The following is adapted from a joint release from the MIT Press and the Harvard Data Science Initiative. The MIT Press and the Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI) have announced the launch of the Harvard Data Science Review (HDSR). The open-access journal, published by MIT Press and hosted online via the multimedia platform PubPub, an initiative of the MIT Knowledge Futures group, will feature leading global thinkers in the burgeoning field of data science, making research, educational resources, and commentary accessible to academics, professionals, and the interested public. With demand for data scientists booming, HDSR will provide a centralized, authoritative, and peer-reviewed publishing community to service the growing profession. The first issue features articles on topics ranging from authorship attribution of John Lennon-Paul McCartney songs to machine learning models for predicting drug approvals to artificial intelligence (AI).

FOR TWO years reports of mass incarceration have seeped out of the remote Chinese province of Xinjiang. Over 1m people, mainly Uighurs and other Muslim minorities, have been locked up in camps. Millions more live under a police state. American officials, fearful of upending trade negotiations, have dithered over a response. On October 7th, three days ahead of the 13th round of talks, they put their foot down.

The astronauts set for the Artemis mission to the moon will put on suits that may look like today's gear, but will be redesigned with new technology to accomplish more complex tasks. The new space suits are set to allow for better mobility, allowing them to lift their arms and objects over their head and flexibility at the hips and knees, for smoother travel over the lunar surface. NASA also plans to take full-body, 3D scans of each astronaut to provide them with the most comfort and broadest range of motion. A famous video of Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, floating around the web that shows the American astronaut bunny hopping across the lunar surface – and this is one of the issues NASA hopes to eliminate with the new design. The new space hear is set to have interchangeable parts that can be used for spacewalks in microgravity or on a planetary surface.

Boris Johnson's most senior aide, Dominic Cummings, is facing conflict of interest accusations over a consultancy role he undertook for a government-endorsed healthcare startup that is in position to receive a share of a new £250m flagship public fund. Cummings advised Babylon Health, a controversial artificial intelligence (AI) firm working within the NHS, on its communications strategy and its senior recruitment, an investigation by the Guardian and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal. A GP app developed by the company was later backed publicly on multiple occasions by the health secretary, Matt Hancock. The former Vote Leave campaign director's formal role with Babylon concluded in July last year but he continued to advise the firm about recruitment until September 2018 – the same month Hancock visited the firm and told staff he wanted the NHS to help the company expand. In August this year, shortly after Boris Johnson entered No 10 with Cummings as his top adviser, Downing Street and the Department of Health announced a £250m fund to boost the use of AI in the NHS by using automated systems for diagnoses or data analysis.

Artificial intelligence is already being deployed and applied in a wide range of situations to boost productivity, increase sales, or improve user experiences. One area that AI use is still in its infancy is cybersecurity. Yet, at a time when hackers' ability to commit fraud and cause harm is more sophisticated than it's ever been, leveraging every tool is paramount if you want to stay ahead of the curve. In addition, the average enterprise is seeing a steady growth in the number and type of users, devices, networks, and interfaces thanks to great strides made in cloud computing, the Internet of Things, 5G, network speeds, data volume, and other contemporary technologies. When deployed in concert with other defensive mechanisms, AI can be a powerful weapon against cyberattacks.

This week on Off the Shelf, Booz Allen Hamilton's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Team, vice president Jeff Kimmons and directors Graham Gilmer, Kathleen Featheringham, and Justin Betof, discuss how to operationalize AI and machine learning (ML) to support the Department of Defense mission. The Booze Allen Hamilton (BAH) AI team highlight how the federal government is engaging and evolving with AI and the unique challenges and opportunities that entails. Among the changes is a focused organizational structure and key champions supporting AI development and deployment across the Department of Defense, including the Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Tea, (aka Project Maven) and the Joint AI Center (the JAIC). The group also highlights and outlines a holistic approach to AI development that delivers mission centric AI services. Everyone can build AI in a lab--the challenging it getting it to work in real-world environments--and the BAH AI team outlines key strategies necessary to getting it done.

One day in 2005, a mother in Evanston, Ill., joined Flickr. Then she more or less forgot her account existed. Years later, their faces are in a database that's used to test and train some of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems in the world. The pictures of Chloe and Jasper Papa as kids are typically goofy fare: grinning with their parents; sticking their tongues out; costumed for Halloween. None of them could have foreseen that 14 years later, those images would reside in an unprecedentedly huge facial-recognition database called MegaFace.

Surrounded by enemy fire, trapped in a valley between mountains and unable to use certain sensors, drones, fire-control and radar applications, a forward-positioned Army infantry unit suddenly finds itself with no radio, sensors, electronics... or GPS. Their communications are jammed, disabled and rendered useless, making them isolated and vulnerable to lethal air and ground attacks. Does this outnumbered infantry unit have any options with which to avoid destruction? How can they get air support or armored vehicle reinforcement? This very realistic possible threat scenario, increasingly becoming more ominous with modern technical advances, is precisely why the Army is moving quickly to modernize its arsenal of electronic weapons -- and further integrate them with cyber systems.

Economic intersectionality can refer to the compounded effects of any combination of characteristics associated with economic disadvantage. In this article, we focus on differing levels of automation-based challenges for African American men and women of various ages and education levels in rural and urban America. We project that African Americans in the 13 community archetypes we analyzed may have a higher rate of job displacement than workers in other segments of the US population due to rising automation and gaining a smaller share of the net projected job growth between 2017 and 2030. By 2030, the employment outlook for African Americans--particularly men, younger workers (ages 18–35), and those without a college degree--may worsen dramatically. Additionally, we find that African Americans are geographically removed from future job growth centers and more likely to be concentrated in areas of job decline.

Today, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that Amazon Textract, a machine learning service that quickly and easily extracts text and data from scanned documents is now eligible for healthcare workloads that require HIPAA certification. This launch builds upon the existing portfolio of AWS artificial intelligence services that are HIPAA-eligible, including Amazon Translate, Amazon Comprehend, Amazon Transcribe, Amazon Polly, Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Rekognition – that help deliver better healthcare outcomes. Healthcare providers routinely extract text and data from documents such as medical records and forms through manual data entry or simple optical character recognition (OCR) software. This is a time-consuming and often inaccurate process that produces outputs requiring extensive post-processing before it can be used by other applications. What organizations want instead is the ability to accurately identify and extract text and data from forms and tables in documents of any format and from a variety of file types and templates.