Google CEO Sundar Pichai is calling for governments around the world to regulate artificial intelligence, saying the sensitive technology should not be used to "support mass surveillance or violate human rights." However, Pichai -- the top executive at Google as well as its parent company Alphabet -- also argued that governments should not go too far as they work to rein in high-stakes technologies like facial recognition and self-driving vehicles. His speech in Europe and companion op-ed come as Europe weighs new ethics rules for artificial intelligence and the White House urges a light-touch approach to regulating technology. "There is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated," Pichai wrote in the Financial Times. "It is too important not to. The only question is how to approach it."

Natalie Lao was set on becoming an electrical engineer, like her parents, until she stumbled on course 6.S192 (Making Mobile Apps), taught by Professor Hal Abelson. Here was a blueprint for turning a smartphone into a tool for finding clean drinking water, or sorting pictures of faces, or doing just about anything. "I thought, I wish people knew building tech could be like this," she said on a recent afternoon, taking a break from writing her dissertation. After shifting her focus as an MIT undergraduate to computer science, Lao joined Abelson's lab, which was busy spreading its App Inventor platform and do-it-yourself philosophy to high school students around the world. App Inventor set Lao on her path to making it easy for anyone, from farmers to factory workers, to understand AI, and use it to improve their lives.

NEW YORK/BANGALORE, INDIA – Facebook Inc. has reached a $550 million settlement of claims it collected and stored millions of users' biometric data without their consent, as Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg pledged better protections for users to address privacy concerns that have dogged the social media company. The proposed class-action settlement was disclosed by Facebook's chief financial officer on a Wednesday conference call to discuss fourth-quarter results, and by lawyers for Facebook users who called it the largest cash settlement of a privacy lawsuit. Facebook did not admit wrongdoing in agreeing to the settlement, which requires court approval. The accord followed Facebook's $5 billion settlement last year with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which arose from the company's having allowed British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica to harvest data for an estimated 87 million users. Zuckerberg said during the call that the FTC settlement committed Facebook to privacy controls that "set a new standard for our industry, going beyond anything that's required by law today."

Four years after the federal government's first chatbots began arriving on the scene to help citizens navigate services, the Department of Home Affairs has finally launched its own. The department recently began trialling a Nuance-powered digital assistant on its website to provide tailored responses to common questions using natural language and conversational dialogue. Initially limited to answering visa and citizenship questions on the immi.homeaffairs It is also capable of learning from its interactions in order to automatically improve its responses to questions over time. A spokesperson told iTnews that the trial assistant "sits on the Nuance platform and was developed in collaboration with the department's service centre provider, Datacom Connect".

--Solving power flow (PF) equations is the basis of power flow analysis, which is important in determining the best operation of existing systems, performing security analysis, etc. However, PF equations can be out-of-date or even unavailable due to system dynamics and uncertainties, making traditional numerical approaches infeasible. T o address these concerns, researchers have proposed data-driven approaches to solve the PF problem by learning the mapping rules from historical system operation data. Nevertheless, prior data-driven approaches suffer from poor performance and generalizability, due to overly simplified assumptions of the PF problem or ignorance of physical laws governing power systems. In this paper, we propose a physics-guided neural network to solve the PF problem, with an auxiliary task to rebuild the PF model. By encoding different granularity of Kirchhoff's laws and system topology into the rebuilt PF model, our neural-network based PF solver is regularized by the auxiliary task and constrained by the physical laws. The simulation results show that our physics-guided neural network methods achieve better performance and generalizability compared to existing unconstrained data-driven approaches. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the weight matrices of our physics-guided neural networks embody power system physics by showing their similarities with the bus admittance matrices. OWER flow (PF) analysis aims at obtaining complete voltage angle and magnitude information for each bus in a power system, given specified loads, generator real power and voltage conditions [1].

The 2016 United States presidential election was marked by the abuse of targeted advertising on Facebook. Concerned with the risk of the same kind of abuse to happen in the 2018 Brazilian elections, we designed and deployed an independent auditing system to monitor political ads on Facebook in Brazil. To do that we first adapted a browser plugin to gather ads from the timeline of volunteers using Facebook. We managed to convince more than 2000 volunteers to help our project and install our tool. Then, we use a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to detect political Facebook ads using word embeddings. To evaluate our approach, we manually label a data collection of 10k ads as political or non-political and then we provide an in-depth evaluation of proposed approach for identifying political ads by comparing it with classic supervised machine learning methods. Finally, we deployed a real system that shows the ads identified as related to politics. We noticed that not all political ads we detected were present in the Facebook Ad Library for political ads. Our results emphasize the importance of enforcement mechanisms for declaring political ads and the need for independent auditing platforms.

Fox News Flash top headlines for Jan. 30 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Joint military operations between coalition and Iraqi forces against the Islamic State group will resume, the Iraqi military said Thursday, after a nearly three-week pause that saw tensions between Washington and Tehran come to a boiling point. The escalations with Iran began after a U.S. drone strike killed one of its top generals in Baghdad earlier this month. Iraqi lawmakers subsequently voted to expel U.S. troops from the country in a non-binding resolution, a move Iraqi military officials said would jeopardize its fight against ISIS, which had overtaken large swaths of the country several years ago and has since been defeated.

Seaborne robots have made a startling discovery beneath a 20-mile glacier in Alaska. The technology found the massive rivers of ice may be melting under the LeConte Glacier much faster than previously thought. Scientists programmed autonomous kayaks to swim near the icy cliffs of the glacier to measure the'ambient meltwater intrusions', which shows how much fresh water is flowing into the ocean from underneath the glacier. The study found ambient melting was 100 times higher than models had estimated. This is the first time experts have been able to analyze plumes of meltwater - the water released when snow or ice melts, where glaciers meet the ocean- because the feat is far too dangerous for ships due to falling ice of slabs from the glacier.

WASHINGTON – The spotlight on brain injuries suffered by American troops in Iraq in January is an example of America's episodic attention to this invisible war wound, which has affected hundreds of thousands over the past two decades but is not yet fully understood. Unlike physical wounds, such as burns or the loss of limbs, traumatic brain injuries aren't obvious and can take time to diagnose. The full impact -- physically and psychologically -- may not be evident for some time, as studies have shown links between TBI and mental health problems. They cannot be dismissed as mere "headaches" -- the word used by President Donald Trump as he said the injuries suffered by the troops in Iraq were not necessarily serious. Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, told reporters Thursday that the number of service members diagnosed with TBI from the Jan. 8 Iranian missile attack in Iraq has now grown beyond the 50 reported earlier this week, although he provided no specific number.

The danger of having artificially intelligent machines do our bidding is that we might not be careful enough about what we wish for. The lines of code that animate these machines will inevitably lack nuance, forget to spell out caveats, and end up giving AI systems goals and incentives that don't align with our true preferences. A now-classic thought experiment illustrating this problem was posed by the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. Bostrom imagined a superintelligent robot, programmed with the seemingly innocuous goal of manufacturing paper clips. The robot eventually turns the whole world into a giant paper clip factory. Such a scenario can be dismissed as academic, a worry that might arise in some far-off future.