British archaeologists who discovered hundreds of artefacts from a cluster of 17th century shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea have had their cargo seized and been accused of an'illicit excavation'. Enigma Recoveries, which led an expedition into the Levantine Basin off the coast of Cyprus, found 12 shipwrecks filled with Chinese porcelain, jugs, coffee pots, peppercorns and illicit tobacco pipes. The ships and their priceless cargo, hailed as the'archaeological equivalent of finding a new planet' were recovered in ancient'shipping lanes' that served spice and silk trades from 300 BC onwards. But in a strongly-worded statement, the Cypriot government accused the company of being well known to both Cyprus and UNESCO for its'illicit underwater excavations' and its'violent extraction of objects causing destruction to their context'. Cyprus's Department of Antiquities accused the company of intending to sell the objects, as allegedly evident in documents filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (NASDAQ).

Artificial Intelligence is developing fast. It will change our lives by improving healthcare (e.g.

As the world continues to fight the novel coronavirus, every section of the society is playing its role. Medical professionals, law enforcement officers, and essential workers are on the frontline of this battle, while researchers, data scientists, and community leaders are also doing their part. There has been a recent increased emphasis on how AI can boost humanity's efforts in this on-going crisis. Experts believe Artificial Intelligence can analyze published literature on the disease, study structure and DNA of the virus, and recommend existing drugs or find a new one (in the latter case, it would take almost two years for the drug to be approved by the FDA). There has also been a discussion on how AI can help governments be smart about social distancing policies.

Watch Benjamin Alarie, co-founder and CEO of Blue J Legal, discuss the expanding role of artificial intelligence in tax with contributing editor at Tax Notes Federal Benjamin Willis. Benjamin Alarie: When we talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence of the law, what we're doing is talking about collecting the raw materials, the rulings, the cases, the legislation, the regs, all that information, and bringing it to bear on a particular problem. We're synthesizing all of those materials to make a prediction about how a new situation would likely be decided by the courts. We have lots of data out there in the form of rulings, in the form of judgments that we can collect as good examples of how the courts have decided these matters in the past. And we can reverse engineer using machine learning methods how the courts are mapping the facts of different situations into outcomes.

Under head of state and ruling Communist Party leader Xi Jinping's leadership, China has been able to "put the outbreak under control through arduous efforts and has been gradually resuming economic and social life while undertaking prevention and control measures on a regular basis," Wang was quoted as saying in a phone call Thursday with the foreign ministers of Hungary, Estonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Another 3 million US citizens filed for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the total to 36.5 million since mid-March, about 22 per cent of the US workforce. The total number of people who have lost their jobs is likely to be an underestimate because many states still have a backlog of claims to get through. Brazil has become a hotspot for coronavirus infections as the country confirmed a record 11,385 daily coronavirus cases and 749 more deaths yesterday. The total number of confirmed cases is now more than 190,000, the sixth highest in the world. Doctors in the country say a lack of adequate testing means the true number of cases could be ten times higher. A coronavirus antibody test developed by Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche has been approved for use by Public Health England. UK health minister Edward Argar said the test "appears to be extremely reliable". Unlike other forms of testing, antibody tests detect whether someone has been previously infected with the ...

Identifying the optimal level of taxation is quite complex. Human behaviour is highly unpredictable and gathering data can be time consuming. Despite decades of economic research being put into finding the optimal tax rate, it remains an open problem. But, scientists at the US business technology company, Salesforce, believe they may have found the key to solving the problem – Artificial Intelligence. The team has developed an AI system called the AI Economist, which uses reinforcement learning technology to identify the optimal level of taxation to make reduce inequality.

A pharmacological effect of a drug on cells, organs and systems refers to the specific biochemical interaction produced by a drug substance, which is called its mechanism of action. Drug repositioning (or drug repurposing) is a fundamental problem for the identification of new opportunities for the use of already approved or failed drugs. In this paper, we present a method based on a multi-relation unsupervised graph embedding model that learns latent representations for drugs and diseases so that the distance between these representations reveals repositioning opportunities. Once representations for drugs and diseases are obtained we learn the likelihood of new links (that is, new indications) between drugs and diseases. Known drug indications are used for learning a model that predicts potential indications. Compared with existing unsupervised graph embedding methods our method shows superior prediction performance in terms of area under the ROC curve, and we present examples of repositioning opportunities found on recent biomedical literature that were also predicted by our method.

Neuroevolution commonly uses speciation strategies to better explore the search space of neural network architectures. One such speciation strategy is through the use of islands, which are also popular in improving performance and convergence of distributed evolutionary algorithms. However, in this approach some islands can become stagnant and not find new best solutions. In this paper, we propose utilizing extinction events and island repopulation to avoid premature convergence. We explore this with the Evolutionary eXploration of Augmenting Memory Models (EXAMM) neuro-evolution algorithm. In this strategy, all members of the worst performing island are killed of periodically and repopulated with mutated versions of the global best genome. This island based strategy is additionally compared to NEAT's (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies) speciation strategy. Experiments were performed using two different real world time series datasets (coal-fired power plant and aviation flight data). The results show that with statistical significance, this island extinction and repopulation strategy evolves better global best genomes than both EXAMM's original island based strategy and NEAT's speciation strategy.

Internet speeds are still running largely as normal despite the increased pressure of lockdown, according to research from regulator Ofcom. Download speeds have only dropped by an average of 2 per cent, according to the research, even with the extra load. That is despite some high-profile outages, including Virgin Media problems that took the internet offline for users across the country. Networks have been under increased strain with more people across the country working from home, children using online platforms to carry on school work, and greater gaming and streaming as a source of entertainment. The communications regulator measured broadband performance for 3,481 users at the beginning and end of March, to compare results before and after lockdown started.