It took a global pandemic and the death of George Floyd to put deep-seated social inequities, especially systemic racism, front and center for intense public debate. We may or may not be on the cusp of a redressing social injustice by reordering our legacy political and economic systems. Either way, a singular piece of technology – artificial intelligence (AI) -- is destined to profoundly influence which way we go from here. This is not just my casual observation. Those in power fully recognize how AI can be leveraged to preserve status-quo political and economic systems, with all of its built-in flaws, more or less intact.

The graph represents a network of 4,768 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "smartcity OR smartcities", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Friday, 24 July 2020 at 00:48 UTC. The requested start date was Friday, 24 July 2020 at 00:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 5,000. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 2-day, 20-hour, 23-minute period from Monday, 20 July 2020 at 09:08 UTC to Thursday, 23 July 2020 at 05:32 UTC.

WASHINGTON – It doesn't quite have the ring of "Morning in America" and "I Like Ike." TV." is getting an unlikely moment in the spotlight as President Donald Trump has taken a detour into the politics of dementia three months before the election. Trump, 74, attempted to demonstrate his mental fitness by reciting five words -- in order, importantly -- over and over in a television interview broadcast Wednesday night. The president said that collection of nouns, or ones like them, was part of a cognitive test he had aced while declaring that his likely Democratic opponent, 77-year-old Joe Biden, could not do the same. In a battle of septuagenarians, the Trump campaign has long tried to paint Biden as having lost some of his mental sharpness. But the gambit has yet to prove successful in denting the former vice president's standing in the race. That leaves Trump trying to escalate the attacks while defending his own ability to handle the mental rigors of the job. "The first questions are very easy," Trump told Fox News. "The last questions are much more difficult.

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence recommended Monday the U.S. should create a digital reserve corps and digital service academy to increase the pipeline of tech-savvy workers into the public sector. The recommendations come as part of the commission's second-quarter report for 2020, which included several other lines of effort from ethics, diplomacy, protection, investment and the application of AI. The report has not been published but was discussed in a live-streamed video call. The commission also recommended expanding scholarship-for-service systems that would offer more financial help for those looking to advance technical skills in exchange for time in government. The digital academy would be fully accredited and independent from the government, with students doing government and private sector internships during breaks, commissioners said Monday.

Then-Rep John Ratcliffe visited the DHS' National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) in 2016, as part of a roll-out of automated cyber tools. ALBUQUERQUE -- Today, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released what the first take on an evolving set of principles for the ethical use of artificial intelligence. The six principles, ranging from privacy to transparency to cybersecurity, are described as Version 1.0, approved by DNI John Ratcliffe last month. The six principles are pitched as a guide for the nation's many intelligence especially, especially to help them work with the private companies that will build AI for the government. As such, they provide an explicit complement to the Pentagon's AI principles put forth by Defense Secretary Mark Esper back in February.

International negotiations to regulate artificial intelligence-based weapons are encountering difficulties, with Japan, Germany and others backing international rules on regulation but maintaining a cautious stance on a treaty to prohibit killer robots. Behind their muted approach is a fear that countries that develop autonomous weapons would shun such a treaty anyway, diminishing the significance of international efforts toward any regulation. Therefore, countries differ over how to attain this objective while agreeing on the need to prevent lethal autonomous weapons from running out of control. Germany hosted an online meeting in early April amid the COVID-19 pandemic to facilitate talks on the control of killer robots, as promoted by the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). Representatives of more than 60 countries and regions, including the United States and Israel, both developers of AI weapons, the European Union and the United Nations, as well as nongovernmental organizations, logged in to participate in the forum.

The 62-year-old owns 52 acres of land on which he grows rice, cotton, pulses, sugarcane and black gram. For years, pests had been attacking his black gram crop, and it took days, even weeks, to consult agricultural experts. By the time he got the remedies, the infection spread, resulting in crop loss. Last year, just as he spotted shrunken leaves, he downloaded an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven application on his phone and uploaded photographs of the leaves. The app, Plantix, took minutes to diagnose that the crop had crinkle virus infection and suggested remedies. The disease, if detected early, is easily controllable by tackling aphid, small sap-sucking insects that act as vectors for the virus. "The disease was diagnosed in two minutes. I started remedial measures that afternoon itself. I also used better irrigation methods and harvested 850 kg black gram per acre, all thanks to AI," says Ravichandran. The earlier output used to be 150 kg per acre. In 2017, Maharashtra, the country's biggest cotton producer, was hit by its worst pest infection on cotton in recent times.

Washington – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took fresh aim at China on Thursday and said Washington and its allies must use "more creative and assertive ways" to press the Chinese Communist Party to change its ways, calling it the "mission of our time." Speaking at the Nixon Library in former President Richard Nixon's birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, Pompeo said the late U.S. leader's worry about what he had done by opening the world to China's Communist Party in the 1970s had been prophetic. "President Nixon once said he feared he had created a'Frankenstein' by opening the world to the CCP," Pompeo said. Nixon, who died in 1994 and was president from 1969 to 1974 opened the way for the establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with Communist China in 1979 through a series of contacts, including a visit to Beijing in 1972. In a major speech delivered after Washington's surprise order this week for China to close its Houston consulate, Pompeo repeated frequently leveled U.S. charges about Beijing's unfair trade practices, human rights abuses and efforts to infiltrate American society.

The design and implementation of an e-voting system is a challenging task. Formal analysis can be of great help here. In particular, it can lead to a better understanding of how the voting system works, and what requirements on the system are relevant. In this paper, we propose that the state-of-art model checker Uppaal provides a good environment for modelling and preliminary verification of voting protocols. To illustrate this, we present an Uppaal model of Pr\^et \`a Voter, together with some natural extensions. We also show how to verify a variant of receipt-freeness, despite the severe limitations of the property specification language in the model checker.

A popular computer puzzle, the game of Minesweeper requires its human players to have a mix of both luck and strategy to succeed. Analyzing these aspects more formally, in our research we assessed the feasibility of a novel methodology based on Reinforcement Learning as an adequate approach to tackle the problem presented by this game. For this purpose we employed Multi-Armed Bandit algorithms which were carefully adapted in order to enable their use to define autonomous computational players, targeting to make the best use of some game peculiarities. After experimental evaluation, results showed that this approach was indeed successful, especially in smaller game boards, such as the standard beginner level. Despite this fact the main contribution of this work is a detailed examination of Minesweeper from a learning perspective, which led to various original insights which are thoroughly discussed.