Welcome to EURACTIV's Digital Brief, your weekly update on all things digital in the EU. You can subscribe to the newsletter here. With the Brits and the Dutch heading to the polls today, the big news of the week is the story that Facebook has removed around 80 pages spreading fake news or using tactics aimed at unfairly influencing the polls. The takedowns came following a discovery by the human rights group Avaaz, in which it uncovered far-right disinformation networks in France, UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and Poland, posting content that was viewed an estimated 533 million times over the past three months. EURACTIV Digital went to investigate further and paid Avaaz a visit at their recently opened'Citizens' War Room' in Brussels (pictured below).

At CES, LG announced that its 2019 ThinQ AI TVs would support Amazon Alexa, and now the voice assistant has arrived in 14 countries. On top of Google's Assistant, you'll be able to use it on any of the ThinQ AI 4K models including NanoCell and OLED models. If you own one, you'll be able to access numerous Alexa Skills, ask questions, control smart home devices and more, without needing an Echo or other Alexa devices as before As with any Alexa device, you can string together a series of commands using Alexa routines. For instance, you can get the traffic, weather and your agenda for the day by saying, "Alexa, start my morning." You can also listen to music, audio books and other content, and get all the latest Alexa updates and features.

Researchers from Samsung's AI Centre located in Moscow have created a new system that can transform still facial images into video sequences of the human face making speech expressions. According to the study, the system creates realistic virtual talking heads through applying the facial landmarks of a target face onto a source face -- for example, a still photo -- to allow the target face to control how the source face moves. "Such ability has practical applications for telepresence, including videoconferencing and multi-player games, as well as [the] special effects industry," Samsung said. While the existence of "deepfake" technology isn't something new, Samsung's new system does not use 3D modelling and only requires one photograph to create a face model. If the system is able to use 32 images to create a model, the system will be able to "achieve [a] perfect realism and personalisation score," Samsung said.

Disinformation and Fake News are hardly anything new but the power of both is increasing exponentially because of the power of social media. Websites like Twitter and Facebook serve up information, images and events based on what they know about our likes, dislikes and desires, thereby supporting our prejudices and undermining open and tolerant debate. But Fake News is yesterday's news. Deep Fakes is where Fake News might be moving next and Deep Fakes could be have a bigger impact and even harder to spot, address or undermine. Deep Fakes is the use of deep learning – a branch of machine learning or artificial intelligence – to marry digital images with fake or forged audio files.

Buzz about artificial intelligence has led to increased spending and put several Trump administration directives in motion, but only a handful of agencies have gotten into the early stages of AI adoption. However, a second wave of agencies may soon launch their own AI tools if they can overcome some common hurdles. The Professional Services Council Foundation, in a report released Wednesday, highlighted some of the challenges and opportunities agencies face in using AI to deliver on their mission. Looking across four agencies -- Defense Department, the General Services Administration, NASA and the Department of Health and Human Services -- the report highlights use cases where program offices have pioneered AI to reduce backlogs or increase the output of their existing workforce. "They've turned to AI to say, 'Are there routine decisions that we make on a regular basis that AI is now competent enough to handle in a way that we can delegate those decision processes to?'" Dominic Delmolino, the chief technology officer at Accenture Federal Services, said Wednesday at a briefing with reporters. Alan Chvotkin, the executive vice president and counsel at PSC, said contract obligations and AI-related investments grew almost 75% to nearly $700 million between fiscal 2016 and 2018.

Hundreds of millions of people across Europe are set to cast their vote over the coming days in the European elections, which run from Thursday to Sunday. Many of them will use an online "questionnaire", such as YourVoteMatters in the UK and several others elsewhere, to navigate through the complex world of European politics and find the party most closely aligned with their views. But what if there was an artificial intelligence that could tell you how to vote instead? "AI will be used when making lots of different decisions, whether it is dating or in business. Why would we not use it in elections?"

Deep learning is increasingly capable of assessing the emotion of human faces, looking across an image to estimate how happy or sad the people in it appear to be. What if this could be applied to television news, estimating the average emotion of all of the human faces seen on the news over the course of a week? While AI-based facial sentiment assessment is still very much an active area of research, an experiment using Google's cloud AI to analyze a week's worth of television news coverage from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive demonstrates that even within the limitations of today's tools, there is a lot of visual sentiment in television news. To better understand the facial emotion of television, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News and the morning and evening broadcasts of San Francisco affiliates KGO (ABC), KPIX (CBS), KNTV (NBC) and KQED (PBS) from April 15 to April 22, 2019, totaling 812 hours of television news, were analyzed using Google's Vision AI image understanding API with all of its features enabled, including facial detection. Facial detection is very different from facial recognition. It only counts that a human face is present in an image, it does not actually attempt to discern who that person is.

Artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Alan Turing infamously asked many years ago, "Can machines think?" Today, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy poses an equally provocative question: Can machines create? In his new book, "The Creativity Code: Art and Innovation in the Age of AI," du Sautoy explores the structural nature of creativity in human endeavors, and looks at areas where AI can have the most influence. "Creativity is a code that evolution across millions of years has honed inside our brains," du Sautoy writes. "Is our creativity in fact more algorithmic and rule-based than we might want to acknowledge? Can we hope to crack the creativity code?"

However, IoT is about data, not things!

WASHINGTON - The U.S. is considering cutting off the flow of vital American technology to five Chinese companies including Megvii, widening a dragnet beyond Huawei to include world leaders in video surveillance as it seeks to challenge China's treatment of minority Uighurs in the country's northwest. The U.S. is deliberating whether to add Megvii, Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co., Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. and two others to a blacklist that bars them from U.S. components or software, people familiar with the matter said. The two others under consideration are Meiya Pico and Iflytek Co. Ltd., according to one of the people. The Trump administration is concerned about their role in helping Beijing repress minority Uighurs, they said, asking not to be identified talking about private deliberations. There's concern also that Hikvision or Dahua's cameras, which come with facial-recognition capabilities, could be employed in espionage, the people said.