Through decades of support, Microsoft was an instrumental force helping China become the AI powerhouse it is today. Now, as the very thought of a U.S. company partnering in tech projects in China draws scrutiny from lawmakers, national security hawks, and human rights advocates, Microsoft could be forced to grapple with tough decisions surrounding the thriving AI ecosystem it fostered there. Microsoft established its research lab in Beijing in 1998, when it was a pioneer paving the way for AI research and business collaborations between the U.S. and China. It was three years before China joined the World Trade Organization, a time when President Bill Clinton actively pushed for closer trade ties with the country, and when AI was mostly the stuff of sci-fi pipe dreams. Since then, Microsoft Research Asia, or MSRA, has been known as one of the most influential hubs of AI research in the world, advancing speech recognition, natural language and image processing, and other deep-learning work, spreading its discoveries far and wide. Elements of research conducted at MSR China have been used to build Microsoft's advertising, chatbots, Bing search, Windows, Xbox, Azure Cloud, and other products used everywhere.

New Yorkers are used to ads dotting the landscape, but now they can't even look to the skies for refuge. As Gothamist reports, mobile developer King and show organizer Pixis are flying a swarm of at least 500 LED-equipped drones over New York City's skyline on November 3rd to advertise Candy Crush. They'll take off from and remain in New Jersey for the 10-minute presentation, but you'll spot them if you're within a one-mile radius of Battery Park. This isn't the first drone light show aimed at NYC. In June, Pixis orchestrated a swarm that promoted the NBA draft by flying over the Hudson River.

For the last several years, Google has been using artificial intelligence to develop a system that can predict floods. It has also been working on wildfire tracking tools. Ahead of the COP27 climate conference taking place next week, the company announced that it is expanding those tools. First, Google says it will offer flood forecasts for river basins in another 18 countries. Those are Brazil, Colombia, Sri Lanka, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Guinea, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Angola, South Sudan, Namibia, Liberia and South Africa. The company previously offered flood warnings to users in India and Bangaldesh with alerts on Android devices and phones that have the Google Search app installed.

Artificial intelligence has found disparities in the amount of airtime women and men were given on CNN, FOX News and MSNBC - females had a 10 percent less chance of speaking during political discussions because male speakers constantly interrupted them. The discovery was made by researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology who analyzed 625,409 dialogues hosted on the three news cable networks from January 2000 through July 2021. The technology revealed women received an average of 72.8 words per chance to speak compared to 81.4 for male speakers and women were interrupted 39.4 percent of the time during discussions - this is compared to the 35.9 percent of the time for men. The team believes their AI could be used during talk shows, interviews and political debates to identify a serial interrupter in real-time, but the study also reinforces previous research that found men interrupt women more to show their dominance. AI analyzed thousands of dialogues from news segments on the three networks and found woman are given a 10 percent less chance at speaking because men interrupt them.

Until now, the borderless, open-source software movement that has helped bring together AI developers and tech from the U.S. and China has risen above geopolitical tensions. Could national security crackdowns tear it apart? When Ben Wu, an engineer in China, wanted to install Facebook's open-source AI framework PyTorch in 2017, he visited its online community on GitHub and asked for some pointers. Soumith Chintala, a Facebook AI research engineer based in New York, showed him how he could download it quickly. PyTorch has become a foundational component of AI technology, thanks in large part to knowledge-sharing exchanges like the one between Wu and Chintala that happen every day.

From chemicals to energy, artificial intelligence (AI) is already showing just how far it can help achieve global sustainability targets across different industrial sectors. One example is Petroliam Nasional Berhad (PETRONAS), has committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. For the Malaysian oil and gas multinational, plant reliability is key to achieving its sustainability goals. PETRONAS identified that early insight into impending equipment failure would enable plant operators to fix equipment proactively before small issues become bigger problems. Proof of concept came via a pilot project in their corporate cloud on Microsoft Azure at four upstream and two downstream units.

'Putin's Playbook' author Rebekah Koffler and former U.S. State Department Deputy Special Envoy Ellie Cohanim react to reports that Russia is seeking Iranian missiles. Two weeks ago, the co-founder of a think tank affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Defense, Ruslan Pukhov, accidentally admitted on Russian TV what Moscow has been denying for several weeks – Russian forces are using Iranian drones to bombard Ukrainian cities, killing civilians. Implicitly criticizing the Russian authorities for being secretive about the deal, Pukhov compared the topic of Iranian drones with a body part. "There's an a** but you can't use the word," he said, adding "we all know they are Iranian, but the powers that be don't acknowledge it." Drones, in fact, are not the only type of military assistance that the Ayatollahs are handing to Putin as Iran emerges as the principal backer of Putin's savage war on Ukraine.

Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin provides insight on responding to drone attacks in Ukraine on "America Reports." The Paris-based dissident organization National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) accused the Iranian regime of furnishing Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's army with more than 3,500 drones for his scorched-earth war against Ukraine. According to reports from the social network of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) inside the Islamic Republic, "Iran's UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] sale contract to Russia includes various offensive drones, including Shahed-129, Mohajer-6 and suicide drones Shahed-136 and Shahed-131." MEK is part of the National Council of Resistance of Iran umbrella organization. The NCRI dossier states, "Tehran has sold more than 3,500 UAVs to Russia. Most of these were made at the factories of the Ministry of Defense, with others produced by the factories of the Iranian Aviation and Space Industries Association (IASIA)."

When Ben Wu, an engineer in China, wanted to install Facebook's open-source AI framework PyTorch in 2017, he visited its online community on GitHub and asked for some pointers. Soumith Chintala, a Facebook AI research engineer based in New York, showed him how he could download it quickly. PyTorch has become a foundational component of AI technology, thanks in large part to knowledge-sharing exchanges like the one between Wu and Chintala that happen every day. And although it's become increasingly corporatized, the borderless, open-source software movement has risen above geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S., which have centered on concerns over China's use of AI to carry out repressive surveillance, its plans to transfer civilian tech for military applications, and Chinese government espionage and intellectual property theft. "I'm definitely surprised at how much [of the] general global considerations you would have from a business angle don't really come in when you're talking about open-source collaboration, especially with AI," Chintala told Protocol in September when Facebook parent company Meta handed over PyTorch to the nonprofit open-source software consortium Linux Foundation.

If you grew up in a covered 12-foot hole in the Earth, and only had a laptop running the latest version of the Stable Diffusion AI image generator, then you would believe that there was no such thing as a woman engineer. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that women are massively underrepresented in the engineering field, but averages from 2018 show that women make up around a fifth of people in engineering professions. But if you use Stable Diffusion to display an "engineer" all of them are men. If Stable Diffusion matched reality, then out of nine images based on a prompt "engineer," 1.8 of those images should display women. Artificial intelligence researcher for Hugging Face, Sasha Luccioni, created a simple tool that offers perhaps the most effective way to show biases in the machine learning model that creates images. The Stable Diffusion Explorer shows what the AI image generator thinks is an "ambitious CEO" versus a "supportive CEO."