One day in 2017, Alexa went rogue. When Martin Josephson, who lives in London, came home from work, he heard his Amazon Echo Dot voice assistant spitting out fragmentary commands, seemingly based on his previous interactions with the device. It appeared to be regurgitating requests to book train tickets for journeys he had already taken and to record TV shows that he had already watched. Josephson had not said the wake word – "Alexa" – to activate it and nothing he said would stop it. It was, he says, "Kafkaesque". This was especially interesting because Josephson (not his real name) was a former Amazon employee.

WASHINGTON/BEIJING – The Trump administration on Tuesday slapped travel bans on Chinese officials involved in a massive crackdown on Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in its west. The State Department said it would not issue visas to Chinese government and Communist Party officials believed to be responsible for or complicit in mass detentions and abuses in Xinjiang province. It did not identify the officials or say how many were affected by the ban, which can also be applied to their immediate family members. U.S. lawmakers have specifically asked for action against Chen Quanguo, the Communist Party chief for Xinjiang and a member of the party's powerful Politburo, and U.S. officials have previously mentioned him when saying the Trump administration was considering sanctions against officials linked to China's crackdown on Muslims. Chen earlier led iron-fisted policies aimed at crushing dissent in Tibet and has gained a reputation within the party for his handling of minority groups.

Hijacking IP addresses is an increasingly popular form of cyber-attack. This is done for a range of reasons, from sending spam and malware to stealing Bitcoin. It's estimated that in 2017 alone, routing incidents such as IP hijacks affected more than 10 percent of all the world's routing domains. There have been major incidents at Amazon and Google and even in nation-states -- a study last year suggested that a Chinese telecom company used the approach to gather intelligence on western countries by rerouting their internet traffic through China. Existing efforts to detect IP hijacks tend to look at specific cases when they're already in process.

Novel applications of artificial intelligence can endanger people in new ways. As AI is integrated into new parts of our lives, we must keep safety and security in the development and maintenance of AI systems top of mind. Last year at Data & Society, we convened experts from a number of fields, including cybersecurity, machine learning, computer science, political science, national security, activism, and advocacy, to conceptualize the greatest opportunities and challenges to building safe and secure socio-technical systems. Among our most significant findings was a rift between what it means to make something "safe" and make something "secure." Safety and security have different valences for different communities.

But only one booth had a line. Attendees stood patiently, every so often oohing and aahing over the featured device. Some turned to strangers, remarking, "Isn't this just the cutest?" or "That's just incredible." Others asked when they could purchase their own. Tombot is one of many startups selling robotic companions for senior citizens, offering emotional support, day-to-day assistance, or remote monitoring through artificial intelligence.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has named Carnegie Mellon University as an Influenza Forecasting Center of Excellence, a five-year designation that includes $3 million in research funding. For four of the past five years, Carnegie Mellon's forecasting efforts have proven the most accurate of all the research groups participating in the CDC's FluSight Network. In addition to expanding CMU's existing forecasting research, the new funding will enable CMU to initiate studies on how to best communicate forecast information to the public and to leaders. It will also support efforts to determine how forecasting techniques might apply to pandemics -- the rare occasions when a truly novel strain of flu is prevalent around the world. Roni Rosenfeld, head of CMU's Machine Learning Department and leader of its epidemic forecasting efforts, said the designation of CMU and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst as the first two CDC flu forecasting centers of excellence marks a coming of age for the epidemic forecasting community.

Robots are critical for expanding humanity off-planet. They help not just with exploring distant parts of the universe, but also with advancing our economic activity into Earth orbit. We spoke with Gordon Roesler, who formerly led DARPA's Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites program. We asked for his thoughts on the potentials and difficulties facing space robotics, as well as how individuals can involve themselves in this exciting field. What are some of the most important ways that space robotics can make space more accessible, and which of these ways are most feasible?

Showcased solutions range from health data protection to green sea turtle tracking and smart fire extinguishing systems. The 2019 edition of IoT Solutions World Congress (IOTSWC) will feature a new specific area under the name IoT Solutions.Font that will focus on startups with original and innovative IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain-based products and services. In its first year, it will hold a total of 10 companies from around the globe who have already tested their products in the market and have shown a real potential for internationalization. These startups will showcase their solutions in the exhibition area, take part in networking activities and compete to access an acceleration program. The participating companies provide solutions ranging from cybersecurity to data analysis and enhanced fire extinguishing equipment monitoring.

The Australian construction industry is far behind the rest of the world when it comes to digital innovation – a critical ingredient in meeting the demands of our rapidly growing population. With immense building and infrastructure pipelines in our cities, we must, as a nation and an industry, embrace digital innovation and artificial intelligence in order to unlock greater efficiencies, improved productivity and accuracies to future-proof our cities, particularly as we face scarcity in labour resources. Infrastructure planning and delivery requires a very specific skillset, not one that is easily transferable from the building sector. It should be home grown through our university system and imported from overseas through skilled migrants as our general population and transportation requirements are growing so quickly that we can't keep up. Simply, there's more work than there are skilled workers.

Regression analysis is a standard supervised machine learning method used to model an outcome variable in terms of a set of predictor variables. In most real-world applications we do not know the true value of the outcome variable being predicted outside the training data, i.e., the ground truth is unknown. It is hence not straightforward to directly observe when the estimate from a model potentially is wrong, due to phenomena such as overfitting and concept drift. In this paper we present an efficient framework for estimating the generalization error of regression functions, applicable to any family of regression functions when the ground truth is unknown. We present a theoretical derivation of the framework and empirically evaluate its strengths and limitations. We find that it performs robustly and is useful for detecting concept drift in datasets in several real-world domains.