Samantha Hoffman is an analyst of Chinese security issues at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi). She recently published a paper entitled Engineering Global Consent: The Chinese Communist Party's Data-Driven Power Expansion. Internet pioneers heralded a time when information would be set free, giving people everywhere unfiltered access to the world's knowledge and bringing about the decline of authoritarian regimes… that's not really happened has it? Bill Clinton said that, for China, controlling free speech online would be like "nailing Jell-O to the wall". I wish he had been right.

The world of data can be chaos! New technologies, tools, products and the ever-changing industry dynamics--there sure is a lot to keep up with. So, what do you do to cut through the noise? Well… one way is to follow the greatest in the world of data science and simply hang on to their every word. We created a list of people who are followed by the humans of data around the world, share their experiences and insights regularly on social media and are well connected to the community.

Recent surveys, studies, forecasts and other quantitative assessments of the progress of AI highlighted the growth in consumers' acceptance of chatbots, especially for help with routine tasks; questions about medical AI algorithms missing the worst patient outcomes; and new predictions for 2020 and beyond about the future of AI and work. Manpower France collects 1.3 million invoices from 80,000 companies annually. After nine months of testing Sidetrade's Aimie, a traditional machine learning-based tool, Manpower found that its collections increased 12% [Fortune] The first eight IT teams at Fannie Mae to receive Moogsoft's AIOps tool have seen a 35% reduction in IT incidents over the past 12 months; the teams using the AIOps tool have cut the time needed to resolve problems by between 25% and 75%, depending on the issue; Fannie expects that when it deploys the AI system to all business units and the system gets better at pinpointing root causes, monthly incidents will decline by 50% to 60% over the next year [WSJ] Familial hypercholesterolaemia or FH is a common genetic disorder that carries a 20-times higher risk for life-threatening cardiovascular disease, but today less than 10% percent of the 1.3 million Americans born with FH are diagnosed. The FIND FH screening algorithm was trained on data from 939 clinically diagnosed individuals and 83,136 individuals presumed free of FH. The model was then applied to a national health-care encounter database (170 million individuals) and an integrated health-care delivery system dataset (174,000 individuals).

Artificial intelligence might sound like a futuristic concept, and it may be true that we're years or decades away from a generalized form of AI that can match or exceed the capabilities of the human brain across a wide range of topics. But the implications of machine learning, facial recognition and other early forms of the technology are already playing out for companies, governmental agencies and people around the world. This is raising questions about everything from privacy to jobs to law enforcement to the future of humanity. On this episode of the GeekWire Podcast, we hear several different takes from people grappling right now with AI and its implications for business, technology and society, recorded across different sessions at the recent GeekWire Summit in Seattle. Listen to the episode above, or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, and continue reading for edited excerpts. Smith: I think it's fair to say that artificial intelligence will reshape the global economy over the next three decades probably more than any other single technological force, probably as much as the combustion engine reshaped the global economy in the first half of the 20th century. One of our chapters is about AI in the workforce, and we actually start it by talking about the role of horses, the last run of the fire of horses in Brooklyn in 1922. And we trace how the transition from the horse to the automobile changed every aspect of the economy. I think the same thing will be true of AI, so we should get that right.

Join Professor Gary Shiffman for a lecture on how AI will impact the coming national security world, and what role humans will play on it. This lecture will provide an introduction to some of the key battlefields that will play out over AI, and how countries and policymakers can adapt to it. This event is part of FAST's 101 lecture series, providing accessible introductory lectures on key tech themes, so don't worry if you're not a tech expert. Foreign Affairs Science and Tech is a Graduate student club dedicated to hosting events and lectures about the cutting edge of international relations and tech. Professor Gary M. Shiffman is a professor int he School of Foreign Service who explores relationships between economic science and national security.

Debates over the benefits and risks of AI are now a day-to-day occurrence in the media, writes Professor Ben Azvine, Head of Security Research, BT. Many of these discussions focus on the potential negatives – from existential threats to employment via the automation of jobs, through to AI being used for the creation of'deep fake' videos. On the other hand, we're already benefiting from the positive effects of AI with automated assistants, while future benefits like self-driving cars are now only just over the horizon. AI will have a transformative effect across almost all technologies and industries, and cyber security is no exception. In preparation for this, my team are constantly researching the short- and long-term developments that AI could provide for both cyber attack and defence – and how we can prepare for them.

In August 2019 the UK government announced a welcome boost for artificial intelligence (AI) in health care, with £250m for a national laboratory in England. Public imagination is captivated by robots, but the new lab will prioritise technologies more likely to benefit the health system and patients in the short term, including algorithms to predict demand for hospital beds and tools that identify signs of disease from diagnostic images, all underpinned by a focus on ethical and fair AI. Many health care professionals rely on paper records and outdated technology, and struggle to access basic information at the point of care. Investment is needed, but this must be matched with a credible national strategy for AI and data analytics that focuses on the needs of patients and the health system rather than technology for technology's sake. The priorities of NHSX, the national agency for digital transformation in health care that will host the AI lab, include reducing clinicians' workloads, giving patients tools to access services directly, ensuring clinical information can be accessed safely where needed, enhancing patient safety, and improving productivity.

If humans can solve complex problems, maybe computers can imitate human brains too! This was the sole inspiration behind the evolution of AI. In today's world, artificial intelligence is doing extraordinary things, and providing smarter cybersecurity is one of them. AI software is a game-changer in the field of cybersecurity wherein it analyzes huge amounts of data that are risky in nature. It helps speed up the response time and increases security operations.

The US government has awarded a giant $10 billion cloud contract to Microsoft, the Department of Defense has confirmed. Known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), the contract will provide the Pentagon with cloud services for basic storage and power all the way up to artificial intelligence processing, machine learning, and the ability to process mission-critical workloads. It's a key contract for Microsoft as the company battles Amazon for cloud dominance, and for a while it was up in the air as to whether Microsoft or Amazon would win this particular one. IBM and Oracle were both eliminated for the bidding back in April, leaving just Microsoft and Amazon as the only companies that could meet the requirements. The contract has been controversial throughout the bidding process, and Oracle lost a legal challenge after it claimed the contract has conflicts of interest.

Not every remix is an innovation: A network perspective on the 3d-printing community. Is the Maker Movement Contributing to Sustainability? Makers' ambitions to do socially valuable things. An empirically informed taxonomy for the Maker movement. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-41267-2_35 Misuraca G., Kucsera, C., Lipparini F., Voigt C., and Radescu R., (2015) ''Mapping and Analysis of ICT-enabled Social Innovation initiatives promoting social investment in integrated approaches to the provision of social services, European Commission's Joint Research Centre, IPTS (Technical Reports).