees" project looks to minimize the loss of this critical resource with remarkable microbots that can mimic the pollinating role of a honeybee. But the project has a number of challenges to overcome before these robots can take to the skies. The RoboBee is a microrobot inspired by the biology of a honey bee.

Swamped by too much raw intel data to sift through, US spy agencies are pinning their hopes on artificial intelligence to crunch billions of digital bits and understand events around the world. Dawn Meyerriecks, the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy director for technology development, said this week the CIA currently has 137 different AI projects, many of them with developers in Silicon Valley. These range from trying to predict significant future events, by finding correlations in data shifts and other evidence, to having computers tag objects or individuals in video that can draw the attention of intelligence analysts. Officials of other key spy agencies at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington this week, including military intelligence, also said they were seeking AI-based solutions for turning terabytes of digital data coming in daily into trustworthy intelligence that can be used for policy and battlefield action. AI has widespread functions, from battlefield weapons to the potential to help quickly rebuild computer systems and programs brought down by hacking attacks, as one official described.

The quest to teach machines to understand human conversations has taken another big step forward with researchers achieving a new level of speech recognition for technology. Xuedong Huang, who leads Microsoft's Speech and Language Group, announced the new milestone in a blog post. Last year his team made headlines when it reached human parity on the "Switchboard conversational speech recognition task", meaning it had created technology that could recognize words in spoken conversation as well as professional human transcribers. Switchboard is a corpus of recorded telephone conversations that the speech research community has used for more than 20 years to benchmark speech recognition systems. The task involves the technology transcribing conversations between strangers who discuss various topics, such as sports and politics.

This paper presents a deep learning method for faster magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by reducing k-space data with sub-Nyquist sampling strategies and provides a rationale for why the proposed approach works well. Uniform subsampling is used in the time-consuming phase-encoding direction to capture high-resolution image information, while permitting the image-folding problem dictated by the Poisson summation formula. To deal with the localization uncertainty due to image folding, very few low-frequency k-space data are added. Training the deep learning net involves input and output images that are pairs of Fourier transforms of the subsampled and fully sampled k-space data. Numerous experiments show the remarkable performance of the proposed method; only 29% of k-space data can generate images of high quality as effectively as standard MRI reconstruction with fully sampled data.

The notorious dark web marketplaces Alphabay and Hansa were shut down in July following "landmark" action by police forces in the US and Europe to unmask who was running them. They join a long list of other forums, chat rooms and boards that appeared and were blazingly popular with the criminal underworld before they were compromised and closed. Darkode, GhostMarket and the Silk Road, have more in common than just the trajectory of their genesis and demise. They all follow the modus operandi of a landmark forum set up in 2001 called Carder Planet. Designed for criminals who specialised in monetising lists or "dumps" of credit card numbers, it has had an influence far beyond that select group.....

We're happy to announce the availability of a new free ebook, Data Science with Microsoft SQL Server 2016 (ISBN 9781509304318), by Buck Woody, Danielle Dean, Debraj GuhaThakurta, Gagan Bansal, Matt Conners, & Wee-Hyong Tok. The world around us, every business and nearly every industry, is being transformed by technology. This disruption is driven, in part, by the intersection of three trends: a massive explosion of data, intelligence from machine learning and advanced analytics, and the economics and agility of cloud computing. While databases power nearly every aspect of business today, they were not originally designed with this disruption in mind. Traditional databases were about recording and retrieving transactions such as orders and payments very reliably, very securely and efficiently.

China's government has announced a goal of becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence in just over a decade, putting political muscle behind growing investment by Chinese companies in developing self-driving cars and other advances. Communist leaders see AI as key to making China an "economic power," said a Cabinet statement on Thursday. It calls for developing skills and research and educational resources to achieve "major breakthroughs" by 2025 and make China a world leader by 2030. It might not be long before machines begin thinking for themselves -- creatively, independently, and sometimes with better judgment than a human.... Artificial intelligence is one of the emerging fields along with renewable energy, robotics and electric cars where communist leaders hope to take an early lead and help transform China from a nation of factory workers and farmers into a technology pioneer. They have issued a series of development plans over the past decade, some of which have prompted complaints Beijing improperly subsidizes its technology developers and shields them from competition in violation of its free-trade commitments.

Yemen's al Qaeda branch, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has taken advantage of a more than two-year-old civil war between the Iran-aligned Houthi group and President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's Saudi-backed government to strengthen its position in the impoverished country.

When we talk to people, we choose how much personal information to disclose about ourselves. How much we reveal, both in terms of breadth and depth, depends on many factors. In a therapeutic context, it is considered desirable to self-disclose, yet people sometimes hold back negative personal experiences, due to fear of being judged or revealing their weaknesses. Researchers Takahisa Uchida and colleagues from Osaka University hypothesized that people may find it easier to disclose their negative feelings to a robot due to its lower social position. The findings of their preliminary research were presented at the 2017 Robot and Human Interactive Communication symposium in Lisbon in August.