Security Studies president Jim Hanson provides analysis on'Fox & amp; Friends First.' Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday paid a compliment to the Trump administration for the Abraham Accords struck between Arab nations and Israel in the Middle East. Blinken was testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Biden administration's foreign policy agenda. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., asked Blinken what his predecessor, Secretary Mike Pompeo, did right. He pointed to tech advances and Middle East peace deals. "Trying to help bring the State Department into the 21st century, the use of technology and empowering, some of our people, with technology, something we really want to follow through," Blinken said.

When Californians learned in October that the waters off Santa Catalina Island once served as a dumping ground for thousands of barrels of DDT waste, the ocean science community jumped into action. A crew was swiftly assembled, shipping lanes cleared, the gears set in motion for a deep-sea expedition aboard the Sally Ride, one of the most technologically advanced research vessels in the country. By Wednesday, the ship was ready to leave San Diego and head for the San Pedro Basin, where 31 scientists and crew members will spend the next two weeks surveying almost 50,000 acres of the seafloor -- a much-needed first step in solving this toxic mystery that the ocean had buried for decades. "We want to provide a common base map of what's on the seabed at a high enough resolution," said Eric Terrill of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who is leading an effort made possible by the many scientists and federal officials who helped fast-track this expedition. "There were a lot of heroics pulled by quite a few people ... to make this happen."

Clearview AI has amassed a database of more than 3 billion photos of individuals by scraping sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google and Venmo. It's bigger than any other known facial-recognition database in the U.S., including the FBI's. The New York company uses algorithms to map the pictures it stockpiles, determining, for example, the distance between an individual's eyes to construct a "faceprint." This technology appeals to law enforcement agencies across the country, which can use it in real time to help determine people's identities. It also has caught the attention of civil liberties advocates and activists, who allege in a lawsuit filed Tuesday that the company's automatic scraping of their images and its extraction of their unique biometric information violate privacy and chill protected political speech and activity.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has potential to drive game-changing improvements for underserved communities in global health. In response, The Rockefeller Foundation and USAID partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop AI in Global Health: Defining a Collective Path Forward. Research began with a broad scan of instances where artificial intelligence is being used, tested, or considered in healthcare, resulting in a catalogue of over 240 examples. This grouping involves tools that leverage AI to monitor and assess population health, and select and target public health interventions based on AI-enabled predictive analytics. It includes AI-driven data processing methods that map the spread and burden of disease while AI predictive analytics are then used to project future disease spread of existing and possible outbreaks.

With so many novel drug candidates for Alzheimer's disease failing in clinical development, researchers in the US have started using artificial intelligence (AI) to screen already-approved therapies for activity against the neurodegenerative disorder. A team based at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School has come up with an AI algorithm – called DRIAD (Drug Repurposing In Alzheimer's Disease) – that it hopes will not only find treatments but also tease out new therapeutic targets. The AI uses machine learning to measure what happens to human brain neural cells when treated with a drug, and could be "a more rapid and less expensive option" than clinical trials of novel therapeutics, according to the researchers. In the journal Nature Communications, Harvard informatics specialist Artem Sokolov and colleagues report that early studies with the platform based on 80 approved drugs suggest Eli Lilly's Olumiant (baricitinib) as a possible candidate for repurposing as an AD therapy. It's not the first time that AI has suggested a new role for Olumiant, which is approved as an arthritis drug.

Russia is staking its future on Artificial Intelligence as President Vladimir Putin puts the technology at the heart of the nation's digital transformation. With the US, China and Europe all investing heavily in AI, the scene is set for a global battle for supremacy. As Putin has said, the nation that leads in AI "will be ruler of the world." In a speech to the AI Journey Conference 2020 held in Moscow in December, Putin told 10,000 online delegates that AI is "one of the greatest technologies ever created by humanity." He promised that AI would become deeply embedded into the nation's infrastructure as part of a new Russian revolution.

Africa is home to the world's fastest growing population, which is expected to double by 2050. This growth is directly linked to the increase in demand for energy – indeed the African Energy Chamber projects that the continent's demand for power will keep rising between 4-5% per year, possibly doubling by 2050. A reversal of fortune for the world's unelectrified population is one of the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations (SDG7). African governments have traditionally relied on centralised grid expansion to improve electricity access. This requires significant capital expenditure and is often not time or cost effective, especially in rural areas where much of Africa's unelectrified population live. At the same time, the Paris Agreement enshrines the global aim to achieve Net Zero in the next 3 decades in order to meet the goal of keeping global temperature rise well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

AI technology is suddenly important to military forces. Not yet an arms race, today's competition is more an experimentation race with a plethora of AI systems being tested and research centres established. The country that first understands AI adequately enough to change its existing human-centred force structures and embrace AI warfighting may gain a considerable advantage. In a new paper for the Australian government, I explore sea, land and air operational concepts appropriate to fighting near-to-medium term future AI-enabled wars. This temporal proximity makes this less of a speculative exercise than might be assumed.

We are at the cusp of a geospatial artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. At its core, Geospatial AI is a discipline that combines innovations in spatial science and AI methods to extract knowledge from spatial big data, which encompasses any data related to the Earth's surface. Astoundingly, the market of geospatial analytics is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24% between 2020-2025. As the technology continues to develop at a record-breaking pace, one of the most important applications of Geospatial AI is to help mitigate and combat the effects of climate change and natural disasters. Data gathered through geospatial techniques on factors like flood levels, land surface temperatures, and wind speeds can provide vital insights to governments and local authorities.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is "adaptive," meaning that it continuously learns algorithms.