The U.S. Defense Department is creating a new position to oversee its digital and artificial intelligence activities, with the hope the office will be able to drive faster progress in those areas and meet threats posed by China, according to a senior defense official. The new chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, or CDAO, will directly report to the deputy defense secretary and oversee the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the Defense Digital Service and the DoD's chief data officer, according to a memo released Dec. 8. Today, those offices directly report to the deputy defense secretary, something the senior defense official said has led to disjointedness. "We've created the CDO, the JAIC and DDS each operating independently and as if the other ones don't exist," said the officer, who briefed media Dec. 8 on the condition of anonymity. "That causes two kinds of inefficiencies. One, it means we don't have the kind of integration across their lines of effort that we could really maximize the impact of the things that any one organization is doing. Two, it means we don't take advantage of when there are overlaps in what they're doing, or underlaps in what they are doing to drive the right kind of prioritization in these spaces."

Not a day passes without a fascinating snippet on the ethical challenges created by "black box" artificial intelligence systems. These use machine learning to figure out patterns within data and make decisions – often without a human giving them any moral basis for how to do it. Classics of the genre are the credit cards accused of awarding bigger loans to men than women, based simply on which gender got the best credit terms in the past. Or the recruitment AIs that discovered the most accurate tool for candidate selection was to find CVs containing the phrase "field hockey" or the first name "Jared". More seriously, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently combined with Henry Kissinger to publish The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, a book warning of the dangers of machine-learning AI systems so fast that they could react to hypersonic missiles by firing nuclear weapons before any human got into the decision-making process. In fact, autonomous AI-powered weapons systems are already on sale and may in fact have been used.

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up SenseTime Group has postponed its $767m Hong Kong initial public offering (IPO) after being placed on a US investment blacklist. SenseTime said it remained committed to completing the offering and would publish a supplemental prospectus and an updated listing timetable. Reuters first reported earlier on Monday the company's plan to withdraw the offering and update its prospectus to include the potential impact of the US investment ban, with the aim of relaunching the IPO process. SenseTime had planned to sell 1.5 billion shares in a price range of HK$3.85 ($0.49) to HK$3.99 ($0.51), according to its regulatory filings. That would raise up to $767m, a figure that had already been trimmed earlier this year from a $2bn target.

SenseTime, whose products are used in smart cities, police surveillance and autonomous driving, had planned to raise as much as $767 million in an initial share sale on the Hong Kong stock exchange this month. On Friday, the U.S. Treasury Department named SenseTime among 25 individuals and entities that it said were connected to "human rights abuse and repression in several countries around the globe," and added it to a list of companies that it says are supporting China's military. U.S. authorities cited the use of SenseTime's facial-recognition technology in China's effort to suppress and assimilate mainly Muslim ethnic minorities in western China. The designation prevents Americans from investing in the company. On Saturday, SenseTime said the accusation was baseless and reflected "a fundamental misunderstanding of our company."

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up SenseTime said Monday it was postponing a planned $767 million initial public offering in Hong Kong after it was blacklisted by the US over human rights concerns in Xinjiang. The US Treasury announced the ban on Friday, saying SenseTime's facial recognition programmes were designed in part to be used against Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang where UN experts and researchers estimate more than one million have been incarcerated in prison camps. The blacklisting immediately cast a shadow over the company's upcoming IPO plans in Hong Kong, which had been due to take place a week later and illustrated the risks investors face from competing sanctions rules as relations between the world's two biggest economies have soured. On Monday, SenseTime filed a statement with the Hong Kong stock exchange saying it would postpone its listing "to safeguard the interests of the potential investors" as they weigh the impact of being placed on the blacklist. SenseTime said it "remains committed" to listing in Hong Kong soon and would fully refund those who had already invested.

The classic win-win has a key flaw in that it cannot offer the parties the right amounts of winning because each party believes they are winners. In reality, one party may win more than the other. This strategy is not limited to a single product or negotiation; it may be applied to a variety of situations in life. We present a novel way to measure the win-win situation in this paper. The proposed method employs Fuzzy logic to create a mathematical model that aids negotiators in quantifying their winning percentages. The model is put to the test on real-life negotiations scenarios such as the Iranian uranium enrichment negotiations, the Iraqi-Jordanian oil deal, and the iron ore negotiation (2005-2009). The presented model has shown to be a useful tool in practice and can be easily generalized to be utilized in other domains as well.

Abstract: In August of 2021, the Santa Fe Institute hosted a workshop on collective intelligence as part of its Foundations of Intelligence project. This project seeks to advance the field of artificial intelligence by promoting interdisciplinary research on the nature of intelligence. The workshop brought together computer scientists, biologists, philosophers, social scientists, and others to share their insights about how intelligence can emerge from interactions among multiple agents--whether those agents be machines, animals, or human beings. In this report, we summarize each of the talks and the subsequent discussions. We also draw out a number of key themes and identify important frontiers for future research. When building intelligent systems, the need to employ complex systems comprising a large number of more basic components seems inescapable. Brains are composed of billions of neurons, and digital computers are composed of billions of transistors. It is the myriad ...

Artificial Intelligence (AI), highly rated among the most disruptive technologies, is a great means for startups to achieve their growth targets. With a number of applications in big data, computer vision, natural language processing, etc, AI is revolutionizing businesses, industries and lives. AI, the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks carried out by humans, is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. Startups now attract the attention of several investors across the globe – In Europe, North America, Asia, and Africa. Some (co)founded by Nigerians include Cloud Minds, 4paradigm Intelia, Spear Lab, Ceretronics Technology, and Aide Solutions. Chopwork, the latest addition to Nigeria's e-market sector, is an AI-powered digital market platform created for sellers and buyers of digital products and services.

While discussions about AI often center around the technology's commercial potential, increasingly, researchers are investigating ways that AI can be harnessed to drive societal change. Among others, Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and Google Brain cofounder Andrew Ng have argued that mitigating climate change and promoting energy efficiency are preeminent challenges for AI researchers. Along this vein, researchers at the Montreal AI Ethics Institute have proposed a framework designed to quantify the social impact of AI through techniques like compute-efficient machine learning. An IBM project delivers farm cultivation recommendations from digital farm "twins" that simulate the future soil conditions of real-world crops. Other researchers are using AI-generated images to help visualize climate change, and nonprofits like WattTime are working to reduce households' carbon footprint by automating when electric vehicles, thermostats, and appliances are active based on where renewable energy is available.

My name is Amena Khatun, and I currently live in Australia with my partner and our son. I am working as a'Postdoctoral Fellow' at Queensland University and Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia. My research interest is computer vision, deep learning, person re-identification, and security surveillance. In February 2017, my Ph.D. journey started in computer vision and deep learning at QUT. I am so thankful for the Australian Government RTP Scholarship, QUT HDR tuition Fees Sponsorship, and QUT Top-up Scholarship.