It has been more than five months since the United States sanctioned the Israeli spyware company NSO Group, and stories about the use and abuse of its Pegasus product continue to break. As various organisations try to push for further measures against Israel for supplying human rights abusers with this tool to further their violations, it is important to remember that Israeli military and surveillance technology is first developed for and tested on Palestinians, before being exported. Unsurprisingly, Pegasus has already been found on the phones of six Palestinian human rights activists, one of whom is now suing NSO in France. Another target happened to be my friend and colleague whose field of work is directly connected to the relationship between Palestine and the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. The thought that the Israelis have had full access to our personal conversations and exchanges in group chats has been quite disturbing, to say the least. However, this is not the first time Israel has violated my privacy and it won't be the last.

The robot seen here can't see the human arm during the entire dressing process, yet it manages to successfully get a jacket sleeve pulled onto the arm. Robots are already adept at certain things, such as lifting objects that are too heavy or cumbersome for people to manage. Another application they're well suited for is the precision assembly of items like watches that have large numbers of tiny parts -- some so small they can barely be seen with the naked eye. "Much harder are tasks that require situational awareness, involving almost instantaneous adaptations to changing circumstances in the environment," explains Theodoros Stouraitis, a visiting scientist in the Interactive Robotics Group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "Things become even more complicated when a robot has to interact with a human and work together to safely and successfully complete a task," adds Shen Li, a PhD candidate in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Li and Stouraitis -- along with Michael Gienger of the Honda Research Institute Europe, Professor Sethu Vijayakumar of the University of Edinburgh, and Professor Julie A. Shah of MIT, who directs the Interactive Robotics Group -- have selected a problem that offers, quite literally, an armful of challenges: designing a robot that can help people get dressed.

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, in its final report to Congress and the Biden administration last year, warned artificial intelligence will soon become "weapons of first resort in future conflicts." That warning, as well as the commission's recommendation for the federal government to increase spending on basic research and development, remains urgent for the U.S. to remain AI-ready in the coming years, even though the commission no longer remains. The commission disbanded in October 2021, but many of its leading experts have shifted to a private-sector entity, the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP). The name stems from the Rockefeller Special Studies Project, launched in 1956 by Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger following the Soviet Union's launch of the satellite Sputnik. SCSP chief executive officer Ylli Bajraktari, NSCAI's former executive director, said Rockefeller and Kissinger saw their project as a way for the U.S. to further define its national objectives when it came to defense, security and foreign policy. "This is not the first time that we're seeing technology playing a critical role in great power competition," Bajraktari said.

Charles Simon, BSEE, MSCs, is the founder and CEO of FutureAI. Most of us interact with artificial intelligence (AI) on a daily basis, whether we realize it or not. Every time you ask Alexa or Siri a question or turn to Google to settle a bar bet on who owns the National Football League's record for most career touchdowns (the answer, by the way, is Jerry Rice), you're using AI. In the business world, AI is ubiquitous. From AI bots that can identify, evaluate, and make recommendations for streamlining business processes to cybersecurity systems that continuously monitor data input patterns in order to thwart cyberattacks, AI repeatedly has demonstrated its capacity for processing and analyzing reams of data faster and more accurately than a human ever could.

High-Performance Computing (HPC) centers and cloud providers support an increasingly diverse set of applications on heterogenous hardware. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) workloads have become an increasingly larger share of the compute workloads, new approaches to optimized resource usage, allocation, and deployment of new AI frameworks are needed. By identifying compute workloads and their utilization characteristics, HPC systems may be able to better match available resources with the application demand. By leveraging datacenter instrumentation, it may be possible to develop AI-based approaches that can identify workloads and provide feedback to researchers and datacenter operators for improving operational efficiency. To enable this research, we released the MIT Supercloud Dataset, which provides detailed monitoring logs from the MIT Supercloud cluster. This dataset includes CPU and GPU usage by jobs, memory usage, and file system logs. In this paper, we present a workload classification challenge based on this dataset. We introduce a labelled dataset that can be used to develop new approaches to workload classification and present initial results based on existing approaches. The goal of this challenge is to foster algorithmic innovations in the analysis of compute workloads that can achieve higher accuracy than existing methods. Data and code will be made publicly available via the Datacenter Challenge website : https://dcc.mit.edu.

If you've ever found yourself starting to shout during a video call on Zoom, it might be because your display is blurry, a new study suggests. Researchers asked pairs of individuals to have unscripted conversations over a video call, while degrading the visual quality over several steps. Participants spoke louder and changed their gestures to compensate for poor visual quality, the experts found, although it's uncertain why. It may be that we associate not being able to see someone clearly with them being far way, so we subconsciously try to compensate by shouting. Humans use hand gestures when it's hard for others to hear us, but we also speak louder when it's hard for people to see us, report experts at Radboud University, the Netherlands It's already known that humans use hand gestures in conversation to compensate for when it's hard for people to hear us.

The United States said Tuesday it has "credible information" that Russia may use "chemical agents" in its offensive to take the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol, reigniting concerns about the use of such prohibited weapons. While the West and Kyiv have been warning Moscow since the start of its invasion on February 24 against any use of chemical weapons, fears have grown this week after unconfirmed reports emerged that such weapons may have already been deployed. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said Tuesday that it was "concerned" by allegations that chemical weapons had been used in Mariupol, a strategic port city besieged by Russian forces in the east of Ukraine and the scene of heavy fighting. The OPCW, to which both Russia and Ukraine belong, referred to "accusations leveled by both sides around possible misuse of toxic chemicals." The Ukrainian Azov battalion, which is engaged in the defense of Mariupol, said Monday that a Russian drone had dropped a "poisonous substance" on soldiers and civilians in Mariupol.

BUCHA, Ukraine--Searching for evidence in the killings of hundreds of people by Russian troops here, Ukrainian prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko unlocked the double doors leading to a boiler room on the south side of town. The space had been used as an office by the occupying forces. Two weeks after Russia's retreat from areas around the Ukrainian capital, local and national authorities are embarking on a wide-ranging probe of alleged war crimes with the aim of building cases strong enough to persuade an international court to hold the Kremlin and its soldiers responsible.

We're on the cusp of a giant upheaval to the ways we pay for things. Cash is on the way out, and the digital technologies set to replace it could transform the very nature of money. Today, central-bank money serves at once as a unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of value. But newer technologies, including cryptocurrencies, could separate those functions out. That shift could weaken the dominance of central banks and set off another wave of currency competition, one that could have lasting consequences for many countries.

Artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Sandra Wachter says that although the House of Lords inquiry into police technology "was a great step in the right direction" and succeeded in highlighting the major concerns around police AI and algorithms, the conflict of interest between criminal justice bodies and their suppliers could still hold back meaningful change. Wachter, who was invited to the inquiry as an expert witness, is an associate professor and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute who specialises in the law and ethics of AI. Speaking with Computer Weekly, Wachter said she is hopeful that at least some of the recommendations will be taken forward into legislation, but is worried about the impact of AI suppliers' hostility to transparency and openness. "I am worried about it mainly from the perspective of intellectual property and trade secrets," she said. "There is an unwillingness or hesitation in the private sector to be completely open about what is actually going on for various reasons, and I think that might be a barrier to implementing the inquiry's recommendations."