When discussing artificial intelligence (AI), many accountants have asked the fundamental question: Will AI replace me and threaten my practice or the firm I work for? A variant of this question has existed since the beginning of the personal computer. For example, before AI, questions arose about whether computers would eliminate accountants. Here's the simple answer: AI will not eliminate you, but your role will change. Think about the impact of Intuit and Microsoft Excel on accounting.

In light of a pending national standard requiring breast density notification in mammography reports, an emerging artificial intelligence (AI) tool may help reduce subjectivity and variability in breast density assessments. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted 510(k) clearance for Saige-Density (DeepHealth/RadNet), an adjunctive AI software that provides automated categorization of breast density based on the American College of Radiology's Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) classification. DeepHealth said a retrospective, multicenter study showed a 91.5 percent alignment between Saige-Density assessment and consensus assessment of breast density by five specialists in breast imaging. The Saige-Density AI algorithm was trained on a racially diverse database of over 166,000 images from 30,000 mammography exams across the United States, according to DeepHealth. "Achieving FDA clearance for another important tool in the breast cancer screening process in such a short time frame highlights our aggressive commitment to bringing state-of-the art AI innovation to the breast screening mammography market," noted Gregory Sorenson, M.D., the CEO and co-founder of DeepHealth.

Nikunj Oza So yeah, so NASA Ames itself has a pretty broad range of work that it does. So there's work going on, for example, in life science, there's work going on things like the heat shields for space vehicles to ensure that on reentry, it does not get too hot. There's certainly significant work in aeronautics things like management of airspace, they are researching new approaches to allow the airspace to be better managed, as we have more and more air traffic not only from commercial vehicles, but from new entrants, like UAVs. So really, AI has quite a broad range of applications within all of these pretty much most of these systems, the engineered systems that we produce, and also natural systems that we study, such as the Earth and space through all the various sensors that we have, they produce a significant amount of data. And oftentimes, what we want to do is sort of reverse engineer those data, so to speak, I mean, we have some understanding of the processes that generate these data.

The recent flooding of social media feeds with AI-generated "portraits" derived from databases of artists' work has renewed conversation over data ownership and the potential power AI has to supplant livelihoods in the future. The 22 million individuals and counting who have already handed over their images to the Lensa application might be fine to receive the myriad of AI-illustrated images in exchange for their data. But the fundamental rights, principles, and freedoms users are giving up during this exchange remains largely unchecked. In Web3 technology circles, much promises have been made of decentralized technologies to open up the possibility for individual ownership and monetization of data, returning power to "creators." This reflects the political ethos held by Blockchain proponents like Etherum co-founder Joe Lubin, who ostensibly seek to supplant the existing power structures of finance through "permissionless" consensus-based transaction data structures.

The video game company Epic Games will pay a total of $520m in penalties and refunds to settle complaints involving children's privacy and methods that tricked players into making purchases, US federal regulators said on Monday. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that it had secured the record-breaking settlements for two cases from Epic Games, which makes the popular game Fortnite. "Epic used privacy-invasive default settings and deceptive interfaces that tricked Fortnite users, including teenagers and children," the FTC chair, Lina Khan, said in a statement. Epic Games agreed to pay a $275m fine for collecting personal information on Fortnite players under the age of 13 without informing their parents or getting their consent. It is the biggest penalty ever issued for breaking an FTC rule.

Disabled astronauts-in-training have completed a zero-gravity flight 25,000ft above Earth to help understand how spacesuits and space vessels can be made more accessible. The crew of 14, who have mobility, vision and hearing difficulties, experienced weightlessness and carried out a number of tests to see what could be done to improve accessibility. The group, who were from five different countries, including Australia, Brazil, Germany, Spain and the US, was made up of scientists, engineers and doctors. The groundbreaking trip, organised by AstroAccess, happened on a Zero-G aircraft in Houston, Texas on Thursday. Disabled astronauts-in-training have completed a zero-gravity flight 25,000ft above Earth to help understand how spacesuits and space vessels can be made more accessible.

Google on Monday announced a $1 million grant to IIT Madras to set up a multi-disciplinary centre for responsible artificial intelligence to study and research various aspects of bias in AI while focusing on the Indian context. The tech giant is also going to offer a similar amount to independent non-profit Wadhwani AI in order to develop AI models which will help monitor crop diseases, predict yield outcomes and bring efficiencies to Kisan call centers. By providing @WadhwaniAI with this grant, we are enabling them to improve farmer outcomes by providing information on crop disease risks, yield forecasts and much more.#GoogleForIndia At the Google for India 2022 event, the company also announced that it will contribute to the agri stack as defined by the government of India through a combination of AI and remote sensing to better manage the problems arising in agriculture. Manish Gupta, Director of Google Research India, told the Indian Express that the tech giant will use its AI models over satellite images to identify things like the location of farms and farm boundaries to better understand the agricultural landscape.

Ukraine's capital has been targeted by a wave of drone attacks by Russia's military that again struck "critical infrastructure". About 20 drones were deployed to Kyiv and the surrounding area early Monday, according to officials, with air defence systems destroying about 15 of the unmanned aerial vehicles. Air raid sirens blasted in the early morning before the sky was declared clear at 5:50am (07:50 GMT). The Kyiv city administration said on its Telegram account that a critical infrastructure point was hit, but did not provide further details. "The enemy is attacking the capital," the administration said.

Drones attacked the Ukrainian capital early Monday morning, the Kyiv city military administration said, urging people to heed air alerts. "The enemy is attacking the capital," the administration posted on Telegram. "At the moment, 9 enemy UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have already been shot down in the airspace of Kyiv." It added that the Russian forces were using barrage ammunition from "Shaheds", Iran-made weapons that have pummelled the capital in recent weeks. The city's civil administration announced an initial air alert at 1:56 am (2356 GMT) which lasted for just over three hours.

Metaheuristics are popularly used in various fields, and they have attracted much attention in the scientific and industrial communities. In recent years, the number of new metaheuristic names has been continuously growing. Generally, the inventors attribute the novelties of these new algorithms to inspirations from either biology, human behaviors, physics, or other phenomena. In addition, these new algorithms, compared against basic versions of other metaheuristics using classical benchmark problems without shift/rotation, show competitive performances. In this study, we exhaustively tabulate more than 500 metaheuristics. To comparatively evaluate the performance of the recent competitive variants and newly proposed metaheuristics, 11 newly proposed metaheuristics and 4 variants of established metaheuristics are comprehensively compared on the CEC2017 benchmark suite. In addition, whether these algorithms have a search bias to the center of the search space is investigated. The results show that the performance of the newly proposed EBCM (effective butterfly optimizer with covariance matrix adaptation) algorithm performs comparably to the 4 well performing variants of the established metaheuristics and possesses similar properties and behaviors, such as convergence, diversity, exploration and exploitation trade-offs, in many aspects. The performance of all 15 of the algorithms is likely to deteriorate due to certain transformations, while the 4 state-of-the-art metaheuristics are less affected by transformations such as the shifting of the global optimal point away from the center of the search space. It should be noted that, except EBCM, the other 10 new algorithms proposed mostly during 2019-2020 are inferior to the well performing 2017 variants of differential evolution and evolution strategy in terms of convergence speed and global search ability on CEC 2017 functions.