The Government Artificial Intelligence (AI) Readiness Index, compiled by Oxford Insights and the International Development Research Centre, ranks the governments of 194 nations according to how prepared they are to utilise AI in the provision of public services. According to global consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCooper, AI technologies are forecast to add an additional $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030, with $6.6 trillion to come from an increase in productivity and $9.1 trillion from consumption-side effects. The score that Oxford Insights provides for each country comprises of 11 input metrics grouped under four high-level topics: governance; infrastructure and data; skills and education; and government public services. On a global level, the top ranking countries (and their scores) were: Singapore (9.186), The likes of India (7.515) and China (7.37) were ranked 17th and 20th respectively.

"AI art", or more precisely art created with neural networks, has recently started to receive broad media coverage in newspapers (New York Times), magazines (The Atlantic), and countless blogs. Combined with the ongoing general "AI hype" and multiple recent museum and gallery exhibitions, this coverage has produced the impression of a new star rising in the art world: that of machine-generated art. It has also led to the popularization of an ever-growing list of philosophical questions surrounding the use of computers for the creation of art. This brief article provides a pragmatic evaluation of the new genre of AI art from the perspective of art history. It attempts to show that most of the philosophical questions commonly cited as unique issues of AI art have been addressed before with respect to previous iterations of generative art starting in the late 1950s. In other words: while AI art has certainly produced novel and interesting works, from an art historical perspective it is not the revolution as which it is portrayed.

Objects made with 3-D printing can be lighter, stronger, and more complex than those produced through traditional manufacturing methods. But several technical challenges must be overcome before 3-D printing transforms the production of most devices. Commercially available printers generally offer only high speed, high precision, or high-quality materials. Rarely do they offer all three, limiting their usefulness as a manufacturing tool. Today, 3-D printing is used mainly for prototyping and low-volume production of specialized parts.

Spotted: Vienna has installed around 200 pedestrian crossing lights that can recognise when a person wants to cross the road. The system was commissioned by Municipal Department 33 of the City of Vienna and developed by a team at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Vision at TU Graz University. It is intended to replace the push-button system, and can adapt to give large groups and people with disabilities more time to cross. The system uses cameras mounted on the traffic light that have a large visual field. The research team used global movement models and recorded data to develop learning algorithms, which recognise when a pedestrian wants to cross the street.

Companies have to defend against all attacks, while the attackers only have to get through once. And it's about to get much, much worse. The same artificial intelligence technologies used to power speech recognition, self-driving cars, and "deep fake" videos have the potential to be turned to other uses, like creating viruses that morph faster than antivirus companies can keep up, phishing emails that are indistinguishable from real messages written by humans, and intelligently going after a data center's entire perimeter to find the smallest vulnerability and then use it to burrow in. "We already know that a skilled and determined human attacker is the most difficult to catch," said Ryan Shaw, co-founder at Bionic, a Washington, DC-based cybersecurity startup. "However, much like defenders, our adversaries have a scaling problem -- there is only so much time and skill to go around."

WASHINGTON - The Trump administration has moved ahead with a surveillance drone sale to four U.S. allies in the South China Sea region as acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said Washington will no longer "tiptoe" around Chinese behavior in Asia. The drones would afford greater intelligence gathering capabilities potentially curbing Chinese activity in the region. Shanahan did not directly name China when making accusations of "actors" destabilizing the region in a speech at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on Saturday but went on to say the United States would not ignore Chinese behavior. The Pentagon announced on Friday it would sell 34 ScanEagle drones, made by Boeing Co., to the governments of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam for a total of $47 million. China claims almost all of the strategic South China Sea and frequently lambastes the United States and its allies over naval operations near Chinese-occupied islands.

Apple is offering iPhone users a way to bypass Facebook's and Google's sign-in services when using new apps. That era actually ended quite some time ago. Remember when iPhones were tied to the desktop for updates? So when Apple confirmed Monday that its next desktop operating system upgrade would split up iTunes into three separate apps, for music, TV shows and movies and podcasts, it seemed like an afterthought. "It's a rounding error," something that should have been done a long time ago, says Gene Munster, an analyst and investor with Loup Ventures, iTunes "had gotten way too big."

Amid a slew of updates to iPhones, Macs and iPads, another tech giant took to the stage at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference to show off the latest version of Minecraft. Microsoft gave WWDC attendees a first look at the new Minecraft Earth augmented reality game, which takes after Pokémon Go to let users create immersive virtual environments in the real world. Thanks to Apple's ARKit, users can build 3D castles, fight off lifelike creepers that sneak up on them and feed virtual chickens through their iPhone. Microsoft first announced Minecraft Earth earlier this year, but the demo during WWDC on Monday marked the first in-depth look at the interactive game. Developers Lydia Winters and Saxs Persson from Mojang, Microsoft's game development studio, came onstage to show how Minecraft Earth works.

We consider optimization of composite objective functions, i.e., of the form $f(x)=g(h(x))$, where $h$ is a black-box derivative-free expensive-to-evaluate function with vector-valued outputs, and $g$ is a cheap-to-evaluate real-valued function. While these problems can be solved with standard Bayesian optimization, we propose a novel approach that exploits the composite structure of the objective function to substantially improve sampling efficiency. Our approach models $h$ using a multi-output Gaussian process and chooses where to sample using the expected improvement evaluated on the implied non-Gaussian posterior on $f$, which we call expected improvement for composite functions (\ei). Although \ei\ cannot be computed in closed form, we provide a novel stochastic gradient estimator that allows its efficient maximization. We also show that our approach is asymptotically consistent, i.e., that it recovers a globally optimal solution as sampling effort grows to infinity, generalizing previous convergence results for classical expected improvement. Numerical experiments show that our approach dramatically outperforms standard Bayesian optimization benchmarks, reducing simple regret by several orders of magnitude.

This paper concerns the problem of learning control policies for an unknown linear dynamical system to minimize a quadratic cost function. We present a method, based on convex optimization, that accomplishes this task robustly: i.e., we minimize the worst-case cost, accounting for system uncertainty given the observed data. The method balances exploitation and exploration, exciting the system in such a way so as to reduce uncertainty in the model parameters to which the worst-case cost is most sensitive. Numerical simulations and application to a hardware-in-the-loop servo-mechanism demonstrate the approach, with appreciable performance and robustness gains over alternative methods observed in both.