President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has said the government will replace some civil service positions with artificial intelligence, instructing ministers to remove two ranks of public servants. "I have ordered ministers to replace echelon III and IV officials with AI [because] our bureaucracy will be faster with AI, but it would depend on the omnibus law," the president said in Jakarta on Thursday, adding that doing so would cut red tape. He referred to a planned law that would synchronize more than 70 overlapping laws and regulations. Jokowi said the current four echelon tiers would be reduced to two by next year as AI was set to replace top civil service posts. He, however, did not elaborate on how the government would go about the plan.

This number jibes with another finding from the DataRobot survey: that 38% of the organizations surveyed reported they use "black box" machine learning systems that offer no insight into how it makes decisions. The juxtaposition of AI bias concerns and black box systems is enough to warrant serious questions about the direction compaines should take with their machine learning, according to John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy. "If someone is trying to sell you a black box system… and you don't know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn't trust it," DataRobot quotes Giannandrea as saying in its report. The survey indicates that organizations are aware of the potential pitfalls and are actively working to mitigate it. DataRobot found that 64% of survey respondents say they're "very to extremely" confident in their ability to identify AI bias.

The country was either prescient or lucky in continuing to fund neural networks research when the US retreated from it in the 1970s and 80s. As a result, Canadian researchers like Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio pushed forward the methods we now call "deep learning." These three researchers won the 2018 Turing Award --often called the Nobel equivalent for computer science. Canada is also known in AI for its collegial, public/private ecosystems. They incorporate government funding, venture capital, university research initiatives, and private sector sponsorship.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby talked with Matt Price of ZeroFox about the type of deep fakes circulating and their potential impact in the election cycle. The following is an edited transcript of their interview. Matt Price: Audio deepfakes are just synthetic audio usually trained on a certain person's voice, such as the CEO of a company, and then you're able to then feed text into that algorithm, which then generates the appropriate words using that person's synthetic voice. Video deepfakes, on the other hand, those are videos where you usually copy someone's face onto either an actor or just replace that original person's face, making them say something they never really said. So this can be very short spans of time.

While the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has already introduced AI as an optional subject in schools, no full fledged degree courses are available in the area in the country besides few short term courses. "In the digital era and rapidly-evolving business landscape, AI is influencing a range of industries and altering the job roles. The world is looking at AI for its widespread applications in almost every industry and is considered to be the next big technological shift in industrial and smartphone revolution. The need of the hour is to make AI education more focused and easily available," said Varun Dhamija, Vice President, Pearson Professional Programs (PPP). "According to our recent survey, 60 pc Indians believe that the world is shifting to a model where people participate in education over a lifetime which makes it age agnostic. More and more seasoned professionals, young learners and mid level employees now realise the need for upskilling and formal training in AI and other areas to keep pace with the dynamic job requirements. Given this backdrop, we will definitely see a demand for not only short term or vocational education, but also for AI specific full time courses," he added.

Airport hubs increasingly are embracing technology in their operations. As part of a three-day Airport IT conference in Munich, Amadeus head of airport IT product management Holger Mattig outlined the future of airport management and said that aviation hubs will witness more use of wearables, internet of things (IoT) applications and predictive analysis in the future. Talking about how the IoT has impacted the aviation industry, Mattig said that computing devices are already exchanging data between each other. "If you look at the apron, all of the devices that go on there – the push back tractors, the de-icing elements, all of these are actually able to talk to each other and give data about every stage of activity," he said. "In terms of flight handling, we now have technologies from companies like Assaia who can make prediction through videos generated by machine learning, and technologies like geofencing, where you can manage drones and improve safety. "We have the same for indoor where there are a lot of initiatives that are used to engage with the mobile phones of passengers in events of potential disruptions." While aviation companies are increasingly using technologies such as IoT and machine learning, Mattig said that going forward, airport and airline companies will start using wearable technology to improve efficiency. He added that employees could start wearing devices such as "smart sunglasses" and "smart bracelets" to track passenger activity, and that monitoring how passengers prefer to shop, eat and spend their time in an airport could help authorities to understand consumer behaviour. "Airports must start to build what I would call airport-centric visible analytics by implementing CRM solutions with the aim to look at the profile of passengers.

Noam Chomsky is one of the greatest minds of our time and is one of the most cited scholars in history. He is a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. He has spent over 60 years at MIT and recently also joined the University of Arizona. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations.

Editor's note: In concert with the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum's Project Gutenberg, a futurist imagines a post-mortem on an artificial intelligence-aided Chinese invasion. The Department of Defense's chief testified before Congress, revealing details of China's efforts to deter the United States during last year's invasion of Taiwan. WASHINGTON -- The Chinese People's Liberation Army shocked the world last November when they activated nearly two million reservists, mobilized the People's Armed Forces Maritime Militia, and executed a surprisingly successful cross-strait invasion of Taiwan. In a marathon day of testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, Secretary of Defense Barry McDermott revealed how the PLA's cyber branch used artificial intelligence and the "internet of things" to help Chinese conventional forces achieve strategic military aims far from the conventional battlefield in Taiwan. McDermott told committee members the artificial-intelligence capabilities China employed will force a redefinition of "the battlefield" and must change how the US military trains for future conflict.

I write scientific papers, keep notes on meetings, write letters of recommendation, notes on scientific articles, keep TODO lists in projects, help files for software, write lecture notes, students send me homework solutions in it, it is a contact database, … Some files are on Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, some in git repos, etc. The problem is that leads to org-files everywhere on my hard drive. At this point I have several thousand org-files that span about five years of work. It is not that easy after a while to find them. Yes there are things like recent-files, bookmarks, counsel-find-file, helm-for-files, counsel/helm-locate, helm/counsel-grep/ag/pt, projectile for searching within a project, a slew of tools to search open buffers, there is recoll, etc… There are desktop search tools, and of course, good organization habits.

QRI's own Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV), which hypothesizes that given a mathematical representation of an experience, the symmetry of this representation will encode how pleasant the experience is (Johnson 2016). We further hypothesize that consonance between a brain's connectome-specific harmonic waves (CSHWs) will be a reasonable proxy for this symmetry (Gomez Emilsson 2017). Marr's Three Levels: as explained on our lineages page, David Marr is most famous for Marr's Three Levels (along with Tomaso Poggio), which describe "the three levels at which any machine carrying out an information-processing task must be understood:" Computational theory: What is the goal of the computation, why is it appropriate, and what is the logic of the strategy by which it can be carried out? Representation and algorithm: How can this computational theory be implemented? In particular, what is the representation for the input and output, and what is the algorithm for the transformation? Hardware implementation: How can the representation and algorithm be realized physically?