Responsible AI, Ethical AI, AI for social good -- I am sure you must have heard these terms at some point or the other, whether you are a Data Scientist or not. "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." And there my journey of understanding this critical aspect of the AI foundation started. I used to wonder how to relate ethics with AI which is just a series of algorithms, when, in fact, we have not been able to apply ethical behavior among ourselves. As per the AI index report published by the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered AI, cybersecurity and regulatory compliance are among the top risks identified by AI/ML-oriented organizations.

My wife and I were recently driving in Virginia, amazed yet again that the GPS technology on our phones could guide us through a thicket of highways, around road accidents and toward our precise destination. The artificial intelligence (AI) behind the soothing voice telling us where to turn has replaced passenger-seat navigators, maps, even traffic updates on the radio. How on earth did we survive before this technology arrived in our lives? We survived, of course, but were quite literally lost some of the time. My reverie was interrupted by a toll booth. It was empty, as were all the other booths at this particular toll plaza.

They have the sort of names that only teenage boys or aspiring Bond villains would dream up (REvil, Grief, Wizard Spider, Ragnar), they base themselves in countries that do not cooperate with international law enforcement and they don't care whether they attack a hospital or a multinational corporation. Ransomware gangs are suddenly everywhere, seemingly unstoppable – and very successful. In June, meat producer JBS, which supplies over a fifth of all the beef in the US, paid a £7.8m ransom to regain access to its computer systems. The same month, the US's largest national fuel pipeline, Colonial Pipeline, paid £3.1m to ransomware hackers after they locked the company's systems, causing days of fuel shortages and paralysing the east coast. "It was the hardest decision I've made in my 39 years in the energy industry," said a deflated-looking Colonial CEO Joseph Blount in an evidence session before Congress. In July, hackers attacked software firm Kaseya, demanding £50m.

Great (or terrifying) moments in deepfake history: The argument about whether a video of President Joe Biden talking to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House was real (it was). The Dutch, British and Latvian MPs convinced their Zoom conference with the chief of staff of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was a deepfake. A special effects expert who made their friend look exactly like Tom Cruise for a TikTok video ironically designed to alert people to the dangers of fake footage. Product placement being digitally added to old videos and movies, and Anthony Bourdain's recreated voice speaking in a documentary. A mother creating fake videos of the other members of her daughter's cheerleading squad behaving badly in an attempt to get them kicked off the team.

Artificial Intelligence or AI is the use of algorithms that simulates human behavior to perform cognitive functions. Use AI to solve problems through interaction, learning, visual perception, planning, reasoning, and natural language processing. Artificial Intelligence is a broad and generic term like any other computer software program which engages human-like processes. Thus, calling an application AI might be correct but will not cover its specifics. The most widely available notion about AI is emerging out of a sci-fi movie.

As the space race heats up, debris has become a burning issue. Since the beginning of the space age in the 1950s, thousands of satellites and rockets have been sent to space and are marooned there. The Union of Concerned Scientists Satellite database has listed more than 4,084 operational satellites currently orbiting the Earth. In 2010, this number was less than a thousand. In the distant future, this problem can extend to the lunar surface and the asteroid belt (the current count stands at 34,000 pieces of space junk bigger than 10 centimetres in size and millions of smaller pieces).

The development of artificial general intelligence is considered by many to be inevitable. What such intelligence does after becoming aware is not so certain. To that end, research suggests that the likelihood of artificial general intelligence becoming hostile to humans is significant enough to warrant inquiry into methods to limit such potential. Thus, containment of artificial general intelligence is a timely and meaningful research topic. While there is limited research exploring possible containment strategies, such work is bounded by the underlying field the strategies draw upon. Accordingly, we set out to construct an ontology to describe necessary elements in any future containment technology. Using existing academic literature, we developed a single domain ontology containing five levels, 32 codes, and 32 associated descriptors. Further, we constructed ontology diagrams to demonstrate intended relationships. We then identified humans, AGI, and the cyber world as novel agent objects necessary for future containment activities.

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Most AI vendors develop solutions that target broad use cases with large markets. This is because investors have shown they are only interested in a target market if it is worth several billion dollars. Therefore smaller markets have been excluded, and AI solution ideas designed for niche markets often die out and the companies behind them come to a standstill before they have the chance to see the light of day. Another side effect of the limited capital to build niche models is that AI vendors tend to build one model and market it to a large set of disparate users.

And in both cases, the end goal of their knowledge graphs is similar--to add value to the vast amount of data out there such that it can be utilised more meaningfully and intelligently in a real-world context, ultimately producing much smarter user experiences. "The need to fit products into tabular structures limits their ability to flex to real-world needs," Capco noted in its June 2020 publication "Knowledge Graphs: Building Smarter Financial Services". And by enabling linkages between data items that would have otherwise remained disparate and siloed off from each other, moreover, knowledge graphs could represent crucial technology for helping to solve some of the world's most pressing and complex data-related challenges. The singular, centralised nature of such control can also elicit many serious privacy concerns for users, as was the case with Facebook and its notorious data-harvesting activities with Cambridge Analytica prior to the 2016 US presidential election. The knowledge graph also allows supply-chain entities to "granularly define who has access to what data--i.e., data can be made fully public, shared with specific supply chain partners, or completely private".

Georgia Tech is a major partner in a new National Science Foundation (NSF) Artificial Intelligence Research Institute focused on adult learning in online education, it was announced today. Led by the Georgia Research Alliance, the National AI Institute for Adult Learning in Online Education (ALOE) is one of 11 new NSF institutes created as part of an investment totaling $220 million. The ALOE Institute will develop new AI theories and techniques for enhancing the quality of online education for lifelong learning and workforce development. According to some projections, about 100 million American workers will need to be reskilled or upskilled over the next decade. With the increase of AI and automation, said Co-Principal Investigator and Georgia Tech lead Professor Ashok Goel, many jobs will be redefined. "There will be some loss of jobs, but mostly we will see individuals needing to learn a new skill to get a new job or to advance their career," said Goel, a professor of computer science and human-centered computing in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing (IC) and the chief scientist with the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U).