Margrethe Vestager, the EU's new souped-up digital and big tech regulator, has promised ethical and human-centred rules on artificial intelligence (AI) in the first 100 days of her mandate. The EU can't be a leader in AI "without ethical guidelines," she told MEPs in her confirmation hearing this week. "The artificial intelligence you want must serve humans. That's a different kind of artificial intelligence" from that seen in the US and China, she said. The new rules will build on the EU's reputation as the world's foremost technology watchdog and regulator of online privacy.

Computing has developed at an amazing pace over the last few decades, but even today's computers are essentially glorified calculators, says Dr Dharmendra Modha. The founder of IBM's Cognitive Computing Group wants to change that. He wants our computers to think more like humans. Modha and his team are designing a cognitive computing chip and software ecosystem inspired by the human brain. It would consume far less power and space than today's computers and could power everything from search and rescue robots in hazardous environments to intelligent buoys which float on ocean waves, predicting tsunamis or warning of oil pollution.

ShotSpotter (Nasdaq: SSTI), a gunshot detection, location and forensic analysis provider, announces the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted the company U.S. Patent No. 10,424,048 entitled "Systems and Methods Involving Creation and/or Utilization of Image Mosaics in Classification of Acoustic Events." ShotSpotter's real-time gunshot detection solution uses a two-step process that employs both machine classification and human review. The system can distinguish with high accuracy whether a loud, impulsive sound detected by its acoustic sensors is a gunshot or a non-gunshot incident, such as fireworks, in less than 60 seconds, according to the company. The innovation behind the patent granted to ShotSpotter covers the conversion of multiple features of the audio event into a set of visual displays that are combined into a single image mosaic. This enables the system to leverage deep learning neural networks that typically identify and classify images, not sounds.

The Sun is the most important source of energy in the solar system. It is important for life to thrive on Earth but at the same time, can cause disruptions. Solar Flares - a sudden flash near sunspots occasionally accompanied by coronal mass ejection can cause interference in communication systems and even power grids. The Sun is an important factor that can impact the weather in space and on Earth, is constantly monitored by an array of telescopes and satellites. Scientists have figured out a more reliable method to study the spherical ball of plasma.

"Any nation that leads in Artificial intelligence, will be the ruler of the world"--Vladimir Putin Since time immemorial mercenaries were used to wage wars on foreign lands by Kings. Mercenaries were so effective that a King from Hungary, in the 15th century, had a standing mercenary army. It is a pragmatic strategy to deploy a trained manpower in prolonged high-casualty war zone, that is highly motivated, effective, and keeps the cost of the war and mission low. Behemoth countries like America and Russia have now decided to adopt autonomous weapon system (AWS) that work on artificial intelligence (AI), to spearhead their aggressive policy abroad. AI is the mercenary of 21st century!!! India has so far been reticent in relying on artificial intelligence due to the trepidation of losing control over the game play of events.

A growing number of empirical studies suggest that negative advertising is effective in campaigning, while the mechanisms are rarely mentioned. With the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and Russian intervention behind the Brexit and the 2016 presidential election, people have become aware of the political ads on social media and have pressured congress to restrict political advertising on social media. Following the related legislation, social media companies began disclosing their political ads archive for transparency during the summer of 2018 when the midterm election campaign was just beginning. This research collects the data of the related political ads in the context of the U.S. midterm elections since August to study the overall pattern of political ads on social media and uses sets of machine learning methods to conduct sentiment analysis on these ads to classify the negative ads. A novel approach is applied that uses AI image recognition to study the image data. Through data visualization, this research shows that negative advertising is still the minority, Republican advertisers and third party organizations are more likely to engage in negative advertising than their counterparts. Based on ordinal regressions, this study finds that anger evoked information-seeking is one of the main mechanisms causing negative ads to be more engaging and effective rather than the negative bias theory. Overall, this study provides a unique understanding of political advertising on social media by applying innovative data science methods. Further studies can extend the findings, methods, and datasets in this study, and several suggestions are given for future research.

Satellite imaging is a critical technology for monitoring and responding to natural disasters such as flooding. Despite the capabilities of modern satellites, there is still much to be desired from the perspective of first response organisations like UNICEF. Two main challenges are rapid access to data, and the ability to automatically identify flooded regions in images. We describe a prototypical flood segmentation system, identifying cloud, water and land, that could be deployed on a constellation of small satellites, performing processing on board to reduce downlink bandwidth by 2 orders of magnitude. We target PhiSat-1, part of the FSSCAT mission, which is planned to be launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) near the start of 2020 as a proof of concept for this new technology.

Limited angle CT reconstruction is an under-determined linear inverse problem that requires appropriate regularization techniques to be solved. In this work we study how pre-trained generative adversarial networks (GANs) can be used to clean noisy, highly artifact laden reconstructions from conventional techniques, by effectively projecting onto the inferred image manifold. In particular, we use a robust version of the popularly used GAN prior for inverse problems, based on a recent technique called corruption mimicking, that significantly improves the reconstruction quality. The proposed approach operates in the image space directly, as a result of which it does not need to be trained or require access to the measurement model, is scanner agnostic, and can work over a wide range of sensing scenarios.

Siddhant T. is a lawyer who is so concerned about his privacy that he wanted his name changed for this story. And so, when an airline representative at New Delhi's Indira Gandhi airport suggested he check in with his face for a flight to Bangalore in September, he bristled -- and then declined. The representative looked confused and called a befuddled supervisor, who repeated what his colleague had said. "I just sort of looked at them in disbelief," said Siddhant, "and then shuffled off immediately to check in the old-fashioned way." Later that day, he posted a picture of his boarding pass to his Instagram.

The Pentagon, taking the next big step of deploying artificial intelligence to aid troops and help select battlefield targets, must settle lingering ethical concerns about using the technology for waging war. Search giant Google dealt a blow last year to the military's maiden artificial intelligence, or AI, program sorting drone footage. Thousands of employees protested working on surveillance technology they said eventually could be used to kill. The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is pushing ahead with a new series of AI projects that will be rolled out to commanders over the coming year with an expected funding boost from Congress. At the same time, a defense board is hammering out ethical guidelines for the cutting-edge technology.