More than 100 of the world's leading experts in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and ethics have signed up to be part of a new journal created by a North East professor. University of Sunderland's Pro-Vice-Chancellor John MacIntyre launches'AI and Ethics' this month alongside his co-Editor-in-Chief, Professor Larry Medsker of George Washington University in the US, and Rachel Moriarty, Publishing Editor at Springer. Five years in the making, the journal has attracted around 100 of the world's leading thinkers and practitioners in this field of study to be part of its editorial board and aims to promote informed debate and discussion of the ethical, regulatory and policy implications that arise from the development of AI. Professor MacIntyre said: "Our objective is to be useful to a wide range of audiences – the academic and scientific community, the commercial and product development community, users of AI, those developing governance and regulatory frameworks for AI, and the public. We want to provide an outlet to publish high-quality work and making it available to be used by those audiences."

The company, along with the European Space Agency (ESA) and computer vision and AI startup Ubotica, announced details of the PhiSat-1, an experimental CubeSat satellite that was ejected from a rocket's dispenser on September 2 along with 45 other similarly small satellites. PhiSat-1 contains a new hyperspectral-thermal camera and onboard AI processing - thanks to an Intel Movidius Myriad 2 Vision Processing Unit (VPU), says the company, the same chip inside many smart cameras and even a $99 selfie drone. PhiSat-1 is one of a pair of satellites on a mission to monitor polar ice and soil moisture, while also testing inter-satellite communication systems in order to create a future network of federated satellites. The first problem the Myriad 2 is helping to solve, say the organizations, is how to handle the large amount of data generated by high-fidelity cameras like the one on PhiSat-1. "The capability that sensors have to produce data increases by a factor of 100 every generation," says Gianluca Furano, data systems and onboard computing lead at the European Space Agency, which led the collaborative effort behind PhiSat-1. "While our capabilities to download data are increasing, but only by a factor of three, four, five per generation."

Facebook launched an independent oversight board and recommitted to privacy reforms this week, but after years of promises made and broken, nobody seems convinced that real change is afoot. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is expected to decide shortly whether to sue Facebook, sources told the New York Times, following a $5 billion fine levied last year. In other investigations, the Department of Justice filed suit against Google this week, accusing the Alphabet company of maintaining multiple monopolies through exclusive agreements, collection of personal data, and artificial intelligence. News also broke this week that Google's AI will play a role in creating a virtual border wall. What you see in each instance is a powerful company insisting it can regulate itself while government regulators appear to reach the opposite conclusion.

The last time my neighbors and I sheltered in place was seven years ago, in April, 2013. On April 15th, two bombs were detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon; three people were killed, and more than two hundred and fifty injured. As the wounded were rushed to twenty-seven hospitals, people stayed inside, in case of further attacks. The police closed the streets to inspect suspicious packages. A few days later, after the bombers had been identified, a manhunt began.

"Look with thine ears," Lear tells poor blind Gloucester, and that is exactly what the rest of us should do now we know that the majority of New York theatres will not open their doors until, at the most optimistic guesstimate, the middle of next year. Zoom fatigue set in months ago, but audio is stepping into the breach to take us places that glazed screen-gazing can't. The eyes tend toward the literal, while what we only hear can bloom, the way a novel does, in the privacy of the mind, as is the case with two new productions--one radical, one retro--that use audio to light a path forward for performance in the COVID era and beyond. "A Thousand Ways" (produced by the Brooklyn-based ArKtype) was created by the duo Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone, who go by the moniker 600 Highwaymen and are known for devising inventive, sincere theatre of a kind that makes urbane audiences fatted on cynicism feel wonder afresh. In "This Great Country," from 2012, seventeen performers, some experienced, some green, acted out scenes from "Death of a Salesman," transforming that classic into something rich and strange; "Employee of the Year," staged in 2014, had five girls under the age of eleven tell the story of one woman's adulthood.

Before continuing to describe what NASA accomplished with its witty IFCS, I will provide you a brief introduction to some important concepts and the benefits of the "fly-by-wire" systems. In a "fly-by-wire" system, the movements of the pilot's flight controls, also known as inceptors, are converted into electronic signals that are transmitted by wires -- thus the name "fly-by-wire ". Using these electrical signals, the Flight Control Computers (FCC) determine how the actuator of each of the control surfaces should move to meet the required aircraft handling qualities criteria. Over time, the traditional mechanical linkages between the pilot's controls and the aerodynamic control surfaces like those of the Flyer have been substitued by the electronic interfaces and computers of the modern "fly-by-wire" systems, although still nowadays traditional mechanical flight control systems can be found in conventional light aircraft. Thanks to the digital "fly-by-wire" systems, the pilot's workload in modern aircraft has decreased considerably, as many critical tasks have been delegated to the computer, like the automatic stabilization of the aircraft.

As digital technology progresses, there has been a growing number of cyberattacks in the last couple of years. By the first half of 2019, 4.1 billion records were exposed due to data breaches. That number is multiplying every day as more people and businesses move online. Cyberattacks are critical for every organization as they can bring the entire organization to a standstill. In such scenarios, security is a necessity for all organizations.

Back when US President Donald Trump (and his challenger Joe Biden) were students, artificial intelligence (AI) had a different connotation. And it is just as well for the White House incumbent in particular, as a new study of the correlation between social media posts and examination scores using AI indicates that content with words and phrases written entirely in capital letters portends lower academic performance. Having trained on 1.9 billion words' worth of content, AI found that the use of all capital letters (–0.08), emojis (–0.06) and exclamation marks (–0.04) corresponded to lower academic performance. While Indians may be intrigued by this conclusion, it is not surprising that the study has shown content with extensive vocabularies, use of terms relating to science and processes, literary flourishes and quotations correspond to better exam scores than those that show a predilection for spelling mistakes and allusions to computer games, horoscopes and military concepts. Of course, Mr Trump would aver that examiners (and AI) are inherently biased and discriminate against those who do not conform to the usual parameters of scholarly expression.

On a bright Tuesday afternoon in Paris last fall, Alex Karp was doing tai chi in the Luxembourg Gardens. He wore blue Nike sweatpants, a blue polo shirt, orange socks, charcoal-gray sneakers and white-framed sunglasses with red accents that inevitably drew attention to his most distinctive feature, a tangle of salt-and-pepper hair rising skyward from his head. Under a canopy of chestnut trees, Karp executed a series of elegant tai chi and qigong moves, shifting the pebbles and dirt gently under his feet as he twisted and turned. A group of teenagers watched in amusement. After 10 minutes or so, Karp walked to a nearby bench, where one of his bodyguards had placed a cooler and what looked like an instrument case. The cooler held several bottles of the nonalcoholic German beer that Karp drinks (he would crack one open on the way out of the park). The case contained a wooden sword, which he needed for the next part of his routine. "I brought a real sword the last time I was here, but the police stopped me," he said matter of factly as he began slashing the air with the sword. Those gendarmes evidently didn't know that Karp, far from being a public menace, was the chief executive of an American company whose software has been deployed on behalf of public safety in France. The company, Palantir Technologies, is named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings." Its two primary software programs, Gotham and Foundry, gather and process vast quantities of data in order to identify connections, patterns and trends that might elude human analysts. The stated goal of all this "data integration" is to help organizations make better decisions, and many of Palantir's customers consider its technology to be transformative. Karp claims a loftier ambition, however. "We built our company to support the West," he says. To that end, Palantir says it does not do business in countries that it considers adversarial to the U.S. and its allies, namely China and Russia. In the company's early days, Palantir employees, invoking Tolkien, described their mission as "saving the shire." The brainchild of Karp's friend and law-school classmate Peter Thiel, Palantir was founded in 2003. It was seeded in part by In-Q-Tel, the C.I.A.'s venture-capital arm, and the C.I.A. remains a client. Palantir's technology is rumored to have been used to track down Osama bin Laden -- a claim that has never been verified but one that has conferred an enduring mystique on the company. These days, Palantir is used for counterterrorism by a number of Western governments.

In June 2020, when the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) issued updated guidance on how to evaluate corporate compliance programs, it came with a clear mandate to companies: Compliance programs must use robust technology and data analytics to assess their own actions and those of any third parties they do business with, from the point of engagement onward. At the very least, companies are expected to be able to explain the rationale for using third parties, whether they have relationships with foreign officials, and any potential risks to their reputation. This is a compliance game-changer. Historically, organizations could argue that they simply did not have the information available to identify potential compliance dissonance across their networks: the "needle in a haystack" defense. Organizations are now expected to show that they are leveraging data and applying modern analytics to draw insights and navigate the risks across their entire business network.