The central government aims to stop net population inflows into the greater Tokyo area by fiscal 2024, it was learned Tuesday. The goal was included in a draft of the government's second five-year comprehensive strategy for regional revitalization, set to run from fiscal 2020. The government hopes to gain Cabinet approval for the new strategy, a successor to the first strategy that covered fiscal 2015-2019, by the end of this month. In the second strategy, the government will scrutinize steps taken under the first strategy and indicate a direction for new measures to accelerate regional revitalization. To alleviate the concentration of people in Tokyo and the three neighboring prefectures of Saitama, Chiba and Kanagawa, the government will make efforts to increase the number of people who have side jobs in rural areas or visit the countryside while living in urban areas.

Back in August 2019, the USPTO published a notice requesting public input on the interplay between patent law and artificial intelligence (AI). The PTO has now extended that deadline for comments until January 10, 2020. For example, should it be sufficient if a person (i) designed the AI algorithm or process that created the work; (ii) contributed to the design of the algorithm or process; (iii) chose data used by the algorithm for training or otherwise; (iv) caused the AI algorithm or process to be used to yield the work; or (v) engaged in some specific combination of the foregoing Start Printed Page 58142activities? Should authors be recognized for this type of use of their works? For example: Should a company who trains the artificial intelligence process that creates the work be able to be an owner?

Back in August 2019, the USPTO published a notice requesting public input on the interplay between patent law and artificial intelligence (AI). The PTO has now extended that deadline for comments until January 10, 2020. For example, should it be sufficient if a person (i) designed the AI algorithm or process that created the work; (ii) contributed to the design of the algorithm or process; (iii) chose data used by the algorithm for training or otherwise; (iv) caused the AI algorithm or process to be used to yield the work; or (v) engaged in some specific combination of the foregoing Start Printed Page 58142activities? Should authors be recognized for this type of use of their works? For example: Should a company who trains the artificial intelligence process that creates the work be able to be an owner?

Finland, which holds the rotating EU presidency until the end of the year, said on Tuesday it aims to teach 1% of all Europeans basic skills in artificial intelligence through a free online course it will now translate into all official EU languages. The European Union is pushing for wide deployment of artificial intelligence across the bloc, to help European companies catch up with rivals in Asia and the United States. "Our investment has three goals: we want to equip EU citizens with digital skills for the future, we wish to increase practical understanding of what artificial intelligence is, and by doing so, we want to give a boost to the digital leadership of Europe," said Finnish Minister of Employment Timo Harakka. "As our Presidency ends, we want to offer something concrete. It's about one of the most pressing challenges facing Europe and Finland today: how to develop our digital literacy," Harakka said in a statement.

The military wants artificial intelligence, but it's not intending to cook it up from scratch. Instead, in a recent solicitation, DARPA asked for proposals to build A.I. based on insect brains. The program seeks to build A.I. that is smaller and more efficient than normal software. Unlike us, insects operate almost entirely based on simple stimuli. Moths, for instance, are so programmed to navigate based on the direction of light that they occasionally navigate directly into lightbulbs.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) established the National Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII) for advancing the health and well-being of Veterans, as part of the commemoration of National Veterans and Military Families Month in November. The new NAII is incorporating input from Veterans and its partners across federal agencies, industry, nonprofits and academia, to prioritize and realize artificial intelligence (AI) research and development that is meaningful to Veterans and the public. "VA has a unique opportunity to be a leader in artificial intelligence," said VA Secretary Robert Wilkie. "VA's artificial intelligence institute will usher in new capabilities and opportunities that will improve health outcomes for our nation's heroes." VA is an ideal environment for advancing AI technology to benefit Veterans.

You might know Moody's Corporation for its credit rating agency, Moody's Investors Service, trusted by bond investors for opinions on credit risk. But the company, founded way back in 1909, grew ever-larger, and in 2007, Moody's Analytics was established to focus on non-rating activities – including economic research, consulting services and software development. Today, the employees of Moody's Analytics include a large number of machine learning and deep learning experts. To find out more about the business, we quizzed one such expert, Ashit Talukder, head of machine learning at Moody's Analytics, who previously spent 12 years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and served as the CTO of the US Department of Labor. Q: Most people know Moody's as a credit rating agency.

Our Civil Liberties are under threat more than ever before. No longer is the dystopian Orwellian future the topic of conspiracy. Pre crime is about to take front stage. While we are busily involved in fighting one another over the charade of impeachment, silently in the background and without a word from the media, laws are being passed, deals are being made, technological advancements are being feverishly worked on, that will remove our freedoms and infringe upon our civil liberties like never before. If you care about your nation, If you care about the constitution, If you care about your freedoms, you might want to pay attention. This is the most serious topic that I have ever covered. This is something that we as a society must collectively fight against with everything we have. If we silently submit, we will walk into a future that none of us wants to be in. The time to stand against this is now.

Ursula von der Leyen, the new president of the European Commission, has pledged to introduce GDPR-style legislation to regulate artificial intelligence (AI).

Research has found that many occupational accidents are foreseeable, being the result of people's unsafe behaviour from a retrospective point of view. The prediction of workers' safety behaviour will enable the prior insights into each worker's behavioural tendency and will be useful in the design of management practices prior to the occurrence of accidents and contribute to the reduction of injury rates. In recent years, researchers have found that people do have stable predispositions to engage in certain safety behavioural patterns which vary among individuals as a function of personality features. In this study, an innovative forecasting model, which employs machine learning algorithms, is developed to estimate construction workers' behavioural tendency based on the Big Five personality taxonomy. The data-driven nature of machine learning technique enabled a reliable estimate of the personality-safety behaviour relationship, which allowed this study to provide novel insight that nonlinearity may exist in the relationship between construction workers' personality traits and safety behaviour. The developed model is found to be sufficient to have satisfactory accuracy in explaining and predicting workers' safety behaviour. This finding provides the empirical evidence to support the usefulness of personality traits as effective predictors of people's safety behaviour at work. In addition, this study could have practical implications. The machine learning model developed can help identify vulnerable workers who are more prone to undertake unsafe behaviours, which is proven to have good prediction accuracy and is thereby potentially useful for decision making and safety management on construction sites.