The Defense Department is in the business of data destruction,

TEHRAN – Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wept Monday over the casket of a top general killed last week in a U.S. airstrike, his prayers joining the wails of mourners who flooded the streets of Tehran demanding retaliation against America for a slaying that has drastically raised tensions across the Middle East. The Tehran funeral for Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani drew a crowd said by police to be in the millions, filling thoroughfares and side streets as far as the eye could see. Although there was no independent estimate, aerial footage and journalists suggested a turnout of at least 1 million, and the throngs were visible on satellite images of Tehran taken Monday. Authorities later brought his remains and those of the others to Iran's holy city of Qom, where another massive crowd turned out. The outpouring of grief was an unprecedented honor for a man viewed by Iranians as a national hero for his work leading the Guard's expeditionary Quds Force.

Tehran is having the regroup and figure out what's next following President Trump's decision to take out their top general, says Nikki Haley, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley blasted Democrats Monday for their continued criticism of Trump's directive to kill Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani via drone strike last week, a decision Haley said showed "great resolve" on the part of the president. "You don't see anyone standing up for Iran," Haley said on "Hannity" Monday. The only ones that are mourning the loss of Soleimani are Democrat leadership and our Democrat presidential candidates." "No one else in the world [mourns], because they knew that this man had evil [in his] veins," Haley added. They knew what he was capable of. And they saw the destruction and the lives lost from his hands."

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon on Monday distanced itself from U.S. President Donald Trump's assertions that he would bomb Iranian cultural sites despite international prohibitions on such attacks. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the U.S. will "follow the laws of armed conflict." When asked if that ruled out targeting cultural sites, Esper said pointedly, "That's the laws of armed conflict." The split between the president and his Pentagon chief came amid heightened tensions with Tehran following a U.S. drone strike that killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite Quds Force. Trump had twice warned that he would hit Iranian cultural sites if Tehran retaliates against the U.S. Esper's public comments reflected the private concerns of other defense and military officials, who cited legal prohibitions on attacks on civilian, cultural and religious sites, except under certain, threatening circumstances.

These kinds of predicaments, which characterize much of what soldiers train to face, are immeasurably improved by emerging applications of AI; artificial intelligence can already gather, fuse, organize and analyze otherwise disparate pools of combat-sensitive data for individual soldiers. Target information from night vision sensors, weapons sights, navigational devices and enemy fire detection systems can increasingly be gathered and organized for individual human soldier decision-makers. However, what comes after this? Where will AI go next in terms of changing modern warfare for Army infantry on the move in war? The Army Research Laboratory is now immersed in a complex new series of research and experimentation initiatives to explore a "next-level" of AI.

BUENOS AIRES – Argentina's government boosted security at its airports, borders and the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires as tensions simmer between the United States and Iran, the South American country's defense minister told local media on Monday. Argentina, which suffered two attacks, in 1992 and 1994, decided to raise its alert level days after a U.S. drone strike killed Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in Iraq, stoking global fears of retaliation attacks. "Because of the history of two attacks we had, Argentina must be on alert for this type of conflict worldwide," Defense Minister Agustin Rossi told local news site Infobae. More than 100 people were killed in two attacks in Argentina in the 1990s. In 1992, the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires was attacked with a car bomb, killing 29 people.

We formally prove the connection between k-means clustering and the predictions of neural networks based on the softmax activation layer. In existing work, this connection has been analyzed empirically, but it has never before been mathematically derived. The softmax function partitions the transformed input space into cones, each of which encompasses a class. This is equivalent to putting a number of centroids in this transformed space at equal distance from the origin, and k-means clustering the data points by proximity to these centroids. Softmax only cares in which cone a data point falls, and not how far from the centroid it is within that cone. We formally prove that networks with a small Lipschitz modulus (which corresponds to a low susceptibility to adversarial attacks) map data points closer to the cluster centroids, which results in a mapping to a k-means-friendly space. To leverage this knowledge, we propose Centroid Based Tailoring as an alternative to the softmax function in the last layer of a neural network. The resulting Gauss network has similar predictive accuracy as traditional networks, but is less susceptible to one-pixel attacks; while the main contribution of this paper is theoretical in nature, the Gauss network contributes empirical auxiliary benefits.

Recently, it has been widely accepted by the research community that interactions between humans and cyber-physical infrastructures have played a significant role in determining the performance of the latter. The existing paradigm for designing cyber-physical systems for optimal performance focuses on developing models based on historical data. The impacts of context factors driving human system interaction are challenging and are difficult to capture and replicate in existing design models. As a result, many existing models do not or only partially address those context factors of a new design owing to the lack of capabilities to capture the context factors. This limitation in many existing models often causes performance gaps between predicted and measured results. We envision a new design environment, a cyber-physical human system (CPHS) where decision-making processes for physical infrastructures under design are intelligently connected to distributed resources over cyberinfrastructure such as experiments on design features and empirical evidence from operations of existing instances. The framework combines existing design models with context-aware design-specific data involving human-infrastructure interactions in new designs, using a machine learning approach to create augmented design models with improved predictive powers.

In this paper, we proposed a novel automated model, called Vulnerability Index for Population at Risk (VIPAR) scores, to identify rare populations for their future shooting victimizations. Likewise, the focused deterrence approach identifies vulnerable individuals and offers certain types of treatments (e.g., outreach services) to prevent violence in communities. The proposed rule-based engine model is the first AI-based model for victim prediction. This paper aims to compare the list of focused deterrence strategy with the VIPAR score list regarding their predictive power for the future shooting victimizations. Drawing on the criminological studies, the model uses age, past criminal history, and peer influence as the main predictors of future violence. Social network analysis is employed to measure the influence of peers on the outcome variable. The model also uses logistic regression analysis to verify the variable selections. Our empirical results show that VIPAR scores predict 25.8% of future shooting victims and 32.2% of future shooting suspects, whereas focused deterrence list predicts 13% of future shooting victims and 9.4% of future shooting suspects. The model outperforms the intelligence list of focused deterrence policies in predicting the future fatal and non-fatal shootings. Furthermore, we discuss the concerns about the presumption of innocence right.

Children's author Dr Seuss describes reading as a gateway to learning. "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go," he wrote in 1978. Even as adults today, Indian entrepreneurs and investors couldn't agree more. Quartz asked a bunch of Indian startup folks about the books they read in 2019.