Reporter Chloe Veltman reacts to hearing her digital voice double, "Chloney," for the first time, with Speech Morphing chief linguist Mark Seligman. Reporter Chloe Veltman reacts to hearing her digital voice double, "Chloney," for the first time, with Speech Morphing chief linguist Mark Seligman. The science behind making machines talk just like humans is very complex, because our speech patterns are so nuanced. "The voice is not easy to grasp," says Klaus Scherer, emeritus professor of the psychology of emotion at the University of Geneva. "To analyze the voice really requires quite a lot of knowledge about acoustics, vocal mechanisms and physiological aspects. So it is necessarily interdisciplinary, and quite demanding in terms of what you need to master in order to do anything of consequence."

Reporter Chloe Veltman reacts to hearing her digital voice double, "Chloney," for the first time, with Speech Morphing chief linguist Mark Seligman. Reporter Chloe Veltman reacts to hearing her digital voice double, "Chloney," for the first time, with Speech Morphing chief linguist Mark Seligman. The science behind making machines talk just like humans is very complex, because our speech patterns are so nuanced. "The voice is not easy to grasp," says Klaus Scherer, emeritus professor of the psychology of emotion at the University of Geneva. "To analyze the voice really requires quite a lot of knowledge about acoustics, vocal mechanisms and physiological aspects. So it is necessarily interdisciplinary, and quite demanding in terms of what you need to master in order to do anything of consequence."

Japan overturned in 2020 its decision to cancel acquisition of U.S.-made reconnaissance drones due to their massive costs out of consideration to then-U.S. President Donald Trump, who was promoting American weapons exports, according to sources close to the matter. The government of then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had told Washington in the spring of 2020 that it would not purchase the Global Hawk drones, but reversed the decision in the summer after Tokyo scrapped in June that year its planned deployment of U.S.-developed land-based Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defense systems, they said. The about-face was prompted by concerns that cancellation of the Global Hawk acquisition would "anger Mr. Trump, who has insisted on exporting U.S.-made weapons," according to a source familiar with the matter. The policy change reflected "excessive consideration for Mr. Trump," the source said.

Japanese and U.S. foreign and defense chiefs on Friday shared their concerns about China's attempts to "undermine the rule-based order" and challenges they pose to the region and world, vowing to cooperate in deterring and responding to "destabilizing activities." In a joint statement issued after their virtual "two-plus-two" talks, the ministers highlighted the "importance of peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait," while opposing any unilateral actions threatening Japan's administration of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, controlled by Japan but claimed by China. Foreign Minister Yoshimasa Hayashi, Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi, and their U.S. counterparts Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, also aired "serious and ongoing concerns" about human rights issues in China's Xinjiang autonomous region and Hong Kong. Hayashi said at the outset of the talks that Japan is "fully committed" to constantly enhancing the alliance toward realizing "a free and open Indo-Pacific," and noted that "it is more important than ever that Japan and the United States are united and exhibit leadership" in the face of a range of challenges. Blinken reaffirmed the alliance as a cornerstone of peace and security in the region, and said the two countries must not only strengthen the tools they have, but also develop "new ones" to address the evolving threats posed by countries seeking to undermine the international rules-based order, including China and North Korea.

In 1970, Marvin Minsky, recipient of the Turing Award ("the Nobel Prize of Computing"), predicted that within "three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being." The fundamental roadblock is that, although computer algorithms are really, really good at identifying statistical patterns, they have no way of knowing what these patterns mean because they are confined to MathWorld and never experience the real world. It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird–you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.

Electronic Intelligence (ELINT), often known as E-Intelligence, is intelligence obtained through electronic sensors. Other than personal communications, ELINT intelligence is usually obtained. The goal is usually to determine a target's capabilities, such as radar placement. Active or passive sensors can be employed to collect data. A provided signal is analyzed and contrasted to collected data for recognized signal types. The information may be stored if the signal type is detected; it can be classed as new if no match is found. ELINT collects and categorizes data. In a military setting (and others that have adopted the usage, such as a business), intelligence helps an organization make decisions that can provide them a strategic advantage over the competition. The term "intel" is frequently shortened. The two main subfields of signals intelligence (SIGINT) are ELINT and Communications Intelligence (COMINT). The US Department of Defense specifies the terminologies, and intelligence communities use the categories of data reviewed worldwide.

Beijing is calling on the world's nuclear powers to expand discussions on global security to include emerging threats, following a rare multilateral pledge to temper the risks of nuclear war. Fu Cong, director-general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Arms Control Department, told reporters in Beijing on Tuesday that the so-called P5 nations -- China, France, Russia, the U.S. and U.K. -- should talk "more directly" about global security. "Strategic stability goes beyond nuclear," he said. "Our idea is to expand the subject of the P5 process so we could discuss not only the nuclear issues, but also other issues related to strategic stability, including outer space, missile defense, even AI and other emerging technologies." The briefing took place after the five nations -- all permanent members of the United Nations Security Council -- issued a joint statement Monday pledging to dial back the risk of a nuclear conflict.

Artificial intelligence technology's impact can be seen in introducing automation, driving efficiency gains and enhancing productivity, creating new jobs, and reducing risks associated with cyber-threats and fraud. During the pandemic, AI-enabled more effective testing for Covid-19 and faster vaccine development and helped manage grocery supply chains and tailor lessons for individual students affected by remote schooling. The San Francisco Bay Area, made up of the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas, is in a category all its own, far and away from the lone U.S. leader in AI. Home to leading academic research centers like Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley; a plethora of startups; and big companies that invest heavily in AI research and technology like Alphabet Inc., Salesforce.com Inc., and Facebook Inc., the Bay Area accounts for roughly one-quarter of all Artificial Intelligence activity in the U.S. It is one of the five global hubs for top artificial intelligence talent in 2021. New York is in the midst of an explosive period of growth in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Solar energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in history. Unfortunately, significantly increasing the grid's fraction of solar energy remains challenging due to its variability, which makes balancing electricity's supply and demand more difficult. While thermal generators' ramp rate -- the maximum rate that they can change their output -- is finite, solar's ramp rate is essentially infinite. Thus, accurate near-term solar forecasting, or nowcasting, is important to provide advance warning to adjust thermal generator output in response to solar variations to ensure a balanced supply and demand. To address the problem, this paper develops a general model for solar nowcasting from abundant and readily available multispectral satellite data using self-supervised learning. Specifically, we develop deep auto-regressive models using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) that are globally trained across multiple locations to predict raw future observations of the spatio-temporal data collected by the recently launched GOES-R series of satellites. Our model estimates a location's future solar irradiance based on satellite observations, which we feed to a regression model trained on smaller site-specific solar data to provide near-term solar photovoltaic (PV) forecasts that account for site-specific characteristics. We evaluate our approach for different coverage areas and forecast horizons across 25 solar sites and show that our approach yields errors close to that of a model using ground-truth observations.

The administration of President Joe Biden entered office on January 20, 2021, pledging a broad-strokes overhaul of how Washington interacts with the world, promising to be a distinct counterpoint to the disruptive, go-it-alone posture of former President Donald Trump, and tying stability and prosperity at home to US interests abroad in his so-called "foreign policy for the middle class". As 2021 ends, the administration has indeed sought to re-up relations with key allies and position itself as a central player in combating global crises, but has faced criticism for failing to live up to vows of a human rights-leading foreign policy and for what some have described as an over-emphasis on sweeping ideological differences at a time when global cooperation -- particularly between superpowers -- is sorely needed. "2021 was a year of transition. President Biden replaced Trump's impetuousness with pragmatism and realism. There is a greater understanding of what US policy actually is," PJ Crowley, the former US assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President Barack Obama, told Al Jazeera.