Russian researchers have used a non-invasive technique that visualizes the brain activity of a person, recreating surprisingly accurate moving images of what our eyes actually see. The method could someday be employed in cognitive disorder treatment or post-stroke rehabilitation devices that are controlled by a patient's thoughts. This is not the first time that scientists have decoded people's brain activity patterns to generate images. Such methods, however, typically rely on functional MRI or surgically implanted neurons, which can be invasive and cumbersome, thereby limiting the potential for everyday applications. The new technique developed by researchers at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Russian corporation Neurobotics is much more versatile.

Amazon's Cambridge UK based Simulation and Experimentation (SimEx) team is looking for an experienced and passionate Machine Learning Scientist to join our fast-paced stimulating environment, to help invent the future of retail with technology. The SimEx team is part of the Supply Chain Optimization Technologies (SCOT) organization. The charter of SCOT is to maximize Amazon's return on our inventory investment in terms of Free Cash Flow, and customer satisfaction. We accomplish this by applying simulation, advanced statistical and machine leaning methods, and empirical analysis to predict and evaluate Amazon's inventory needs. The SimEx team builds systems that allow SCOT to answer "what if?" questions about our supply chain, our fulfillment network, and our customers.

Lateral phishing attacks – scams targeting users from compromised email accounts within an organization – are becoming an increasing concern in the U.S. Whereas in the past attackers would send phishing scams from email accounts external to an organization, recently there's been an explosion of email-borne scams in which an attackers compromise email accounts within organizations, and then uses those accounts to launch internal phishing emails to fellow employees – the kind of attacks known as lateral phishing. And when a phishing email comes from an internal account, the vast majority of email security systems can't stop it. Existing security systems largely detect cyber attacks that come from the outside, relying on signals like IP and domain reputation, which are ineffective when the email comes from an internal source. Lateral phishing attacks are also costly. FBI data shows that these cyberattacks caused more than $12 billion in losses between 2013-2018.

Reservoir computing is an approach to make machine learning algorithms run faster. The word reservoir refers to a dynamical system. A dynamical system is denoted by a mathematical function that describes how a point in space behaves with time. Having knowledge of these systems helps predict the future position of that point in space. This reservoir consists of a bunch of recurrently connected units that are connected randomly.

Microsoft's Ignite conference starts today in Orlando, Florida, where the company is expected to announce updates across its product portfolio. More than a few were revealed this morning on the Microsoft 365 side of the business, which encompasses not only Office 365 products like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook but Yammer, OneNote, and OneDrive. A preview of Ideas in Word for the web is rolling out for Office 365 commercial users. It's an AI-powered proofreader that taps natural language processing and machine learning to deliver intelligent, contextually aware suggestions that could improve a document's readability. For instance, Ideas in Word will recommend ways to make phrases more concise, clear, and inclusive.

Electrical engineers at Duke University have harnessed the power of machine learning to design dielectric (non-metal) metamaterials that absorb and emit specific frequencies of terahertz radiation. The design technique changed what could have been more than 2000 years of calculation into 23 hours, clearing the way for the design of new, sustainable types of thermal energy harvesters and lighting. The study was published online on September 16 in the journal Optics Express. Metamaterials are synthetic materials composed of many individual engineered features, which together produce properties not found in nature through their structure rather than their chemistry. In this case, the terahertz metamaterial is built up from a two-by-two grid of silicon cylinders resembling a short, square Lego.

His book, The Algorithmic Leader, offers a hopeful and practical guide for leaders of all types, and organisations of all sizes to help them to survive and thrive in this era of unprecedented change and this is something we will be learning much more about during this podcast. Mike Walsh is a global futurist and is CEO of Tomorrow, a global consultancy who designs companies for the 21st century so they can thrive in this era of disruptive technological change. Mike's clients include many of the global Fortune 500, and he is a sought-after keynote speaker who regularly shares the stage with world leaders and business icons alike. He has delivered nearly 1,000 keynote speeches around the world and his best-selling book Futuretainment, published by Phaidon, was the winner of the design award by the Art Director's Club in New York Mike's newest book, The Algorithmic Leader, presents a pragmatic guide for future leaders and is based on many of the fascinating people Mike has met and interacted with over the years from Jack Ma (founder of Alibaba) to Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn), as well as the next generation of entrepreneurs whose companies may end up shaping the future of the world we live in. Finally, My name is Nick Day and I am a specialist Payroll Recruiter.

Virginia Dignum is professor at the Department of Computing Science at Umea University in Sweden. She is also member of, among others, the European Commission High Level Expert Group on AI, the World Economic Forum Council on AI, the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethically Aligned Design of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems and the European Global Forum on AI (AI4People). She has written a series of blogs for the website Medium.com, on which the content of this blogpost is based. You can find the hyperlinks to her blogs at the bottom of this page. Facing the challenge of bringing together many views from different disciplines on what AI exactly entails, Virginia's definition of AI offers an overarching perspective: "(…) AI is the discipline of developing computer systems that are able of perceiving their environment, with the ability to deliberate how to best act in order to achieve its own goals, while taking into account that the environment contains other actors similar to itself." She continues by explaining that AI is about the autonomy on deciding how to act, adapting to changes in the environment, including to actions and aims of other agents in that environment and then deciding how to act.

Killer robots, whether they're the product of scaremongering or a real threat to the international power balance, now have their very own set of ethical rules. However, the newly published Pentagon guidelines on the military use of AI are unlikely to satisfy its critics. The draft guidelines were released late last week by the Defense Innovation Board (DIB), which the Department of Defense (DoD) had tasked in 2018 with producing a set of ethical rules for the use of AI in warfare. The DIB has spent the past 12 months studying AI ethics and principles with academics, lawyers, computer scientists, philosophers, and business leaders – all chaired by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt. What they came up with had to align with the DoD's AI Strategy published in 2018, which determines that AI should be used "in a lawful and ethical manner to promote our values".

Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana can answer all sorts of questions that pop into users' heads, and they're improving every day. But what happens when a company like Amazon decides to crowdsource answers to fill gaps in its platform's knowledge? The result can range from amusing and perplexing to concerning. Alexa Answers allows any Amazon customer to submit responses to unanswered questions. When the web service launched in general availability a few weeks ago, Amazon gave assurances that submissions would be policed through a combination of automatic and manual review.