As more decisions become automated and processed by algorithms, these processes become more opaque and less accountable. The public has a right to know the data processes that impact their lives so they can correct errors and contest decisions made by algorithms. Personal data collected from our social connections and online activities are used by the government and companies to make determinations about our ability to fly, obtain a job, get security clearance, and even determine the severity of criminal sentencing. These opaque, automated decision-making processes bear risks of secret profiling and discrimination as well as undermine our privacy and freedom of association. Without knowledge of the factors that provide the basis for decisions, it is impossible to know whether government and companies engage in practices that are deceptive, discriminatory, or unethical.

"I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act on changing the climate"– Greta Thunberg Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl, who is famously called as a climate change warrior. She has started an international youth movement against climate change and has been nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize 2019 for climate activism. According to a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel (IPCC), climate change is seen as the top global threat by many countries.

In the ever onward march of modern technology, we humans have sometimes felt uncomfortable about the increasing automation of telecommunications – from machines calling us with recorded messages to switchboard operators replaced by numbered menus to choose from. However, we seem to be turning a corner, with many people now happy to communicate with devices such as chatbots. For example, a report from media data specialists Comscore which looked at the future of voice technology in the US, found that half of smartphone users engage with voice technology and messaging apps on their device, and one in three do so on a daily basis. According to Call Centre Helper investment in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will increase by more than 300 per cent over the next year, and eight out of ten businesses have already implemented AI as a customer service solution, or are planning to do so by 2020. A blog by NewGenApps has looked at the top 11 ways that companies are now using AI in their business processes, and they say that "What started as a rule-based automation is now capable of mimicking human interaction. It is not just the human-like capabilities that make artificial intelligence unique. An advanced AI algorithm offers far better speed and reliability at a much lower cost … compared to its human counterparts."

An image is worth more than 1000 words! A graphical abstract serves as a visual summary of an article's main findings. We share our best practices from implementing the use of graphical abstracts in our journal.

That was the takeaway on Sept. 7, when the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) lost contact with its Vikram lunar lander during an attempt to touch down at the moon's south pole. India was poised to become the fourth nation to ever successfully touch down softly on the lunar regolith, doing so in a place that no other country has previously reached. Though the space agency is still scrambling to revive communication with Vikram -- which has been spotted from lunar orbit -- the unhappy landing sequence seemed like a painful echo of the situation earlier this year, when a private robotic Israeli lander, Beresheet, crashed into our natural satellite. It's all a reminder that, despite the fact that humans landed on the moon many times during the Apollo missions half a century ago, doing so remains a tough business. Of the 30 soft-landing attempts made by space agencies and companies around the world, more than one-third have ended in failure, space journalist Lisa Grossman tweeted.

HOUSTON – The style of attack used against oil plants in Saudi Arabia that knocked out half of the country's production on Saturday is unlikely to be a risk in the United States, energy and security experts say. "The U.S. oil industry has a lot of redundancy," said Amy Myers Jaffe, senior fellow for energy at the Council on Foreign Relations. U.S. refineries go offline often, after accidents or storms, with little impact to the market, Jaffe said. Even production in the country's biggest oil field, the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, is spread across thousands of wells in a 75,000- square-mile (194,250-square-kilometer) region. The kind of gas-oil separation facility hit in the attacks in Saudi Arabia is done in smaller plants located across U.S. oil fields.

TVs and radios blare that "artificial intelligence is coming," and it will take your job and beat you at chess. But AI is already here, and it can beat you -- and the world's best -- at chess. In 2012, it was also used by Google to identify cats in YouTube videos. Today, it's the reason Teslas have Autopilot and Netflix and Spotify seem to "read your mind." Now, AI is changing the field of synthetic biology and how we engineer biology.

Have you ever noticed your friends getting tagged automatically after you upload a group picture? Though the technology has now gained widespread attention, its history can be traced back to the 1960s. Woodrow Wilson (Woody) Bledsoe, an American mathematician and computer scientist, is one of the founders of pattern and facial recognition technology. Back in the 1960s, he developed ways to classify faces using gridlines. A striking fact was, even during the experimental and inception phase, the application was able to match 40 faces per hour.

Can machine learning help clean it up? A team of computer scientists spanning the globe think so. They've built a neural network that can seemingly classify tweets into four different categories: normal, aggressor, spam, and bully – aggressor being a deliberately harmful, derogatory, or offensive tweet; and bully being a belittling or hostile message. The aim is to create a system that can filter out aggressive and bullying tweets, delete spam, and allow normal tweets through. The boffins admit it's difficult to draw a line between so-called cyber-aggression and cyber-bullying.

NHS England describes clinical audit as a way of identifying whether healthcare is being provided in accordance with agreed standards and where improvements could be made to improve outcomes for patients.1 Audits may be local or national. In England the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP), on behalf of the National Health Service (NHS), is responsible for overseeing and commissioning more than 30 clinical audits, which form the National Clinical Audit Programme.2 These collect and analyse data supplied by local clinicians. The national audit covering stroke is the Sentinel Stroke National Audit Programme (SSNAP).3 Stroke is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide, with an estimated 5.9 million deaths and 33 million stroke survivors in 2010.4