Republican Rep. Lance Gooden is concerned that AI could eventually replace human decision-making in government and other critical areas of society. The head of Britain's MI6 intelligence agency said artificial intelligence will not replace the need for human spies during a rare public speech in Prague Wednesday. Richard Moore, chief of the U.K.'s Secret Intelligence Service, spoke on the evolving threats to the West from Russia and Iran at the British Embassy in Prague on Wednesday. He also addressed the importance and necessity of the "human factor" despite rapidly evolving machine learning, according to the Associated Press. "AI is going to make information infinitely more accessible and some have asked whether it will put intelligence services like mine out of business," the spy chief said.

Nick Clegg has defended the release of an open-source artificial intelligence model by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta, as he claimed that "hype" about AI's dangers was running ahead of the technology's development. The president of global affairs at Meta and former UK deputy prime minister spoke on Wednesday after the company said it was opening access to its new large language model (LLM), Llama 2, which will be free for research and commercial use. LLMs are trained on vast amounts of data and underpin generative AI products such as the ChatGPT chatbot. Some experts have warned that making AI models open source – or freely available to use and adapt for unique purposes – could lead to the technology being used for malicious purposes. Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Clegg said: "My view is that the hype has somewhat run ahead of the technology. I think a lot of the existential warnings relate to models that don't currently exist, so-called super-intelligent, super-powerful AI models – the vision where AI develops an autonomy and agency on its own, where it can think for itself and reproduce itself. "The models that we're open-sourcing are far, far, far short of that.

WASHINGTON – On the final night of his visit to Washington in late June, after 15 standing ovations in Congress and an opulent White House dinner tailored to his vegetarian tastes, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi set time aside to court and be cheered by another important constituency: the Indian diaspora. Backstage at the Kennedy Center, as business leaders in bespoke suits and fine silk saris filtered into a 1,200-seat theater, Modi met with a handful of entrepreneurs. Most were young, educated in India, made rich in America, and eager to connect with the man who presents himself as a guru to the world, preaching how this is "the century of India." "Thank you for lifting the image and spirits of Indian Americans," Umesh Sachdev, 37, told the prime minister, explaining that he was the founder of Uniphore, an artificial intelligence business valued at $2.5 billion, with offices in India and California. Modi tapped Sachdev's shoulder and exclaimed "waah," or wow in Hindi.

Center for AI Safety Director Dan Hendrycks explains concerns about how the rapid growth of artificial intelligence could impact society. A 26-year-old self-made billionaire whose company is helping the Pentagon adopt artificial intelligence technology warned this week the Chinese government is spending three times as much as the U.S. government is to become the world's undisputed AI leader. "The country that is able to most rapidly and effectively integrate new technology into warfighting wins. If we don't win on AI, we risk ceding global influence, technology leadership and democracy to strategic adversaries like China," Alexandr Wang, CEO of Scale AI, told members of the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. "The Chinese Communist Party deeply understands the potential for AI to disrupt warfare and is investing to heavily capitalize on the opportunity," he said.

People in Texas sounded off on AI job displacement, with half of people who spoke to Fox News convinced that the tech will rob them of work. On a crisp autumn day in 1992, President George H.W. Bush's reelection campaign arrived at my hometown of Wixom, Michigan. Speaking from the rear of a train, President Bush deservedly extolled his achievement of cementing the end to the Cold War through his Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (SALT), which eased people's fear of nuclear war after an unnerving decades-long arms race. The nuclear narrative traces back to 1945 when J. Robert Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project yielded the world's first atomic bomb. It took more than a decade for the world to come together to create the International Atomic Energy Agency to address nuclear safety and security, but by that time, it was too late.

Russia launched overnight air attacks on Ukraine's south and east using drones and possibly ballistic missiles, Ukrainian officials said. The southern port of Odesa and the Mykolaiv, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhia and Dnipropetrovsk regions were under threat of Russian drone attacks. Ukraine's air force said it downed 31 out of 36 Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones, all six Kalibr cruise missiles and one reconnaissance drone launched by Russia overnight. Russia's defence ministry said it carried out overnight attacks on two Ukrainian port cities in what it called "a mass revenge strike", a day after an attack on the Crimean Bridge. The ministry said in a statement it struck Odesa and Mykolaiv and hit all targets.

The interest in exploring planetary bodies for scientific investigation and in-situ resource utilization is ever-rising. Yet, many sites of interest are inaccessible to state-of-the-art planetary exploration robots because of the robots' inability to traverse steep slopes, unstructured terrain, and loose soil. Additionally, current single-robot approaches only allow a limited exploration speed and a single set of skills. Here, we present a team of legged robots with complementary skills for exploration missions in challenging planetary analog environments. We equipped the robots with an efficient locomotion controller, a mapping pipeline for online and post-mission visualization, instance segmentation to highlight scientific targets, and scientific instruments for remote and in-situ investigation. Furthermore, we integrated a robotic arm on one of the robots to enable high-precision measurements. Legged robots can swiftly navigate representative terrains, such as granular slopes beyond 25 degrees, loose soil, and unstructured terrain, highlighting their advantages compared to wheeled rover systems. We successfully verified the approach in analog deployments at the BeyondGravity ExoMars rover testbed, in a quarry in Switzerland, and at the Space Resources Challenge in Luxembourg. Our results show that a team of legged robots with advanced locomotion, perception, and measurement skills, as well as task-level autonomy, can conduct successful, effective missions in a short time. Our approach enables the scientific exploration of planetary target sites that are currently out of human and robotic reach.

In this paper we propose a new model to represent human debates and methods to obtain collective conclusions from them. This model overcomes two drawbacks of existing approaches. First, our model does not assume that participants agree on the structure of the debate. It does this by allowing participants to express their opinion about all aspects of the debate. Second, our model does not assume that participants' opinions are rational, an assumption that significantly limits current approaches. Instead, we define a weaker notion of rationality that characterises coherent opinions, and we consider different scenarios based on the coherence of individual opinions and the level of consensus. We provide a formal analysis of different opinion aggregation functions that compute a collective decision based on the individual opinions and the debate structure. In particular, we demonstrate that aggregated opinions can be coherent even if there is a lack of consensus and individual opinions are not coherent. We conclude with an empirical evaluation demonstrating that collective opinions can be computed efficiently for real-sized debates.

We study Bayesian histograms for distribution estimation on $[0,1]^d$ under the Wasserstein $W_v, 1 \leq v < \infty$ distance in the i.i.d sampling regime. We newly show that when $d < 2v$, histograms possess a special \textit{memory efficiency} property, whereby in reference to the sample size $n$, order $n^{d/2v}$ bins are needed to obtain minimax rate optimality. This result holds for the posterior mean histogram and with respect to posterior contraction: under the class of Borel probability measures and some classes of smooth densities. The attained memory footprint overcomes existing minimax optimal procedures by a polynomial factor in $n$; for example an $n^{1 - d/2v}$ factor reduction in the footprint when compared to the empirical measure, a minimax estimator in the Borel probability measure class. Additionally constructing both the posterior mean histogram and the posterior itself can be done super--linearly in $n$. Due to the popularity of the $W_1,W_2$ metrics and the coverage provided by the $d < 2v$ case, our results are of most practical interest in the $(d=1,v =1,2), (d=2,v=2), (d=3,v=2)$ settings and we provide simulations demonstrating the theory in several of these instances.

Ubiquitous technologies, such as smartphones and wearables, are an integral part of our lives today [47, 90]. Their proliferation has given rise to Personal Informatics (PI), namely a class of systems that "help people collect personally relevant information for the purpose of self-reflection and gaining self-knowledge" [66]. Such systems enable people to keep track of their productivity [62], finances [60], and learning [45]. Yet, tracking various aspects of physical and mental health is particularly prevalent [33]. PI systems can continuously and unobtrusively measure and collect physiological and behavioral data, namely, "digital biomarkers", from users through integrated sensors. Digital biomarkers contain an uncanny amount of personal information. Even the coarser behavioral biomarkers acquired from consumer wearables (e.g., steps, calories) strongly correlate to a person's gender, height, and weight [61], while signals of finer granularity (e.g., accelerometer and heart rate), can predict variables associated with an individual's physical health, fitness, and demographics [89]. At the same time, consumer smartphones and wearables are now packed with an increasing number of advanced health tracking features, innovating in personal health, research, and care [7]. Flagship consumer wearable algorithms --some approved by the US Food and Drug Administration-- can now identify signs of atrial fibrillation (AFib) through electrocardiogram (ECG) or photoplethysmography (PPG) signals [37].