By Pavel Sharikov, for the EastWest Institute Artificial intelligence (AI) -- defined by John McCarthy, one of the doyens of AI, as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines" -- is slowly gaining relevance in the military domain. While commercial use of AI is widening, there are only three countries that are reported to be developing serious military AI technologies: the United States, China and Russia. AI promises a significant military advantage to a nation's offensive and defensive military capabilities.

Digital technologies are becoming ubiquitous, effective, and cost efficient, but are underutilized in medicine. These technologies -- like wearable health monitors, sensors, and even ingestible devices that can measure everything from how many steps you take, to blood pressure, and how a drug interacts with your body once ingested -- have the potential to disrupt every aspect of health care, including high-stakes, high-cost drug development. Specifically, these devices can revolutionize the antiquated process of developing new drug therapies and can vastly improve how we collect, measure, and assess health data so that we can offer new treatments to patients without wasting valuable time and limited resources. Clinical trials are designed to evaluate whether a new drug is safe and effective while protecting volunteer patients participating in the trials from risk. All good intentions, but some of today's research processes date back to 1946. New and proven digital technologies can make drug development smarter, better, and faster.

On Tuesday, news broke that Microsoft refused to sell its facial recognition software to law enforcement in California and an unnamed country. The move led to some praise for the company for being consistent with its policy to oppose questionable human rights applications, but a broader examination of Microsoft's actions in the past year indicates that the company has been saying one thing and doing another. Last week, the Financial Times reported that Microsoft Research Asia worked with a university associated with the Chinese military on facial recognition tech that is being used to monitor the nation's population of Uighur Muslims. Up to 500,000 members of the group, primarily in western China, were monitored over the course of a month, according to a New York Times report. Microsoft defended the work as helpful to advance the technology, but U.S. Senator Marco Rubio called the company complicit in human rights abuses.

If you've ever wondered what a loaf of bread would look like as a cat, edges2cats is for you. The program that turns sketches into images of cats is one of many whimsical creations inspired by Phillip Isola's image-to-image translation software released in the early days of generative adversarial networks, or GANs. In a 2016 paper, Isola and his colleagues showed how a new type of GAN could transform a hand-drawn shoe into its fashion-photo equivalent, or turn an aerial photo into a grayscale map. Later, the researchers showed how landscape photos could be reimagined in the impressionist brushstrokes of Monet or Van Gogh. Now an assistant professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Isola continues to explore what GANs can do.

SEO is currently changing and shifting thanks to things like Artificial Intelligence and voice searches. Do these changes mean that SEO is dead? This is a highly controversial topic which brings up lots of questions like privacy issues to accurately finding results compared to search. Or is it just changing, the same way it's changed many times already? There are some issues that we'll have to delve into in more depth in order to discuss this question, and by the end of it, you should have a better idea of where SEO is heading and how to adapt and which changes are most significant.

WHEN I was growing up, nobody promised me a flying car. But I was promised an AI apocalypse. Those shiny machines were going to crush our skulls underfoot, and we were all going to welcome our new robot overlords. Many people still seem to think it is likely to happen. But we might still get a deadly AI nightmare.

Deepfakes are video manipulations that can make people say seemingly strange things. Barack Obama and Nicolas Cage have been featured in these videos. SAN FRANCISCO – When a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – one altered to show the Democratic leader slurring her words – began making the rounds on Facebook last week, the social network didn't take it down. Instead, it "downranked" the video, a behind-the-scenes move intended to limit its spread. That outraged some people who believe Facebook should do more to clamp down on misinformation.

The invention of religion is a big bang in human history. Gods and spirits helped explain the unexplainable, and religious belief gave meaning and purpose to people struggling to survive. But what if everything we thought we knew about religion was wrong? What if belief in the supernatural is window dressing on what really matters--elaborate rituals that foster group cohesion, creating personal bonds that people are willing to die for. Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse thinks too much talk about religion is based on loose conjecture and simplistic explanations. Whitehouse directs the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. For years he's been collaborating with scholars around the world to build a massive body of data that grounds the study of religion in science. Whitehouse draws on an array of disciplines--archeology, ethnography, history, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science--to construct a profile of religious practices. Whitehouse's fascination with religion goes back to his own groundbreaking field study of traditional beliefs in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s.

An Upstate New York school district will turn on its controversial automated surveillance software that can detect guns and identify faces on June 3, 2019. Lockport City School District was the first in the nation to install the enhanced Aegis camera system in its schools back in October 2018 and will now begin testing it. The security system is intended to become broadly operational across the district's high school, middle school and six elementary schools by September 1, 2019. The Aegis surveillance system can identify guns in the video footage it records and cross-reference people's faces against its security databases. The controversial development has attracted pushback from local parents, privacy advocates and some legislators, who say it could invade students' privacy. Each client who installs the system is able to choose which information is loaded into its database.

Thank you, Alexander [Campbell] for the introduction. Thanks also to Genevieve Furtado and the other conference organizers for the invitation to speak here today, at the 19th Annual Operational Risk North America Conference. I understand that this is the Champagne Keynote address. Given that title, I feel obligated as an economist to share with you the reported last words of John Maynard Keynes – the father of modern macroeconomics: "I should have drunk more champagne." I hope my words here today do not inspire a similar sentiment. And finally, I must remind you that the views that I express today are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission or its staff.[1] My remarks this afternoon will center on a technology topic that is encroaching on many aspects of our lives and increasingly so within financial markets: Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps better known by its two-letter acronym "AI," artificial intelligence has been the fodder of science fiction writing for decades. But the technology underlying AI research has recently found applications in the financial sector – in a movement that falls under the banner of "Fintech."