Amazon might face some political opposition in its bid to acquire iRobot. Democrats including Senator Elizabeth Warren and House Representatives Jesus Garcia, Pramila Jayapal, Mondaire Jones, Katie Porter and Mark Pocan have asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to oppose the purchase of the Roomba creator. The members of Congress pointed to Amazon's history of technology buyouts to support their case, arguing that the company snaps up competitors to eliminate them. Amazon killed sales of Kiva Systems' robots after the 2012 acquisition and used them exclusively in its warehouses, for instance. The 2017 and 2018 acquisitions of Blink and Ring reportedly helped Amazon dominate US video doorbell sales, while the internet retailer has also faced multiple accusations of abusing third-party seller data to launch rival products and promote them above others.

What's happened: Meta has unveiled an AI system that generates short videos based on text prompts. Make-A-Video lets you type in a string of words, like "A dog wearing a superhero outfit with a red cape flying through the sky," and then generates a five-second clip that, while pretty accurate, has the aesthetics of a trippy old home video. How it works: Meta combined data from three open-source image and video data sets to train its model. Standard text-image data sets of labeled still images helped the AI learn what objects are called and what they look like. And a database of videos helped it learn how those objects are supposed to move in the world. Why it matters: Although the effect is rather crude, the system offers an early glimpse of what's coming next for generative artificial intelligence, and it is the next obvious step from the text-to-image AI systems that have caused huge excitement this year.

"Star Wars" star Mark Hamill has been appointed as the ambassador of UNITED24, a fundraising platform supporting the "Army of Drones" project for the benefit of Ukraine. The 71-year-old veteran actor, famous for his role as Luke Skywalker in the galactic franchise, was introduced as the ambassador via an online call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy Thursday, according to CNN. The president reportedly "expressed his gratitude" toward Hamill, who had been actively showing his support to his home country, which was invaded by Russia earlier this year. "Mark, you have become the first ambassador to help Ukraine raise funds to support its defenders," Zelenskyy said. "For Ukrainians, this means a lot. As in'Star Wars,' good will triumph over evil, and light will overcome darkness. Hamill responded and said he was "honored" to have such a vital role in this "long and unequal fight" between Russia and Ukraine because the latter needed "continuous additional support." "I know for certain that Ukrainians need drones to protect their land, their freedom, and the values of the entire democratic world.

Every other day, my WhatsApp bursts with messages from friends in Brazil and abroad expressing equal parts of excitement and apprehension as Sunday's Brazilian presidential elections approach. On Wednesday, my best friend who lives in the country's capital, Brasília, texted to say she was scared of wearing red clothes to go vote this weekend because red is the color associated with the Worker's Party of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, the current front-runner, has a real, if slim, chance to beat far-right incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in the first round by getting more than 50 percent of valid votes. "The mood is terrible," she wrote, later adding that in the last 48 hours, four instances of political violence had been recorded across the country. My friend's worries are justified.

Location: Our offices are in London (Farringdon), with the ability to work from home for part of the week. The Ada Lovelace Institute is recruiting to the newly created position of Associate Director, Data & AI Law and Policy to join our senior leadership team and develop a comprehensive strategy for informing and influencing public policy, regulatory initiatives and legislative debates on data and AI policy and regulation, in the UK and beyond. In the past five years, AI and other tech regulation has become politically palatable, practically achievable and even commercially desirable in jurisdictions around the world. The year 2022 alone has seen a significant global uptick in proposals for the regulation of AI technologies, online markets, social media platforms and other digital technologies, such as the European Union Directive on AI liability, a forthcoming AI regulation whitepaper in the UK, and similar initiatives in jurisdictions such as Canada and Brazil. At the same time, data regulation is being reformed and iterated in the UK, EU and beyond.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to cause global disaster, but humans can take steps to prevent calamity, experts say. A new survey finds that more than a third of scientists doing AI research believe that the decisions made by AIs could trigger a debacle as bad or worse than nuclear war. The research highlights growing concern that AI could have unintended dangerous effects and produce many benefits. The way to stop computers from harming people? "Develop principles for safe and trustworthy AI," Michael Huth, the head of the Department of Computing at Imperial College London and a senior researcher at the AI company Xayn told Lifewire in an email interview. "This is already happening for deep learning applications, such image classifications, where one can verify, in principle, whether small input distortions can make the AI model misclassify a commercial airplane as an attacking fighter jet."

LONDON, Sept. 27, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to The Business Research Company's research report on the high energy lasers market, the emergence of artificial intelligence is gaining popularity among the high energy lasers industry trends. Many companies operating in the market are focused on developing AI-based products to get a competitive advantage. For instance, in April 2022, the US Navy successfully tested the Layered Laser Defense (LLD), a laser weapon designed and developed by Lockheed Martin, a US-based aerospace, arms, defense, information security, and technology company. This is the Layered Laser Defense (LLD). It can use a high-power laser to counter unmanned aerial systems and fast-attack boats, as well as track inbound air threats, support combat identification, and conduct battle damage assessments of engaged targets.

Air Recon DL's benefits extend to nearly all magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) clinical procedures. The platform covers all anatomies, enabling better image quality, shorter scan times and improved patient experience. GE Healthcare said in a news release that the solution's compatibility expands from 2D to 3D imaging sequences. This allows physicians to diagnose patients with an improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and sharpness. Meanwhile, it said the 3D imaging provides for more clinical efficiency by eliminating the need for multiple 2D acquisitions.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! For years, U.S. defense officials and Washington think-tankers alike have debated whether the future of our military could -- or should -- look a little less human. Already, the U.S. military has started to rely on technology that employs machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and big data -- raising ethical questions along the way. While these technologies have countless beneficial applications, ranging from threat assessment to preparing troops for battle, they rightfully evoke concerns about a future in which Terminator-like machines take over.

Within the context of topological data analysis, the problems of identifying topological significance and matching signals across datasets are important and useful inferential tasks in many applications. The limitation of existing solutions to these problems, however, is computational speed. In this paper, we harness the state-of-the-art for persistent homology computation by studying the problem of determining topological prevalence and cycle matching using a cohomological approach, which increases their feasibility and applicability to a wider variety of applications and contexts. We demonstrate this on a wide range of real-life, large-scale, and complex datasets. We extend existing notions of topological prevalence and cycle matching to include general non-Morse filtrations. This provides the most general and flexible state-of-the-art adaptation of topological signal identification and persistent cycle matching, which performs comparisons of orders of ten for thousands of sampled points in a matter of minutes on standard institutional HPC CPU facilities.