Nadya Bliss is the Executive Director of the Global Security Initiative at Arizona State University. In that capacity, she leads a pan-university organization advancing research, education, and other programming in support of national and global security. She has proven expertise in growing mission-focused research organizations; deep knowledge of the technology transition pipeline; and significant experience identifying advanced research capabilities to address mission needs with almost two decades specifically in defense and security sectors. Dr. Bliss is actively involved in national service, including currently as an Executive Committee member of the Computing Community Consortium and the Vice Chair of the DARPA ISAT (Information Science and Technology) study group.

Anja Kaspersen is a senior fellow at Carnegie Council. She is the former director of the United Nations for Disarmament Affairs in Geneva and deputy secretary general of the Conference on Disarmament. Previously, she held the role as the head of strategic engagement and new technologies at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Prior to joining the ICRC she served as a senior director for geopolitics and international security and a member of the executive committee at the World Economic Forum. Kaspersen is a Norwegian diplomat, former businessperson and academic.

A photograph of the sky by Trevor Paglen can look like a massive abstraction, except for a tiny speck, a surveillance drone, spotted like a malignant dot on a chest x-ray. His images of secluded military sites in Nevada can also ooze with colour from the churning heat and dust. In the new documentary film Unseen Skies, directed by Yaara Bou Melhem, Paglen calls the effect "impressionistic haze". Photographing those places, often from miles away (or farther), is about "seeing and not seeing at the same time," Paglen says. "For me those images were about capturing that paradox."

As we continue to move forward in digital transformation, an increasing number of companies are discovering the promise of robotic process automation (RPA). In a nutshell, RPA allows companies to gain efficiencies and (hopefully) save money by automating routine tasks. RPA is what I'd call the low-hanging fruit of artificial intelligence. It's governed by structured input. Its processes are mundane and rule-based.

On 21 April 2021, the European Commission proposed a new, transformative legal framework to govern the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the European Union. The proposal adopts a risk-based approach whereby the uses of artificial intelligence are categorised and restricted according to whether they pose an unacceptable, high, or low risk to human safety and fundamental rights. The policy is widely considered to be one of the first of its kind in the world which would, if passed, have profound and far-reaching consequences for organisations that develop or use technologies incorporating artificial intelligence. The European Commission's proposal has been in the making since 2017, when EU legislators enacted a resolution and a report with recommendations to the Commission on Civil Law Rules on Robotics. In 2020, the European Commission published a white paper on artificial intelligence.

Chief Technology Officer at Integrity Management Services, Inc., where she is leading cutting-edge technology solutions (AI) for clients. According to a recent World Economic Forum report, 50% of all employees will need reskilling by 2025. In the U.S. government alone, 18.2% of the federal government retired in 2020. Another 34% will be eligible for retirement by the fiscal year 2023. Our workforce demands are urgent.

ZHAOQING, China – Xpeng Motors, a Chinese electric car startup, recently opened a large assembly plant in southeastern China and is building a matching factory nearby. It has announced plans for a third. Another Chinese electric car company, Nio, has opened one large factory in central China and is preparing to build a second several kilometers away. Zhejiang Geely, owner of Volvo, showed off an enormous new electric car factory in eastern China last month rivaling in size some of the world's largest assembly plants. Evergrande, a troubled Chinese real estate giant, has just built electric car factories in the cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou and hopes to be making almost as many fully electric cars by 2025 as all of North America.

Cybersecurity experts said that Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have positively and negatively affected cybersecurity. Although relatively new AI security tools are often used to define "good" as opposed to "bad" by comparing the behavior of entities throughout the environment with those living in similar environments. Artificial intelligence algorithms are used to train data to respond to different situations. Artificial Intelligence is helping Cybersecurity to accelerate its technological progress. Security experts, including CISOs with products purporting to use artificial intelligence to dramatically improve the accuracy and efficiency speed of both threat detection and response.

We consider qualitative strategy synthesis for the formalism called consumption Markov decision processes. This formalism can model dynamics of an agents that operates under resource constraints in a stochastic environment. The presented algorithms work in time polynomial with respect to the representation of the model and they synthesize strategies ensuring that a given set of goal states will be reached (once or infinitely many times) with probability 1 without resource exhaustion. In particular, when the amount of resource becomes too low to safely continue in the mission, the strategy changes course of the agent towards one of a designated set of reload states where the agent replenishes the resource to full capacity; with sufficient amount of resource, the agent attempts to fulfill the mission again. We also present two heuristics that attempt to reduce expected time that the agent needs to fulfill the given mission, a parameter important in practical planning. The presented algorithms were implemented and numerical examples demonstrate (i) the effectiveness (in terms of computation time) of the planning approach based on consumption Markov decision processes and (ii) the positive impact of the two heuristics on planning in a realistic example.

Last Tuesday, shortly after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued relaxed guidelines for wearing masks in public during the COVID-19 pandemic, President Joe Biden gave a speech on the North Lawn of the White House. The setting was so verdant--bright sunlight, tall trees framing a lectern, shrubbery in full bloom--that it might have been a virtual Zoom background. Biden wore a black mask to the lectern, then took it off to speak. "If you're in a crowd, like in a stadium or at a concert, you still need to wear a mask, even if you're outside," he said. "But, beginning today, gathering with a group of friends in the park, going for a picnic, as long as you are vaccinated and outdoors, you can do it without a mask."