MUNICH ― U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Saturday called out China as America's main adversary and warned allies that letting the Chinese firm Huawei build its next-generation, or 5G, network risks their security cooperation and information sharing arrangements with the U.S. "Reliance on Chinese 5G vendors, for example, could render our partners' critical systems vulnerable to disruption, manipulation and espionage," Esper said in a speech at the high-level Munich Security Conference. "It could also jeopardize our communication and intelligence sharing capabilities, and by extension, our alliances." Adopting Huawei's equipment on allies' 5G networks, Esper said, "could inject serious risk into our defense cooperation." It was a tough statement partially at odds with other U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who offered assurances last week that U.S.-U.K. intelligence sharing remained strong despite Britain's decision to include Huawei in some parts of its nascent 5G network. A day earlier, the White House's point person for international telecommunications policy, Robert Blair, told reporters: "There will be no erosion in our overall intelligence sharing."

The European Union is backing away from its plan to introduce a temporary ban on facial recognition technology -- instead delegating decisions on the software to its member states. In a previous draft of a paper on AI, the European Commission had proposed introducing a five-year moratorium on the technology. But in a new draft seen by the Financial Times, that suggestion has been dropped. "The early draft floated the idea of a full ban, which is very popular among civil rights campaigners worried about abuse," a person with direct knowledge of the discussions told the FT. "But the security community is against the ban because they think it's a good tool."

Gen. Qassem Soleimani was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq, the Tehran-backed Lebanese organization Hezbollah urgently met with Iraqi militia leaders, seeking to unite them in the face of a huge void left by their powerful mentor's death, two sources with knowledge of the meetings said. The meetings were meant to coordinate the political efforts of Iraq's often-fractious militias, which lost not only Soleimani but also Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a unifying Iraqi paramilitary commander, in the Jan. 3 attack at Baghdad airport, the sources said. While offering few details, two additional sources in a pro-Iran regional alliance confirmed that Hezbollah, which is sanctioned as a terrorist group by the United States, has stepped in to help fill the void left by Soleimani in guiding the militias. All sources in this article spoke on condition of anonymity to address sensitive political activities rarely addressed in public. Officials with the governments of Iraq and Iran did not respond to requests for comment, nor did a spokesperson for the militia groups.

Even as AI technology transforms some aspects of cybersecurity, the intersection of the two remains profoundly human. Although it's perhaps counterintuitive, humans are front and center in all parts of the cybersecurity triad: the bad actors who seek to do harm, the gullible soft targets, and the good actors who fight back. Even without the looming specter of AI, the cybersecurity battlefield is often opaque to average users and the technologically savvy alike. Adding a layer of AI, which comprises numerous technologies that can also feel unexplainable to most people, may seem doubly intractable -- as well as impersonal. That's because although the cybersecurity fight is sometimes deeply personal, it's rarely waged in person.

Imagine getting to a courthouse and seeing paper signs stuck to the doors with the message "Systems down." What about police officers in the field unable to access information on laptops in their vehicles, or surgeries delayed in hospitals? That's what can happen to a city, police department, or hospital in a ransomware attack. Ransomware is malicious software that can encrypt or control computer systems. Criminals who launch these attacks can then refuse to return access until they get paid.

One thing is certain: The explosion of data creation in our society will continue as far as pundits and anyone else can forecast. In response, there is an insatiable demand for more advanced high performance computing to make this data useful. The IT industry has been pushing to new levels of high-end computing performance; this is the dawn of the exascale era of computing. Recent announcements from the US Department of Energy for exascale computers represent the starting point for a new generation of computing advances. This is critical for the advancement of any number of use cases such as understanding the interactions underlying the science of weather, sub-atomic structures, genomics, physics, rapidly emerging artificial intelligence applications, and other important scientific fields.

In images taken from a satellite floating 400 kilometers above the Earth, Europe's humanitarian crisis shows up as white pixels against the blue-green vastness of the Mediterranean. Captured by the sensors in space, small overcrowded boats with migrants leaving Africa headed north look like tiny white comets bursting through the ocean, leaving a tail where they stir waves. "It's not that with every image I look at, I think about how someone could be dying right now," said Elisabeth Wittmann as she clicked through satellite footage on her laptop showing the coast west of the Libyan port of Sabratha. "That's also to protect myself," she added. The 26-year-old computer scientist from southern Germany is one of a dozen researchers who have teamed up with a new NGO called Space-Eye to develop artificial intelligence technology that allows computers to detect migrant boats in satellite images.

Immune systems across the globe have been working overtime this winter as a devastating flu season has taken hold. More than 180,000 Americans have been hospitalized and 10,000 more have died in recent months, according to the CDC, while the coronavirus (now officially designated COVID-19) has spread across the globe at an alarming rate. Fears of a growing worldwide flu outbreak have even prompted the precautionary cancelling of MWC 2020 -- barely a week before it was slated to open in Barcelona. But in the near future, AI-augmented drug development could help produce vaccines and treatments fast enough to halt the spread of deadly viruses before they mutate into global pandemics. Conventional methods for drug and vaccine development are wildly inefficient.

Mediation Perspectives is a periodic blog entry that's provided by the CSS' Mediation Support Team and occasional guest authors. How is artificial intelligence (AI) affecting conflict and its resolution? Peace practitioners and scholars cannot afford to disregard ongoing developments related to AI-based technologies – both from an ethical and a pragmatic perspective. In this blog, I explore AI as an evolving field of information management technologies that is changing both the nature of armed conflict and the way we can respond to it. AI encompasses the use of computer programmes to analyse big amounts of data (such as online communication and transactions) in order to learn from patterns and predict human behaviour on a massive scale.

Elastic is a search company with a simple goal: to solve the world's data problems with products that delight and inspire. As the creators of the Elastic Stack, we help thousands of organizations including Cisco, eBay, Grab, Goldman Sachs, ING, Microsoft, NASA, The New York Times, Wikipedia, and many more use Elastic to power mission-critical systems. From stock quotes to Twitter streams, Apache logs to WordPress blogs, our products are extending what's possible with data, delivering on the promise that good things come from connecting the dots. We have a distributed team of Elasticians across 30 countries (and counting), and our diverse open source community spans over 100 countries. We are looking to add a hardworking software engineer to join our team, who can help contribute to our information retrieval initiatives through machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). Your primary focus will be driving forward development of machine learning based information retrieval features in the Elastic Stack.