The UK is set to ease data mining laws in a move designed to further boost its flourishing AI industry. We all know that data is vital to AI development. Tech giants are in an advantageous position due to either having existing large datasets or the ability to fund/pay for the data required. Most startups rely on mining data to get started. Europe has notoriously strict data laws.

Zscaler, Inc. (NASDAQ: ZS), the leader in cloud security, today announced newly advanced AI/ML innovations powered by the largest security cloud in the world for unparalleled user protection and digital experience monitoring. The new capabilities further enhance Zscaler's Zero Trust Exchange security platform to enable organizations to implement a Security Service Edge (SSE) that protects against the most advanced cyberattacks, while delivering an exceptional digital experience to users, and simplifying the adoption of a zero-trust architecture. Organizations are facing a 314 percent increase in cyberattacks on encrypted internet traffic and an 80 percent increase in ransomware with nearly a 120 percent increase in double extortion attacks. Phishing is also on the rise with industries like financial services, government, and retail seeing annual increases in attacks of over 100 percent in 2021. To combat advancing threats, organizations need to adapt their defenses to real-time changes in risk.

The surge in digital transformation initiatives across businesses and the heightened need for real-time insights has led to an explosion in data creation. But few organisations have a proper understanding of where all their data exists in the first place. Every company has different siloed data sets running on-premises and across multiple public and private clouds and various servers. A recent global survey commissioned by IBM with Morning Consult found 9 out of 10 IT professionals in India reporting that their company draws from 20 or more different data sources to inform its AI, BI, and analytics systems. "This has led to data silos and complexity and as a result most data remains unanalysed, inaccessible or untrusted," says Siddhesh Naik, Data, AI & Automation sales leader, IBM Technology Sales, IBM India/South Asia.

Independence testing plays a central role in statistical and causal inference from observational data. Standard independence tests assume that the data samples are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) but that assumption is violated in many real-world datasets and applications centered on relational systems. This work examines the problem of estimating independence in data drawn from relational systems by defining sufficient representations for the sets of observations influencing individual instances. Specifically, we define marginal and conditional independence tests for relational data by considering the kernel mean embedding as a flexible aggregation function for relational variables. We propose a consistent, non-parametric, scalable kernel test to operationalize the relational independence test for non-i.i.d. observational data under a set of structural assumptions. We empirically evaluate our proposed method on a variety of synthetic and semi-synthetic networks and demonstrate its effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art kernel-based independence tests.

Emergency vehicles (EMVs) play a crucial role in responding to time-critical calls such as medical emergencies and fire outbreaks in urban areas. Existing methods for EMV dispatch typically optimize routes based on historical traffic-flow data and design traffic signal pre-emption accordingly; however, we still lack a systematic methodology to address the coupling between EMV routing and traffic signal control. In this paper, we propose EMVLight, a decentralized reinforcement learning (RL) framework for joint dynamic EMV routing and traffic signal pre-emption. We adopt the multi-agent advantage actor-critic method with policy sharing and spatial discounted factor. This framework addresses the coupling between EMV navigation and traffic signal control via an innovative design of multi-class RL agents and a novel pressure-based reward function. The proposed methodology enables EMVLight to learn network-level cooperative traffic signal phasing strategies that not only reduce EMV travel time but also shortens the travel time of non-EMVs. Simulation-based experiments indicate that EMVLight enables up to a $42.6\%$ reduction in EMV travel time as well as an $23.5\%$ shorter average travel time compared with existing approaches.

NASA is finally set to launch its'CAPSTONE' spacecraft mission on Tuesday morning, marking an important early stage in its Artemis programme. The spacecraft, which is about the size of a microwave oven and weighs just 55 pounds, will blast off from Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand at 5:55 EDT (10:55 BST). Over six months, it will test the stability of a halo-shaped orbit around the moon before this orbit is used by Lunar Gateway, NASA's planned lunar outpost. Lunar Gateway will serve as a'staging area' for landing humans on the moon for the first time in 50 years and potentially as a jumping-off point for missions to Mars. The public can watch today's CAPSTONE launch from New Zealand on NASA Live.

Australia's second-biggest appliances chain says it is pausing a trial of facial recognition technology in stores after a consumer group referred it to the privacy regulator for possible enforcement action. In an email on Tuesday, a spokesperson for JB Hi-Fi Ltd said The Good Guys, which JB Hi-Fi owns, would stop trialling a security system with optional facial recognition in two Melbourne outlets. Use of the technology by The Good Guys, owned by JB Hi-Fi Ltd, was "unreasonably intrusive" and potentially in breach of privacy laws, the group, CHOICE, told the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). While the company took confidentiality of personal information seriously and is confident it complied with relevant laws, it decided "to pause the trial … pending any clarification from the OAIC regarding the use of this technology", JB Hi-Fi's spokesperson added. The Good Guys was named in a complaint alongside Bunnings, Australia's biggest home improvement chain, and big box retailer Kmart, both owned by Wesfarmers Ltd, with total annual sales of about 25 billion Australian dollars ($19.47m) across 800 stores.

A leaked Woolworths employee training module slide claims that it is using "artificial intelligence and facial mapping" in its stores -- but the company denies it is using the technology. This is from a Woolies training module from 2020." At the bottom of the slide, a box titled "Did You Know?" boasts about the company's use of technology to catch offenders: "Our high standard CCTV is already resulting in offenders being arrested by police. We are using technology like artificial intelligence and facial mapping to identify offenders!" Woolworths confirmed that the slide was real, but denied it is using either artificial intelligence or facial recognition to prevent theft.

Melbourne/Canberra: Private companies and public authorities are quietly using facial recognition systems around Australia. Despite the growing use of this controversial technology, there is little in the way of specific regulations and guidelines to govern its use. Spying on shoppers We were reminded of this fact recently when consumer advocates at CHOICE revealed that major retailers in Australia are using the technology to identify people claimed to be thieves and troublemakers. There is no dispute about the goal of reducing harm and theft. But there is also little transparency about how this technology is being used.

What is it's the most common use word. At least you know you will find companies talking about that. What is automation for a product company like yours Jennifer Shore. It's it's great to see life people in three days. So if I could take a step back and say what is it terrorists do. So we are literally solving one of the world's hardest problems right now which is focusing on transparency in the global supply chain. And so what's happened that we've all just lived through in the last two and a half years is that every company in the world got very swiftly educated how connected they were to each other. And they also realized very very quickly that the way they had been looking at risk in their supply chain was manual right. It was with you know you think about when you onboard a new supplier or vendor you Google. You look it up and say oh is that good or bad. Well whether it's a ship going sideways in a canal whether it's the unfortunate situation with the Ukraine Russia and the 3000 global sanctions against Russia and no one knows if they're doing business with Russia or not. So when you think about this digital transformation there has been a swift uptick in our industry because CEOs and boards are realizing that understanding risk and the transparency in their supply chain is tied to their bottom line.