Flood forecasts are crucial for effective individual and governmental protective action. The vast majority of flood-related casualties occur in developing countries, where providing spatially accurate forecasts is a challenge due to scarcity of data and lack of funding. This paper describes an operational system providing flood extent forecast maps covering several flood-prone regions in India, with the goal of being sufficiently scalable and cost-efficient to facilitate the establishment of effective flood forecasting systems globally.

Assessing regulatory compliance of personal financial advice is currently a complex manual process. In Australia, only 5%- 15% of advice documents are audited annually and 75% of these are found to be non-compliant(ASI 2018b). This paper describes a pilot with an Australian government regulation agency where Artificial Intelligence (AI) models based on techniques such natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and deep learning were developed to methodically characterise the regulatory risk status of personal financial advice documents. The solution provides traffic light rating of advice documents for various risk factors enabling comprehensive coverage of documents in the review and allowing rapid identification of documents that are at high risk of non-compliance with government regulations. This pilot serves as a case study of public-private partnership in developing AI systems for government and public sector.

There are many ways in which Artificial Intelligence can potentially benefit society – but doing so requires a radically different data sharing model. Public and political interest in AI technologies has dramatically increased over the last couple of years. Previously dismissed as a territory for nerds and computer freaks, few topics make the headlines quite as frequently these days. Most of these headlines paint a rather bleak picture, making exaggerated claims about the loss of jobs in the wake of AI or predicting a digital Cold War. One of the most watched TED talks on the topic is titled, "Artificial Intelligence: It will kill us."

California lawmakers have passed a bill that bans law enforcement from using facial recognition technology gathered by body cameras – in a bid to end privacy abuse. The bill, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, will go into effect in 2020 and last for three years. The motion also prohibits cops from using biometric surveillance including other forms of identification that can be capture from body camera videos. California lawmakers have passed a bill that bans law enforcement from using facial recognition technology gathered by body cameras – in a bid to end privacy abuse. The bill is first of its kind in the US and recognizes that'the use of facial recognition and other biometric surveillance is the functional equivalent of requiring every person to show a personal photo identification card at all times in violation of recognized constitutional rights.

Oculus co-founder has designed a drone that is capable of seeking out its targets and ramming them head on in order to destroy them. In a video demonstration, Interceptor seeks out its opponent and charges at it 100 miles per hour, ultimately hurdling both of them to the ground. The company claims it is capable of neutralizing threats in any environment, day or night, and according to its creator, the device'almost always survives and returns to base.' Interceptor is the brainchild of Anduril, which was founded by Palmer Luckey who also co-founded Oculus - the Facebook owned company that designs virtual reality technology. 'The best way to kill fast drones piloted by hostile humans is with even faster drones piloted by AI!' said Luckey on Twitter. 'The United States cannot allow the skies of the world to turn into the Wild West, our ability to take out aerial threats in a matter of seconds is part of the solution.'

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents numerous opportunities to benefit society; however, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OIPC), together with numerous international counterparts, have been urging the adoption of national strategies to ensure the responsible use of AI and mitigate the risks to privacy and data associated with same. Recognizing that AI poses challenges to privacy, data protection and human rights, the Declaration on Ethics and Data Protection in Artificial Intelligence was adopted at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners. This Declaration aims to "preserve human rights in the development of artificial intelligence" by endorsing the following six guiding principles: While the OIPC continues to monitor AI developments in Canada and internationally, the Government of Canada has also been active in addressing potential issues arising from the use of such technologies. For example, Canada is among the first countries to announce a national strategy for AI. The Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy, a $125-million investment in AI, was announced in the 2017 Federal Budget, with a main objective of supporting research on AI.

In just about every submarine movie, there's a scene where the heroes, aboard one sub, engage the villains, in another, in some sort of deep-sea shootout. Neither side knows exactly where the other is, and the savvier captain usually the good guy -- turns that ambiguity to deadly advantage. A new program seeks to apply artificial intelligence to ocean data and thereby help submarine operators understand where their adversaries are, what they're doing, and what they can see. Even today's best sonar technology doesn't give a sub captain a very good sense of the battlespace, says Jules Jaffe, a research oceanographer at Scripps Oceanography at the University of California San Diego who is embarking on the U.S. Navy program. "What the submariners get is a low-dimensional picture. So if you are towing an array, you get information like bearing and sometimes frequency information," Jaffe said at the Defense One / Nextgov Genius Machines Summit here on Tuesday.

The Crew Interactive Mobile CompaniON (CIMON) mobile astronaut assistant, which is equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), returned to Earth on 27 August 2019. The SpaceX CRS-18 Dragon spacecraft carrying CIMON was undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) at 16:59 CEST; the capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean approximately 480 kilometres southwest of Los Angeles and was recovered at 22:21 CEST. "We expect CIMON to return to Germany at the end of October," reports Christian Karrasch, CIMON Project Manager at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) Space Administration. He looks back on the past few months: "CIMON is a technology demonstration that has completely met our expectations. During its initial operation in space – a 90-minute mission with the German ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst on the ISS in November 2018 – it showed that it functions well in microgravity conditions and can interact successfully with astronauts. We are very proud to have been the first to use AI on the Space Station and have been working for several months on an improved successor model. With CIMON, we were able to lay the foundations for human assistance systems in space to support astronauts in their tasks and perhaps, in the future, to take over some of their work."

Using AI on the battlefield is the stuff of 80s movie fantasies. "There will be times where the machines make the mistake. We're not looking for the omniscient machine that is never wrong. What we're looking for are machines that have been tested to the point where we have the trust that the AI will do what it is designed to do, and hopefully be able to explain why it made the decision it did." Read commentary about the expected real world impact and US policy.

An artificial intelligence documentary based on a speech given by Jim Hagemann Snabe, Chairman at Siemens, at the 2019 AI for Good Global Summit. In his speech, Jim speaks of how we can use Artificial Intelligence to help solve the challenges faced by humanity today, and warns against the misuse of Artificial Intelligence. The AI for Good Global summit is an annual event hosted by the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Find out more about the annual AI for Good Global Summit here: https://aiforgood.itu.int/ Speech written and spoken by Jim Hageman Snabe Film written, edited, & directed by Marc Janssens: www.marcjcontent.com