Iran's top nuclear scientist woke up an hour before dawn, as he did most days, to study Islamic philosophy before his day began. That afternoon, he and his wife would leave their vacation home on the Caspian Sea and drive to their country house in Absard, a bucolic town east of Tehran, where they planned to spend the weekend. Iran's intelligence service had warned him of a possible assassination plot, but the scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, had brushed it off. Convinced that Fakhrizadeh was leading Iran's efforts to build a nuclear bomb, Israel had wanted to kill him for at least 14 years. But there had been so many threats and plots that he no longer paid them much attention. Despite his prominent position in Iran's military establishment, Fakhrizadeh wanted to live a normal life. And, disregarding the advice of his security team, he often drove his own car to Absard instead of having bodyguards drive him in an armored vehicle. It was a serious breach of security protocol, but he insisted. So shortly after noon on Friday, Nov. 27, he slipped behind the wheel of his black Nissan Teana sedan, his wife in the passenger seat beside him, and hit the road.

This morning Eleos Health, a company that uses AI-backed voice technology to gather insights into behavioral health, scored $6 million in seed funding. The funding news coincides with the company's announcement that Dr. David Shulkin, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, has joined the company's board. The Israeli company created a tool that uses voice AI capabilities to help mental health professionals analyze their patients. Clinicians can run the technology in the background of a mental health session. The system is then able to analyze the session based on "hundreds of data parameters" and in turn give clinicians more insights and information about the patient, and in turn help personalize care.

It is increasingly common to encounter prediction tasks in the biomedical sciences for which multiple datasets are available for model training. Common approaches such as pooling datasets and applying standard statistical learning methods can result in poor out-of-study prediction performance when datasets are heterogeneous. Theoretical and applied work has shown $\textit{multi-study ensembling}$ to be a viable alternative that leverages the variability across datasets in a manner that promotes model generalizability. Multi-study ensembling uses a two-stage $\textit{stacking}$ strategy which fits study-specific models and estimates ensemble weights separately. This approach ignores, however, the ensemble properties at the model-fitting stage, potentially resulting in a loss of efficiency. We therefore propose $\textit{optimal ensemble construction}$, an $\textit{all-in-one}$ approach to multi-study stacking whereby we jointly estimate ensemble weights as well as parameters associated with each study-specific model. We prove that limiting cases of our approach yield existing methods such as multi-study stacking and pooling datasets before model fitting. We propose an efficient block coordinate descent algorithm to optimize the proposed loss function. We compare our approach to standard methods by applying it to a multi-country COVID-19 dataset for baseline mortality prediction. We show that when little data is available for a country before the onset of the pandemic, leveraging data from other countries can substantially improve prediction accuracy. Importantly, our approach outperforms multi-study stacking and other standard methods in this application. We further characterize the method's performance in data-driven and other simulations. Our method remains competitive with or outperforms multi-study stacking and other earlier methods across a range of between-study heterogeneity levels.

The Commerce Department is actively recruiting candidates to serve on the government's newly-formed National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee, or NAIAC--where they'll inform President Joe Biden and agencies on issues raised by the emerging technology. At least nine members will serve up to two consecutive three-year terms on the committee, according to a recently released call for nominations. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is charged with providing administrative support to the high-level group. "The announcement was posted just over a week ago and we have already had a good deal of interest, with more than 65 submissions so far," NIST's Public Affairs Director Jennifer Huergo told Nextgov on Friday. AI is a complex technology that is increasingly prevalent in, and even shaping, many human lives.

Iran's top nuclear scientist woke up an hour before dawn, as he did most days. That afternoon, he and his wife would leave their vacation home on the Caspian Sea and drive to their country house in Absard, east of Tehran. Convinced that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was leading Iran's efforts to build a nuclear bomb, Israel had wanted to kill him for at least 14 years. Iran's intelligence had warned Fakhrizadeh of a possible assassination plot, but the scientist had brushed it off. So shortly after noon on November 27, he slipped behind the wheel of his black Nissan Teana sedan along with his wife and hit the road.

Like biologically based systems (left), complex emergent behaviors--which arise when separate components are merged together in a coordinated system--also result from neuromorphic networks made up of quantum-materials-based devices (right). Pandemic lockdown forces a new perspective on designs for futuristic AI-based computing devices. Isaac Newton's groundbreaking scientific productivity while isolated from the spread of bubonic plague is legendary. University of California San Diego physicists can now claim a stake in the annals of pandemic-driven science. A team of UC San Diego researchers and colleagues at Purdue University have now simulated the foundation of new types of artificial intelligence computing devices that mimic brain functions, an achievement that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.

The Russian government still has a strong influence on Telegram despite lifting a ban last year. RadioFreeEurope reports Telegram has temporarily blocked all of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's Telegram chat bots during voting in the country's parliamentary election this weekend. Company founder Pavel Durov said Telegram would obey an election law barring campaigning during elections, calling the law "legitimate." The move comes despite the nature of the bots and Durov's past statements. One of the bots, Smart Voting, was only meant to identify candidates that could unseat the dominant United Russia party, not just Navalny's Russia of the Future party.

Federal authorities will investigate a fiery car crash which killed two people in a Tesla in Florida last week. The National Transportation Safety Board announced on Twitter it would send three investigators to look into the operation of a Tesla Model 3 which left the road in Coral Gables and collided with a tree, and the fire that followed. "We always look especially closely at newer technology," said Peter Knudson, an NTSB spokesman. The crash occurred near a residential intersection. It was not immediately known if speed was a factor or if the car's automated driving system was activated.

Former DNC national press secretary Jose Aristimuno and Urban Reform president Charles Blain weigh in on'Fox News Live.' A botched drone strike in Kabul aimed at ISIS-K terrorists, but that the Pentagon admitted on Friday instead killed an aid worker and members of his family including seven children, is the latest furor to involve Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley -- who had called the strike "righteous" but on Friday described it as a "horrible tragedy." Head of the U.S. Central Command Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. announced Friday that it is unlikely any ISIS-K members were killed in a Kabul drone strike on Aug. 29, which led to multiple civilian casualties. GENERAL SAYS IT IS UNLIKELY ISIS-K MEMBERS KILLED IN AUGUST KABUL DRONE STRIKE: 'A TRAGIC MISTAKE' "We now assess that it is unlikely that the vehicle and those who died were associated with ISIS-K or a direct threat to US forces," McKenzie said of the airstrike at a briefing, following an investigation by the military. The drone strike, which was intended to target ISIS-K operatives, resulted in the deaths of an aid worker and up to nine of his family members, including seven children.

NASA wants to push the concept of Swarm intelligence to new heights. Swarms of drones have gotten a lot of time in the spotlight lately, mostly for their use in potential military operations. The U.S. military is testing out swarm operations in simulations, while the British Army is using live drones operating in swarms during actual training operations. Other militaries are also interested in deploying swarms. One of the biggest advantages a swarm of drones has when performing military operations is its resiliency.