Artificial intelligence has quickly turned out to be an essential tool in the security industry.

Many job descriptions across organizations will require at least some use of AI in the coming years, creating opportunities for the savvy to learn about AI and advance their careers regardless of discipline. New job titles have and will emerge to help the organization execute on AI strategy. Machine learning engineers have cemented a leading role on the AI team, for example, taking first place on best jobs listed on Indeed last year, according to a recent rapport in CIO. And AI specialists were the top job in LinkedIn's 2020 Emerging Jobs report, with 74% annual growth in the last four years. This was followed by robot engineer and data scientist.

World models are self-supervised predictive models of how the world evolves. Humans learn world models by curiously exploring their environment, in the process acquiring compact abstractions of high bandwidth sensory inputs, the ability to plan across long temporal horizons, and an understanding of the behavioral patterns of other agents. In this work, we study how to design such a curiosity-driven Active World Model Learning (AWML) system. To do so, we construct a curious agent building world models while visually exploring a 3D physical environment rich with distillations of representative real-world agents. We propose an AWML system driven by $\gamma$-Progress: a scalable and effective learning progress-based curiosity signal. We show that $\gamma$-Progress naturally gives rise to an exploration policy that directs attention to complex but learnable dynamics in a balanced manner, thus overcoming the "white noise problem". As a result, our $\gamma$-Progress-driven controller achieves significantly higher AWML performance than baseline controllers equipped with state-of-the-art exploration strategies such as Random Network Distillation and Model Disagreement.

With rapid advances in machine learning (ML), more of this technology is being deployed into the real world interacting with us and our environment. One of the most widely applied application of ML is facial recognition as it is running on millions of devices. While being useful for some people, others perceive it as a threat when used by public authorities. This discrepancy and the lack of policy increases the uncertainty in the ML community about the future direction of facial recognition research and development. In this paper we present results from a cross-national survey about public acceptance, privacy, and discrimination of the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in the public. This study provides insights about the opinion towards FRT from China, Germany, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US), which can serve as input for policy makers and legal regulators.

In time-to-event prediction problems, a standard approach to estimating an interpretable model is to use Cox proportional hazards, where features are selected based on lasso regularization or stepwise regression. However, these Cox-based models do not learn how different features relate. As an alternative, we present an interpretable neural network approach to jointly learn a survival model to predict time-to-event outcomes while simultaneously learning how features relate in terms of a topic model. In particular, we model each subject as a distribution over "topics", which are learned from clinical features as to help predict a time-to-event outcome. From a technical standpoint, we extend existing neural topic modeling approaches to also minimize a survival analysis loss function. We study the effectiveness of this approach on seven healthcare datasets on predicting time until death as well as hospital ICU length of stay, where we find that neural survival-supervised topic models achieves competitive accuracy with existing approaches while yielding interpretable clinical "topics" that explain feature relationships.

Medical imaging artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Avicenna.AI has announced it has received 510(k) clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its CINA Head triage AI solution for neurovascular emergencies. The FDA's decision covers CINA's automatic detection capabilities for both intracranial haemorrhage and large vessel occlusion (LVO) from CT-scan imaging. Stroke is a leading cause of death in the USA, with more than 795,000 strokes resulting in more than 100,000 deaths each year. It is estimated that up to a third of the most common type of stroke are caused by LVO, when a clot blocks the circulation of the blood in the brain. Around one in 10 strokes are thought to be caused by intracranial haemorrhage.

India's busiest railway station has an approximate footfall of five lakh passengers/day. Every day, over a million transactions are handled across 13,000 Aadhaar centres. In a nation, where queues are omnipresent at public service buildings, a burning need for intelligent digital interventions is obvious. India is expected to reach 627 million Internet users by 2019 end. This digital adoption is propelled by rural India, which registers 35 per cent annual growth. Why then is the common Indian not lapping up information from the many websites and apps launched by the Government of India?

In this article, I will look at how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can help improve cybersecurity practices in an environment of ever-increasing threats and discuss the role of AI in alleviating the perennial talent shortage in the field of cybersecurity. Remember that the current wave of AI, driven by advances in deep learning, started around 2015, but the talent short- ages in cybersecurity precede that. I also caution that if we are not careful, AI can even be a double-edged sword when it comes to cybersecurity. Let me start with a flashback. About a decade ago, I used to audit the information security practices and cybersecurity preparedness of large global enterprises.

The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aims to develop innovative technologies that would augment operations underground. The SubT Challenge allows teams to demonstrate new approaches for robotic systems to rapidly map, navigate, and search complex underground environments, including human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks. The SubT Challenge is organized into two Competitions (Systems and Virtual), each with two tracks (DARPA-funded and self-funded). The Cave Circuit, the final of three Circuit events, is planned for later this year. Final Event, planned for summer of 2021, will put both Systems and Virtual teams to the test with courses that incorporate diverse elements from all three environments.

Getting products from one place to another with as little human contact as possible is becoming an imperative for Japanese businesses as retailers, warehouses, and transport providers adapt to the coronavirus pandemic. Japanese companies are developing next-generation logistics technology to deliver goods without human touch, driven by worker shortages and the Covid-19 pandemic. Manufacturer Tsubakimoto Chain's sorting and conveyor systems are growing increasingly popular as companies seek ways to move things around, while startup Hacobu aims to increase use of its online platform for trucks to share information as they load and unload goods at warehouses. Meanwhile, companies in Japan and other Asian countries have expressed interest in U.S. startup Above Robotics' cloud-based software, which stitches together various autonomous logistics and transportation systems. Japan's government views automated logistics as important for global competitiveness, with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism urging greater use of data and artificial intelligence in managing truck fleets, autonomous vehicles, and drones.