A pro-China propaganda campaign that's been bashing the US on social media created fake followers with the help of AI-generated images. Since June, the campaign has been posting English-language videos critical of the Trump administration on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, according to research company Graphika, which has been tracking the group's activities. Graphika dubs the campaign "Spamouflage Dragon." And like other propaganda activities, the pro-China group uses fake accounts to share and post comments on its content to help it gain wider circulation. However, Graphika noticed something odd with the profile photos belonging to these fake accounts: In some cases, the headshots appear to be the work of an AI program designed to create artificial human faces. At first glance, the profile photos look legitimate.

An event pitting an AI-controlled fighter plane against a human pilot in a virtual dogfight was recently held, with the end result that the AI managed to defeat its human opponent, adding another example of AIs outclassing humans at even extraordinarily complex tasks. As reported by DefenseOne, the recent virtual dogfight was orchestrated by the US military as part of an ongoing effort to demonstrate the capability of autonomous agents to defeat aircraft in dogfights, a project called the AlphaDogFight challenge. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) chose eight teams of AIs developed by various defense contractors, and pitted these AI teams against each other in virtual dogfights. The winner of this tournament was an AI developed by Heron Systems, and afterward the AI was pitted against a human pilot who wore a VR helmet and sat in a flight simulator. The AI reportedly won all five rounds it played.

The US power grid system is not only large but dynamic, which makes it especially challenging to manage. Human operators know how to maintain systems when conditions are static. But when conditions change quickly operators lack a clear way of anticipating how the system should best adapt to meet system security and safety requirements. At the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory a research team has developed a novel approach to help system operators understand how to better control power systems with the help of artificial intelligence. Their new approach could help operators control power systems in a more effective way, which could enhance the resilience of America's power grid, according to a recent article in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems.

The Department of Defense has made HPC news twice in the last few days – in one, the Army will spend $32 million on supercomputing technology from composable infrastructure vendor Liqid; in the other, DOD will partner with the Department of Energy and Microsoft to develop AI algorithms to support natural disaster first responders. In the deal with Colorado-based Liqid, the Army has purchased two supercomputers to improve data analytics for organizations "across the military branches requesting such services," according to a story by Andrew Eversen in the online military publication C4ISRNET. The computers will be located at the Army Research Laboratory's DOD Supercomputing Resource Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, according DOD announcement earlier this month. The High Performance Computing Modernization Program, or HPCMP, provides advanced computing capabilities to the DOD's R&D community. "The primary customer base for the (HPCMP) has been the physics-based modeling, which are your weapons designers and that kind of stuff -- it's all based on physics effects," Matt Goss, director of the center, told C4ISRNET.

A standard method for testing some of the mechanical properties of materials is to poke them with a sharp point. This "indentation technique" can provide detailed measurements of how the material responds to the point's force, as a function of its penetration depth. With advances in nanotechnology during the past two decades, the indentation force can be measured to a resolution on the order of one-billionth of a Newton (a measure of the force approximately equivalent to the force you feel when you hold a medium-sized apple in your hand), and the sharp tip's penetration depth can be captured to a resolution as small as a nanometer, or about 1/100,000 the diameter of a human hair. Such instrumented nanoindentation tools have provided new opportunities for probing physical properties in a wide variety of materials, including metals and alloys, plastics, ceramics, and semiconductors. But while indentation techniques, including nanoindentation, work well for measuring some properties, they exhibit large errors when probing plastic properties of materials -- the kind of permanent deformation that happens, for example, if you press your thumb into a piece of silly putty and leave a dent, or when you permanently bend a paper clip using your fingers.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Postmaster General Louis DeJoy refused requests by Democrats on Monday to restore mail-sorting machines or mailboxes removed from service as part of sweeping operational changes at the Postal Service, despite complaints that the changes are causing lasting damage and widespread delays. Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., told DeJoy at a hearing on Capitol Hill that changes imposed by DeJoy this summer have threatened the reliability of mail service in his state and across the country. "What the heck are you doing?" Lynch asked DeJoy at a sometimes contentious House Oversight Committee hearing. Either through "gross incompetence" or "on purpose," DeJoy is "deliberately dismantling this once-proud institution," Lynch said. DeJoy denied any wrongdoing and accused Lynch and other Democrats of spreading misinformation.

Even small changes in your surroundings could indicate danger. Imagine a robot could detect those changes, and a warning could immediately alert you through a display in your eyeglasses. That is what U.S. Army scientists are developing with sensors, robots, real-time change detection and augmented reality wearables. Army researchers demonstrated in a real-world environment the first human-robot team in which the robot detects physical changes in 3D and shares that information with a human in real-time through augmented reality, who is then able to evaluate the information received and decide follow-on action. "This could let robots inform their Soldier teammates of changes in the environment that might be overlooked by or not perceptible to the Soldier, giving them increased situational awareness and offset from potential adversaries," said Dr. Christopher Reardon, a researcher at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory.

A few days ago, the UK Department of Transport announced a consultation on Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS). This led to media outlets such as the BBC arguing that hands-free driving might be legal in the UK as soon as Spring 2021. But some went further, claiming this was a step towards self-driving cars by next year. Automated safety features are a significant part of cutting-edge car technology, so a major feature in most electric vehicles, although far from exclusively for EVs. Tesla TSLA in particular makes a lot of noise about its self-driving abilities, and contender Lucid is claiming it will go further with its Air.

By Andrew Rathkopf Posted on August 20, 2020 Small- to medium-sized (SMBs) are the backbone of the American economy: 30.7 million SMBs operate across the country and account for 64 percent of new jobs.They represent 99.9 percent of all businesses in the U.S., but they face many hurdles. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 20 percent of SMBs fail in their first year and that approximately half do not survive for longer than five. Only 35 percent of such businesses make it past their first decade in operation.The reasons for these failures are varied, but many involve cash flow issues, as 29 percent report they ran out of money and 18 percent cite pricing or supply cost problems. The ongoing pandemic has added new obstacles, too, as social distancing and stay-at-home orders cut off key revenue streams. Seventy percent of SMBs are adding new digital capabilities or enhancing existing ones to continue their operations, but firms often require financing to implement these innovations.A multitude of SMB investors are looking to help, but lending to digitally focused SMBs comes with its own hurdles, including fraud risks and inefficient lending procedures driven by stiff regulatory measures.

The power of artificial intelligence has transformed health care by using massive datasets to improve diagnostics, treatment, records management, and patient outcomes. Complex decisions that once took hours -- such as making a breast or lung cancer diagnosis based on imaging studies, or deciding when patients should be discharged -- are now resolved within seconds by machine learning and deep learning applications. Any technology, of course, will have its limitations and flaws. And over the past few years, a steady stream of evidence has demonstrated that some of these AI-powered medical technologies are replicating racial bias and exacerbating historic health care inequities. Now, amid the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, some researchers are asking whether these new technologies might be contributing to the disproportionately high rates of virus-related illness and death among African Americans. African Americans aged 35 to 44 experience Covid-19 mortality rates that are nine times higher than their White counterparts.