The most recent big iOS update, which makes it easier to opt out of ads that track you across apps and web sites, has sent the digital marketing industry into a bit of a tizzy. That includes Facebook, which has been telling users that tracking helps keep its services "free of charge." Facebook is doing just fine, and choosing to preserve your privacy is not going to result in an Instagram service fee. Elsewhere in social media privacy news, Twitter rolled out a so-called Tip Jar this week that lets you send money to your favorite users. But it failed to vet how PayPal handles payments, potentially exposing users' home or email addresses when they send or receive a tip.

Recent advances in Named Entity Recognition (NER) show that document-level contexts can significantly improve model performance. In many application scenarios, however, such contexts are not available. In this paper, we propose to find external contexts of a sentence by retrieving and selecting a set of semantically relevant texts through a search engine, with the original sentence as the query. We find empirically that the contextual representations computed on the retrieval-based input view, constructed through the concatenation of a sentence and its external contexts, can achieve significantly improved performance compared to the original input view based only on the sentence. Furthermore, we can improve the model performance of both input views by Cooperative Learning, a training method that encourages the two input views to produce similar contextual representations or output label distributions. Experiments show that our approach can achieve new state-of-the-art performance on 8 NER data sets across 5 domains.

A pervasive design issue of AI systems is their explainability--how to provide appropriate information to help users understand the AI. The technical field of explainable AI (XAI) has produced a rich toolbox of techniques. Designers are now tasked with the challenges of how to select the most suitable XAI techniques and translate them into UX solutions. Informed by our previous work studying design challenges around XAI UX, this work proposes a design process to tackle these challenges. We review our and related prior work to identify requirements that the process should fulfill, and accordingly, propose a Question-Driven Design Process that grounds the user needs, choices of XAI techniques, design, and evaluation of XAI UX all in the user questions. We provide a mapping guide between prototypical user questions and exemplars of XAI techniques to reframe the technical space of XAI, also serving as boundary objects to support collaboration between designers and AI engineers. We demonstrate it with a use case of designing XAI for healthcare adverse events prediction, and discuss lessons learned for tackling design challenges of AI systems.

Three-quarters of government decision-makers struggle to select the right artificial intelligence solutions for their projects, a new report found. Still, 61% of respondents to a KPGM survey said AI is moderately to fully functional in their organization, according to "Thriving in an AI World," a report the professional services firm released March 9. And in the next two years, respondents said they plan to use AI to improve process automation (48%) and analytics (40%). To determine the best AI solutions, agencies must first define their use case, said Rob Dwyer, KPMG advisory principal specializing in technology in government. Robotic process automation is a common entry point to AI in the public sector because vendors in that area are well established, and it's relatively easy to earn small wins that can drive support for other AI efforts, he said.

Jose Hernandez joins'Fox News Live' to discuss NASA's historic feat and Blue Origin's latest successful launch, return. NASA's Mars Ingenuity helicopter took off on its fifth test flight Friday, but it won't be returning to the Perseverance rover this time. The helicopter took flight around 3:30 p.m. ET from Wright Brothers Field, where it has performed its previous test flights, with the plan this time to head south 423 feet and land in a new area for the first time. Data from the light will transmit back to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory around 7:30 p.m. on Friday. NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter can be seen hovering over Jezero Crater.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby spoke with Noel Calhoun, CTO of Interos, an artificial intelligence supply chain solution, about AI in the supply chain. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Karen Roby: Noel, we're going to talk a little bit about AI today in our supply chain. You spent many years in the public and the private sectors, working with the CIA. When we talk about our supply chain, I mean, never before has the light been put on it as much as it is right now.

The Postal Service is rolling out artificial intelligence tools across 195 of its processing centers to give the agency greater visibility into the terabytes of data it already captures from incoming packages each day. USPS uses the algorithms to categorize packages and to troubleshoot anomalies with packages in its delivery network. AI algorithms can also cut the time to locate missing packages down from several days to a few hours. Todd Schimmel, USPS's manager of letter mail technology, oversaw the agency's partnership with NVIDIA to stand up its Edge Computing Infrastructure Program (ECIP). Each of the four edge servers that are part of the program handles 20 terabytes of package images.

The Biden administration announced Wednesday a new website dedicated to artificial intelligence, a place where people can stay up-to-date on the federal government's developments in artificial intelligence. This news comes as Dr. Peter Hershock from the East-West Center prepares for a virtual discussion on the subject Thursday. Dr. Peter Hershock is the director of the center's Asian Studies Development Program and recently released a book about artificial intelligence, "Buddhism and Intelligent Technology: Toward a More Humane Future." Hershock says our development of artificial intelligence will eventually lead to the ethical singularity, "a point at which evaluating competing value systems and conceptions of humane intelligence take on infinite value/significance." In his book, he looks back at historic schools of thought such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Socrates to find insight, to help navigate the conflicting values of artificial intelligence.

Surveillance cameras, like the one here in Boston, are used throughout Massachusetts. The state now regulates how police use facial recognition technology. Surveillance cameras, like the one here in Boston, are used throughout Massachusetts. The state now regulates how police use facial recognition technology. Massachusetts lawmakers passed one of the first state-wide restrictions of facial recognition as part of a sweeping police reform law.

For a couple of years, the EU Commission has worked on rules, regulations, and incentives around Artificial Intelligence. On April 21st, it released the long-awaited proposal for harmonized regulations on AI. The proposal to be adopted in national legislation is a far-reaching set of rules that will impact all organizations, at par and perhaps even more comprehensive, than GDPR. Understanding the basics of the new rules and the organizational impact is a requirement for all senior executives. An