According to Business Insider, more than 50% of the total costs for delivering goods is attributable to what is known as "last mile delivery" – the point at which the package finally arrives at the buyer's door. In a recent study by Global Industry Analysts, the last mile delivery market worldwide is expected to reach over $35 Billion by 2025. Last mile delivery is the most expensive and time-consuming part of the shipping process, either due to lack of density and long distances in rural areas or traffic congestion in urban ones. The idea of using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) – or drones – for last mile delivery is gaining popularity. The use of drones to deliver parcels has the potential to significantly decrease delivery costs – no driver, truck or congestion – and expand coverage areas.

The Air Force has signed a deal with Trueface, a developer of computer vision systems, to provide facial recognition, license plate recognition and weapon detection for an unnamed air base. This comes after the Air Force hired the company earlier this year to conduct research on how to use facial recognition software on bases. The new pact was built out of the initial research they worked on this year, according to a Medium post from Mason Allen of Trueface. Both the Air Force and Trueface declined to say which base the technology would be used but Shaun Moore, CEO of Trueface, said the company had more plans to work with the government and military institutions on these kinds of projects. "The goal here is to protect the assets and people on base," Moore said in an interview.

The next arms race will be fought not in megatons but in milliseconds. When the primary players can destroy each other 100 times over, it comes down to who can do so faster. Of course, that is a vast oversimplification of the race occuring right now, particularly between the United States and China for superiority in artificial intelligence programs and related technology. The U.S. is currently leading, but according to the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence in its recent report to Congress, China is projected to overtake the U.S. in research and development spending within ten years. Of course, spending primacies can change. If, for example, military and political priorities move less resources to a space force and more to practical AI integration into current fighting forces, the Chinese edge could be blunted or reversed.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently used by IT professionals to manage cybersecurity threats, protecting organisations from ongoing cybercrimes. With its ability to take large volumes of information and deduce clusters of similarity, it won't be long until AI will turn on us. Another quality that AI is exhibiting is its ability to mimic humans to a worryingly accurate degree. It can draw pictures, age photographs of people, and just recently, it has been found to impersonate human voices. This means that AI could potentially replicate human hacking tactics, which are currently the most damaging and the most time-consuming form of attack for hackers.

Just when we thought it was safe to go back in the water, a new threat has emerged to equal employment opportunity as employers base hiring decisions on artificial intelligence powered video and game-based "pre-employment" assessments of job candidates. The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research center based in Washington, D.C., recently asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate HireVue, a recruiting company based in Utah that purports to evaluate a job applicant's job qualifications through online "video interview" and/or "game-based challenge." According to its web site, HireVue has more than 700 customers worldwide including over one-third of the Fortune 100 and such leading brands such as Unilever, Hilton, JP Morgan Chase, Delta Air Lines, Vodafone, Carnival Cruise Line, and Goldman Sachs. The company states it has hosted more than ten million on-demand interviews and one million assessments. The EPIC complaint follows a wave of lawsuits in recent years charging that employers are using software algorithms to discriminate against older workers by targeting internet job advertisements exclusively to younger workers.

Researchers, start-ups and multinationals have been named among the winners of this year's AI Awards. Now in its second year, the AI Awards are run by AI Ireland, a non-profit business with backing from Microsoft Ireland and Alldus International. The organisation runs a number of community websites and monthly meetups supporting the area of data science, machine learning and AI in Ireland. Seven awards were handed out as part of the event today (20 November), with those shortlisted coming from academia, start-ups, SMEs and multinationals. The first of these awards was for the use of AI in a sector, with the winner named as speech recognition start-up SoapBox Labs.

This is a summary of an article written for Security Week by Fortinet's CMO and Executive Vice President of Products, John Maddison. The entire article can be accessed here. In the cybersecurity space, there has always been an unfair advantage for cybercriminals. Adversaries only need to find one vulnerability to wreak havoc on an entire system. All it takes is a single misconfigured device, or outdated operating system.

The retail banking services are one of the pillars of the modern economic growth. However, the evolution of the client's habits in modern societies and the recent European regulations promoting more competition mean the retail banks will encounter serious challenges for the next few years, endangering their activities. They now face an impossible compromise: maximizing the satisfaction of their hyper-connected clients while avoiding any risk of default and being regulatory compliant. Therefore, advanced and novel research concepts are a serious game-changer to gain a competitive advantage. In this context, we investigate in this thesis different concepts bridging the gap between persistent homology, neural networks, recommender engines and reinforcement learning with the aim of improving the quality of the retail banking services. Our contribution is threefold. First, we highlight how to overcome insufficient financial data by generating artificial data using generative models and persistent homology. Then, we present how to perform accurate financial recommendations in multi-dimensions. Finally, we underline a reinforcement learning model-free approach to determine the optimal policy of money management based on the aggregated financial transactions of the clients. Our experimental data sets, extracted from well-known institutions where the privacy and the confidentiality of the clients were not put at risk, support our contributions. In this work, we provide the motivations of our retail banking research project, describe the theory employed to improve the financial services quality and evaluate quantitatively and qualitatively our methodologies for each of the proposed research scenarios.

"It is now too late to stop a future collapse of our societies because of climate change." These are not the words of a tinfoil hat-donning survivalist. This is from a paper delivered by a senior sustainability academic at a leading business school to the European Commission in Brussels, earlier this year. Before that, he delivered a similar message to a UN conference: "Climate change is now a planetary emergency posing an existential threat to humanity." In the age of climate chaos, the collapse of civilization has moved from being a fringe, taboo issue to a more mainstream concern. As the world reels under each new outbreak of crisis--record heatwaves across the Western hemisphere, devastating fires across the Amazon rainforest, the slow-moving Hurricane Dorian, severe ice melting at the poles--the question of how bad things might get, and how soon, has become increasingly urgent. The fear of collapse is evident in the framing of movements such as'Extinction Rebellion' and in resounding warnings that business-as-usual means heading toward an uninhabitable planet. But a growing number of experts not only point at the looming possibility that human civilization itself is at risk; some believe that the science shows it is already too late to prevent collapse. The outcome of the debate on this is obviously critical: it throws light on whether and how societies should adjust to this uncertain landscape. Yet this is not just a scientific debate. It also raises difficult moral questions about what kind of action is warranted to prepare for, or attempt to avoid, the worst. Scientists may disagree about the timeline of collapse, but many argue that this is entirely beside the point. While scientists and politicians quibble over timelines and half measures, or how bad it'll all be, we are losing precious time.

The Israelian historian Yuval Noah Harari has achieved international fame for having written a history of Homo Sapiens (humankind), a prophetic prediction of its end, and the beginning of new species called Homo Deus: an immortal cyborg with divine powers. The book that started it all is called: Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind. In her article, Yuval Noah Harari: The age of the cyborg has begun – and the consequences cannot be known, Carole Cadwalladr asks Harari: In some ways, I say, it struck me that Sapiens isn't actually a history book – it's a philosophy book that asks the big, philosophical questions and attempts to answer them through history. I think that I see history as a philosophy laboratory. Philosophers come up with all these very interesting questions about the human condition, but the way that most of them – though not all – go about answering them is through thought experiments. When I discovered Harari, I came to think about Stephen Hawking s book: A Brief History of Time. In the book Hawking seems to want to surpass Nietzsche s declaration: God is Dead! In the introduction he presents a variety of philosophical questions, whereafter he says: Traditionally these are questions for philosophy; but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern development in science, particular physics…[See my article: A Critique of Stephen Hawking].