The Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who spent some of his happiest years chronicling life in Caracas, once declared journalism "the best job in the world". Not so if you are reporting on today's Venezuela, where journalists are feeling the heat as the South American country lurches towards full-blown dictatorship under President Nicolás Maduro. In the four weeks since Venezuela's disputed election, local journalists have come up with a distinctly 21st-century tactic to avoid being arrested for reporting on 21st-century socialism: using artificial intelligence avatars to report all the news Maduro's regime deems unfit to print. In daily broadcasts, the AI-created newsreaders have been telling the world about the president's post-election crackdown on opponents, activists and the media, without putting the reporters behind the stories at risk. Carlos Eduardo Huertas, the director of Connectas, the Colombia-based journalism platform coordinating the initiative, said far from being a gimmick, the use of AI was a response to "the persecution and the growing repression that our colleagues are suffering in Venezuela, where the uncertainty over the safety of doing their job … grows by the minute".

Urban environments are intricate systems where the breakdown of critical infrastructure can impact both the economic and social well-being of communities. Electricity systems hold particular significance, as they are essential for other infrastructure, and disruptions can trigger widespread consequences. Typically, assessing electricity availability requires ground-level data, a challenge in conflict zones and regions with limited access. This study shows how satellite imagery, social media, and information extraction can monitor blackouts and their perceived causes. Night-time light data (in March 2019 for Caracas, Venezuela) is used to indicate blackout regions. Twitter data is used to determine sentiment and topic trends, while statistical analysis and topic modeling delved into public perceptions regarding blackout causes. The findings show an inverse relationship between nighttime light intensity. Tweets mentioning the Venezuelan President displayed heightened negativity and a greater prevalence of blame-related terms, suggesting a perception of government accountability for the outages.

Hector Geffner got his Ph.D at UCLA with a dissertation that was co-winner of the 1990 ACM Dissertation Award. He then worked as Staff Research Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in NY, USA and at the Universidad Simon Bolivar, in Caracas, Venezuela. Since 2001, he is a researcher at ICREA and a professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He is a former Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He is also a member of the EurAI board, a Fellow of AAAI and EurAI, and author of the book Default Reasoning: Causal and Conditional Theories'', MIT Press, 1992, editor of "Heuristics, Probability, and Causality: a Tribute to Judea Pearl" along with R. Dechter and Joe Halpern, College Publications, 2010, and author with Blai Bonet of "A Concise Introduction to Models and Methods for Automated Planning", Morgan and Claypool, 2013.

In my February blog, I explained how to use the tokenization technique in Natural Language Processing (NLP) to predict whether a particular Tweet could be geolocated to a particular neighborhood in the city of Caracas, Venezuela. Almost 37,000 Spanish Tweets that had a latitude and longitude from the city of Caracas, Venezuela were used to observe reactions to the food shortages within each of the city's five municipalities from December 2014 to October 2016.

U.S. officials sent out a warning after Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was attacked with explosive drones in a failed assassination attempt. The Aug. 4 attack targeted Maduro while he was giving a speech in Caracas. He was unharmed but seven soldiers were hurt. It raised concerns worldwide that commercial drones could be used to harm people. ABC News obtained a bulletin from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and National Counterterrorism Center officials detailing that concern.

CARACAS – Venezuela's all-powerful constituent assembly was to launch proceedings Wednesday to try opposition lawmakers over a failed "attack" on President Nicolas Maduro, who also accused exiled opposition leader Julio Borges over the incident. Constituent Assembly chief Diosdado Cabello called the session to strip the lawmakers of their parliamentary immunity so they could face trial for the alleged and failed bid to kill the president. "When justice comes, it hits hard," Cabello said. Maduro and his government said the president had been targeted by two flying drones each carrying 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of powerful C4 plastic explosives. But details of Saturday's incident remain unclear, with conflicting information coming from various sources.

CARACAS, Venezuela – President Nicolas Maduro went on television Tuesday night to accuse one of Venezuela's most prominent opposition leaders of being linked to a weekend assassination attempt using drones. Maduro said statements by several of the six suspects already arrested pointed to involvement by Julio Borges, an opposition leader living in exile in Colombia. "Several of the declarations indicated Julio Borges. The investigations point to him," Maduro said, though he provided no details on Borges' alleged role. Critics of Maduro's socialist government had said immediately following Saturday evening's attack that they feared the unpopular leader would use the incident as an excuse to round up opposition politicians amid widespread unrest over Venezuela's devastating economic collapse.

CARACAS, Venezuela – President Nicolas Maduro has accused two opposition legislators of having roles in the drone attack that Venezuelan officials have called an assassination attempt on the leader, and his allies are moving against the accused. The head of Venezuela's pro-government constitutional assembly said he would have the body take up a proposal Wednesday to strip the lawmakers of their immunity from prosecution. During a national television broadcast Tuesday night, Maduro said statements from some of the six suspects already arrested in the weekend attack pointed to key financiers and others, including Julio Borges, one of the country's most prominent opposition leaders who is a lawmaker but is living in exile in Colombia. "Several of the declarations indicated Julio Borges. The investigations point to him," Maduro said, though he provided no details on Borges' alleged role.

BOGOTA/CARACAS – A former Venezuelan municipal police chief and anti-government activist says he helped organize an operation to launch armed drones over a military rally on Saturday that President Nicolas Maduro has called an assassination attempt. In an interview, Salvatore Lucchese, a Venezuelan activist who was previously imprisoned for his role in past protests, told Reuters he orchestrated the attack with a loose association of anti-Maduro militants known generally in Venezuela as the "resistance." The "resistance" referred to by Lucchese is a diffuse collection of street activists, student organizers and former military officers. It has little formal structure, but is known in the country mostly for organizing protests in recent years in which demonstrators have clashed with police and soldiers. Reuters could not independently verify Lucchese's claims about the attack, in which drones flew over the rally in central Caracas.

Drone industry and law-enforcement officials are struggling to find common ground over expanding flights and protecting public safety, a debate thrust into the public spotlight by a reported assassination attempt on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The Federal Aviation Administration is projecting a fourfold increase, from more than 110,000 currently, in the number of commercial drones flying in U.S. skies in the next five years. U.S. law-enforcement officials, however, want to delay widespread operations until reliable defensive systems are developed. Saturday's attack with unmanned aircraft in Caracas was a reminder for the drone industry and U.S. government officials over the potential security threats even readily available commercial drones can pose. Venezuelan authorities said a pair of explosive-laden drones carrying a total of about 4 pounds of plastic explosives were part of an unsuccessful assassination attempt during an outdoor ceremony in Caracas, with one of the vehicles detonating after government jamming devices knocked it off course.