"How do you do that without creating unintended consequences?" said Casey Ellis, founder of San Francisco-based cybersecurity startup Bugcrowd Inc. "That's a hard problem to solve, and I think she's been pretty thoughtful about it." A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Ms. Harris served as California's attorney general as Silicon Valley companies such as Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc. grew into global titans and critics began questioning their influence. The Morning Download delivers daily insights and news on business technology from the CIO Journal team. While vice presidents have limited power to shape or enforce policy from the White House, advocates say she could help prioritize the tech industry's policy wishlist, which includes issues such as immigration reform. The Trump administration has curtailed visas for highly skilled workers, drawing rebukes from Silicon Valley in recent months.

Gong.io, the US-Israeli company that uses AI to analyze customer data for sales teams, has announced it has raised its third round in 18 months, securing $200 million at a whopping $2.2 billion valuation in a Series D funding round. The funding round was led by Coatue Management, Index Ventures and Salesforce Ventures and joined by earlier investors like Sequoia Capital and Battery Ventures. Gong said it will use the new funding to "fulfill strong market demand for its Revenue Intelligence Platform, reinforce its market leadership, and invest in its product, engineering and go-to-market teams." The company said it has raised a total of $334 million to date. This includes a $65 million Series C funding round in December 2019 and a $40 million Series B investment in February 2019.

This post is a practical example of Neural Style Transfer based on the paper A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style (Gatys et al.). For this example we will use the pretained Arbitrary Image Stylization module which is available in TensorFlow Hub. We will work with Python and tensorflow 2.x. Neural style transfer is an optimization technique used to take two images--a content image and a style reference image (such as an artwork by a famous painter)--and blend them together so the output image looks like the content image, but "painted" in the style of the style reference image. This is implemented by optimizing the output image to match the content statistics of the content image and the style statistics of the style reference image.

AWS announced the general availability of AWS Wavelength on Verizon's 5G Network. Applications demanding ultra-low latency in single-digit milliseconds can leverage AWS compute and storage at the edge with Verizon's 5G Network. The service is now available with Boston and the San Francisco Bay, starting with the San Jose area. AWS has embedded AWS compute and storage services at the edge of 5G with Verizon's 5G Network. Developers can now leverage machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and video/game streaming requiring low latency edge processing with AWS Wavelength, notes the announcement.

If you ask pet owners to pick the most difficult part of their workday routine, many would say "mornings." They don't mean the common struggles with getting out of bed or commuting, but rather the emotions involved in leaving their beloved pets behind. The sad look in the pets' eyes suggests this is not an easy time for them either. Surveys conducted by ZenCrate and Zulily show that more than 32 million dogs in the US suffer anxiety when left alone at home, while 84 percent of pet parents frequently worry about their housebound fur babies. There are a number of solutions available, such as pet sitters or daycare facilities, but these do not allow people and pets to actually stay connected. An increasingly popular tech-based approach that enables distanced interactions is smart pet monitoring cameras.

Amazon Web Services brought its compute and storage capabilities to the mobile edge this week for developers in Boston and the San Francisco Bay area with its new AWS Wavelength on Verizon's 5G network. AWS' first Wavelength Zones use Verizon's 5G Edge mobile compute platform to allow developers and enterprises to deploy ultra-low latency-dependent applications to mobile and connected wireless devices at the edge of Verizon's 5G Ultra Wideband network. Use cases for 5G mobile edge compute using AWS Wavelength include machine learning (ML) inference at the edge, autonomous industrial equipment, connected cars, smart cities and factories, the Internet of Things, live and interactive video and game streaming, and virtual reality. Developers can build applications that provide near-real-time analytics for instant decision-making and automated robotic systems for manufacturing facilities. AWS Wavelength's debut comes eight months after AWS CEO Andy Jassy and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg (pictured) unveiled the new service at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in December.

In recent years, machine learning has been very successful in solving a wide range of problems. In particular, neural networks have reached human, and sometimes super-human, levels of ability in tasks such as language translation, object recognition, game playing, and even driving cars. Aerospike is the global leader in next-generation, real-time NoSQL data solutions for any scale. Aerospike's patented Hybrid Memory Architecture delivers an unbreakable competitive advantage by unlocking the full potential of modern hardware, delivering previously unimaginable value from vast amounts of data at the edge, to the core and in the cloud. With this growth in capability has come a growth in complexity. Data scientists and machine learning engineers must perform feature engineering, design model architectures, and optimize hyperparameters. Since the purpose of the machine learning is to automate a task normally done by humans, naturally the next step is to automate the tasks of data scientists and engineers. This area of research is called automated machine learning, or AutoML. There have been many exciting developments in AutoML recently, and it's important to take a look at the current state of the art and learn about what's happening now and what's coming up in the future. InfoQ reached out to the following subject matter experts in the industry to discuss the current state and future trends in AutoML space. InfoQ: What is AutoML and why is it important?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not the one that is borne by the overwhelming science fiction vision. In the near future, we will see almost every area of life in order to make our activities more effective and interactive. According to China's search engine, Baidu's top researcher, "Reliability of speech technology approaches the point we will only use and do not even think about." Andrew Ng says the best technology is often invisible, and speech recognition will disappear in the background as well. Baidu is currently working on more accurate speech recognition and more efficient sentence analysis, which expects sound technologies to be able to interact with multiple devices such as household appliances.

Microsoft will release the latest edition of its famous Flight Simulator software for PC later this month with ultra lifelike graphics - but it will require a massive 150GB of free storage to install it. The software will make use of satellite maps from Bing as well as live readings from weather stations and airports around the world to create'the most realistic' version of the game ever developed. Users simply upload their desired destination and use the'realistic' training system to navigate the area – the simulator is set to be released for PC on August 18, Xbox shortly after and VR later this year. The simulator lets'pilots' sit in a realistic cockpit, allowing them to learn the ins and outs of a real airplane and travel from or to more than 40,000 real-world airports and visit sites between them. The latest version of the 38 year old software includes 37 thousand airports, 1.5 billion buildings and two trillion trees, mountains, roads and rivers. According to Microsoft it will include live traffic, real time weather and moving animals to reflect the fact Earth is a'living world'.

SCI COMMUN### Conservation A company seeking to build a controversial gold and copper mine in Alaska won a major victory on 24 July when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued an environmental analysis saying the mine wouldn't endanger the world's most productive sockeye salmon fishery. The decision clears the way for the Corps to issue permits needed by promoters of the Pebble Mine, located at the headwaters of two major watersheds that form part of the Bristol Bay salmon runs, just north of the Aleutian Islands. Environmental and Native Alaskan groups and some salmon scientists blasted the new study, saying it understated risks by focusing on the mine's small, initial footprint over 20 years of mining rather than its potential impacts if it expands to become one of the world's largest gold and copper mines, as its promoters hope. Mine backers have said such an expansion would get a closer environmental review later if they pursue it. Scientists have raised concerns that even the smaller mine could have wide impacts, because the resilience of the salmon runs hinges on access to a wide variety of spawning habitats. Environmental groups have vowed to file lawsuits to block the project. 90% —Accuracy of a new artificial intelligence system trained to identify individual weaver birds, which human birders generally cannot tell apart unless they are tagged ( Methods in Ecology and Evolution ). ### Planetary science China's first independent mission to Mars blasted off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on 23 July. To arrive in February 2021, Tianwen-1, a “quest for heavenly truth,” comprises an orbiter, lander, and rover. Only the United States and the Soviet Union have successfully landed on Mars. Instruments on the three Tianwen-1 craft will study the planet's magnetic field and atmosphere, map its surface, and characterize its geology. Tianwen-1 is the second in a trio of fresh martian missions: The United Arab Emirates launched its Hope orbiter on 19 July, and NASA planned to launch its Perseverance rover as early as 30 July, after Science went to press. ### Funding A bill in France would increase research spending over the next 10 years and add tenure-track faculty positions, a novelty in France. But critics say the plan's increases would be too small and slow. By 2030, the annual public research budget would rise by about one-third, to €20 billion, toward a goal of lifting overall R&D spending from 2.2% of gross domestic product to 3%. The National Research Agency, which funds researchers through competitive calls, would get €1 billion more over 7 years, reaching about €1.7 billion in 2027, to help raise its grant success rates from 16% to a target of 30%. The new, nonpermanent tenure-track positions would complement the permanent entry-level research positions traditionally offered by the French system, but critics fear the growth may lead to a decline in the permanent ones. Parliament is expected to approve the bill. ### Drug trials A monoclonal antibody given to babies has strongly protected them from severe disease caused by respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a leading cause of infant death. As reported this week in The New England Journal of Medicine , a placebo-controlled study of nearly 1500 babies born preterm—who are at higher risk of severe symptoms of RSV—in 23 countries found that a single injection of the antibody before RSV season starts in the fall led to 78.4% fewer hospitalizations for lower respiratory infections associated with the disease. The antibody, being developed by AstraZeneca and Sanofi Pasteur, could replace one now on the market that is rarely used. (It is recommended only for infants at highest risk, requires five shots, and is very expensive.) The companies plan to seek regulatory approval of the new prophylaxis if larger studies now underway in preterm and full-term infants confirm that it is safe and effective. ### Graduate studies The American Astronomical Society last week launched the Astronomy Genealogy Project, which maps 5000 astronomers to their academic “descendants”—the 28,000 doctorate recipients they supervised. The discipline's family tree, at astrogen.aas.org, stretches back to 1766, but half of the listed doctorates were awarded since 2002. Organizers hope the data will help historians and sociologists of science analyze patterns across countries, universities, and subfields. U.S. universities awarded slightly more than half of the doctorates listed, and about two-thirds of the theses are online. ### Climate Environmental groups last week denounced as weak a plan announced by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to limit greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft. The new standard would match an existing one adopted in 2016 by a U.N. body, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), that required emissions cuts by 2028. But recently manufactured planes already meet the standard, and EPA conceded its new rule would not reduce overall airplane emissions. Manufacturers have supported such a U.S. regulation to help them meet ICAO certification requirements. IACO has predicted that even under its standard, airplane emissions will grow by at least 3% a year globally. U.S. aviation accounts for 3% of the country's greenhouse gas emissions. ### Extreme life Bacteria from seafloor sediments buried 101 million years ago have been grown in the lab, raising the possibility they are as old as their muddy home. They had somehow survived in an area of the Pacific Ocean almost devoid of organic matter or other nutrients most bacteria need, although the sediments recovered do contain oxygen, the researchers report in Nature Communications . The finding pushes back the documented age of bacteria living in marine sediment from 15 million years and provides new insights on the limits of life under extreme conditions. A team led by researchers from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology harvested the microbes from core samples drilled up to 5700 meters below sea level and took precautions against contaminating them with modern bacteria. The group argues the microbes likely didn't have enough food to keep replicating, and instead may have survived for eons without dividing by repairing age-related cellular damage. The microbes identified are known members of more than eight bacterial groups, many of which are commonly found elsewhere on Earth. ### Biotechnology Scientists announced last week that they used CRISPR gene editing to modify a cow embryo so that the resulting calf, named Cosmo, should produce more offspring bearing male traits. Bulls are 15% more efficient than cows at converting feed into weight gain, so the new method may allow cattle farmers to raise fewer cattle, benefiting the environment, say the researchers at the University of California, Davis. The researchers inserted a gene called SRY , which initiates male development and is normally found on the male sex chromosome, into an embryo's chromosome 17. Next, the researchers plan to determine whether Cosmo's offspring that inherit the SRY gene look and grow like males. Fifty percent of the calf's progeny will naturally be male; another 25% will be genetically female but will carry the SRY gene. ### Conservation Florida's governor this month signed a bill to establish a 162,000-hectare marine sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico and protect one of the state's last remaining stretches of seagrass. Florida's coast boasts the most continuous expanse of seagrass beds in the United States, but these diverse habitats, home to blue crabs and manatees, have been damaged by nutrient-driven algal blooms and boat propellers. Authorities plan to create a management plan for the new Nature Coast Aquatic Preserve to balance protection with ecotourism, boating, and fishing. ### A magic ride for science In 1984, artist Bruce Degen met writer Joanna Cole at a publisher's office in New York City to discuss creating a children's book about science. They went on to collaborate and publish 13 colorful, zany books in The Magic School Bus series, featuring the ebullient, intrepid teacher Ms. Frizzle (above, right), who takes her students on fantastic adventures into the ocean, across the Solar System, and through the human body, for example. Cole died on 12 July at age 75. But the series continues to teach young readers and their parents about the natural world. > Q: Did you expect to create such a legacy? > A: I was in art school doing very serious art, and I realized that, in my heart of hearts, I wanted to do children's books. In the beginning, it was darn hard work. Some book sketch dummies have five layers of rewrites and reillustrations. The first book was a one-book contract to see if this would work. [The reception] was like the world was waiting for somebody to make this happen. People say, “[As a child,] I [used to] read these books, now I read them to my kids!” I could never have imagined it. > Q: Does scientific accuracy get in the way of storytelling? > A: Frequently. You have to tell kids what is true, but you can't give them all the truth—it's too much. For example, the evolution book goes from now [back] to the beginning of the Earth. I [initially] tried to show every era, year, and life form. It was too complicated. So it ended up as a nice, open spiral with a few representations of each era. > Q: Why use the format of adventures? > A: By following the story, it gave kids a mental filing system—they could retrieve and remember information because it was given to them in a memorable trip. ### Dispatches from the pandemic Read additional Science coverage of the pandemic at [sciencemag.org/tags/coronavirus][1]. #### U.S. vaccine efficacy trials begin The first large-scale efficacy trials of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States began last week. On 27 July, the National Institutes of Health, working with Moderna, announced the start of one that aims to recruit 30,000 people. Later that day, a partnership between Pfizer and BioNTech announced separately it was launching a similarly sized study at sites in the United States and elsewhere. Both the Moderna and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines contain messenger RNA that prompts cells to make a protein that studs the surface of the COVID-19 virus. If the vaccines work, this viral protein will safely teach the immune system how to battle the virus if a person later is exposed to it. Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration's push to accelerate development of a COVID-19 vaccine, has committed nearly $3 billion to these two R&D projects, about half its total investment. Other efficacy trials of various COVID-19 vaccines have begun in Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. Results are expected in late fall at the earliest. #### CDC slammed over school rules Guidance issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week for safely reopening schools downplays risks that teachers, other staff members, and students will spread or contract COVID-19, many public health specialists say. Provoking claims that CDC's advice had been politicized, the agency revised an earlier draft that President Donald Trump had panned as “very tough and expensive.” The nonbinding recommendations, released 23 July, emphasize the social and developmental benefits of in-person schooling and highlight that young children are at low risk for contracting the disease and transmitting the virus that causes it. The document also recommends against screening students for symptoms. Nevertheless, the Trump administration did advise communities with high infection rates to consider not beginning in-person classes. Large school districts, such as those in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Diego, have already announced that they will begin the 2020–21 school year with online instruction only. #### Anti-Fauci TV segment canceled Following heavy criticism from scientists and others, Sinclair Broadcast Corp. this week canceled plans for its chain of local TV stations to air a segment featuring widely challenged accusations that Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, intentionally created the virus responsible for COVID-19 and sent it to China. Fauci has helped lead the U.S. effort to control the pandemic despite tangling with President Donald Trump. The allegation came from Judy Mikovits, a virologist and antivaccine activist who appears in a documentary about the coronavirus that was also widely debunked as false and misleading (). The Sinclair segment, a new interview with Mikovits, was available online until the company pulled it for review on 25 July, after Media Matters reported its existence. Sinclair announced on 27 July that it would not air the segment on the nearly 200 TV stations it owns or operates in 89 U.S. markets—but not before one in Charleston, West Virginia, had broadcast it. [1]: http://sciencemag.org/tags/coronavirus