The US has added 28 Chinese organisations to the Entity List for their suspected involvement in human rights and privacy violations against Muslim minority groups, particularly the Uyghur. As a result, the action will prohibit trade between the 28 entities and US companies. The Department of Commerce has not specified reasons for blacklisting the organisations, apart from ruling that they were "acting contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States". Among the trade-blocked companies are Hikvision and Dahua Technology, two of the world's largest video surveillance suppliers and manufacturers that have been implicated in AI surveillance operations and data collection against Muslim minorities. The Department of Commerce's report stated: "Specifically, these entities have been implicated in human rights violations and abuses in the implementation of China's campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, and high-technology surveillance against Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the XUAR [Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region]."

The Internet of Things (IoT) has turned into a guide of digital transformation for some companies across industries. The disruptive innovation enables organizations to remain associated with their users to give a definitive customer experience. For instance, in view of the insights it can uncover, companies can come up with one of a kind, creative approaches to appreciate and impact customer movement including behavior and purchasing patterns. With that, they can change the way buyers' access data while furnishing organizations with significant information which can help increase financial advantages. Utilizing IoT for activities, for example, predictive maintenance and resource management alone has the potential monetary impact of $4 trillion to $11 trillion by 2025. Out of the 8.4 billion devices everywhere throughout the world, just 1% are connected.

The United States is blacklisting a group of Chinese tech companies that develop facial recognition and other artificial intelligence technology that the U.S. says is being used to repress China's Muslim minority groups. A move Monday by the U.S. Commerce Department puts the companies on a so-called Entity List for acting contrary to American foreign policy interests. The blacklist effectively bars U.S. firms from selling technology to the Chinese companies without government approval. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a written statement Monday that the U.S. government "will not tolerate the brutal suppression of ethnic minorities within China." The blacklisted companies include Hikvision and Dahua, both of which are global providers of video surveillance technology.

A NASA Frontier Development Lab (FDL) team has shown that by using deep learning, it is possible to virtually monitor the Sun's extreme ultraviolet (EUV) irradiance, which is a key driver of space weather. The Sun is vital for survival, but solar flares, which typically occur a few times a year, have the potential to cause severe disruptions in space and on Earth. These disruptions can impact spacecraft, satellites and even systems here on Earth, including GPS navigation, radio communications and the power grid. Deep learning can help get more value out of our current ability to monitor the Sun by providing virtual instruments to supplement physical devices. This research will be published in Science Advances on October 2, 2019 ("A deep learning virtual instrument for monitoring solar extreme ultraviolet spectral irradiance").

Farmers around the world are facing the urgent question of how to sustainably feed a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 -- and the answer, in part, might be found nestled among the cornstalks and soybeans on a farm a short distance from Washington, D.C. The fields are outfitted with a network of high-tech sensors that could revolutionize how food is grown across the globe by putting data in the hands of farmers and scientists in ways unimaginable a few years ago. The sensors are part of a groundbreaking new partnership between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The 7,000-acre farm at the USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland is using FarmBeats, a project that aims to harness data and artificial intelligence to help farmers cut costs, increase yields and sustainably grow crops that are more resilient to climate change. "We can't simply double our acreage to produce this food," says Dan Roberts, research leader at the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Research Laboratory, located at the Beltsville center.

Employee activism and outside pressure have pushed big tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Google into promising to slash their carbon emissions. When Microsoft held an all-staff meeting in September, an employee asked CEO Satya Nadella if it was ethical for the company to be selling its cloud computing services to fossil fuel companies, according to two other Microsoft employees who described the exchange on condition they not be named. Such partnerships, the worker told Nadella, were accelerating the oil companies' greenhouse gas emissions. Microsoft and other tech giants have been competing with one another to strike lucrative partnerships with ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and other energy firms, in many cases supplying them not just with remote data storage but also artificial intelligence tools for pinpointing better drilling spots or speeding up refinery production. The oil and gas industry is spending roughly $20 billion each year on cloud services, which accounts for about 10% of the total cloud market, according to Vivek Chidambaram, a managing director of Accenture's energy consultancy.

Donald Trump's latest salvo against China threatens to derail a $1 billion coming-out party for a prominent startup backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., while curtailing the country's broader ambitions of leading artificial intelligence in the coming decade. The US placed eight Chinese technology giants on a US blacklist on Monday, accusing them of being implicated in human rights violations against Muslim minorities in the country's far-western region of Xinjiang. Among those singled out for sweeping American export restrictions were SenseTime Group Ltd., the world's largest AI startup, and Megvii Technology Ltd. -- two giant enterprises Beijing is counting on to spearhead advances into a revolutionary technology, aided by billions of dollars in foreign backing. The White House's actions -- announced days before sensitive trade negotiations resume in Washington -- cast a pall over not just Megvii's capital-raising effort but the burgeoning Chinese sector. Leading players like SenseTime and Megvii, already having trouble securing financing during an economic downturn, had considered international forays to sustain a sizzling pace of growth.

But they will get here faster if states and the federal government invest in infrastructure to promote their development. Investments could include a lane on the highway that is restricted to autonomous trucks. The investments might also include special parking lots built near exits on the interstate where drivers take autonomous trucks from a regional warehouse, get out, and push the go button freeing the truck to drive autonomously to another parking lot near an interstate exit where a driver is waiting to catch the truck. The investments could even include incentives for telecommunications companies to improve the cellular coverage along certain interstates or the placement of different types of sensors along a road that communicate directly with autonomous trucks. Should states make these investments?

Picking up steam in 1997 with Intel opening of a microchip factory and an $800 million USD investment, Costa Rica has since blossomed into a key tech hub in Latin America, according to an article from Nearshore Americas. But leaving the landmark Intel investment aside (the factory is now closed), the country is fostering growth through government spending in the space, high public funds devoted to education and tax-friendly technology parks that attract investors and talent from around the globe. With a population of five million inhabitants and 51,000 square kilometers, the number of companies in the country has reached over 546 IT companies, 3,447 manufacturing (including medical components), and performed 12,281 various commercial activities by 2018. This activity generated over 300,000 jobs, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Census. One of the major fields in the current technological revolution is artificial intelligence (AI), of which a high amount of development is occurring in Costa Rica.

The British Library on London's Euston Road is probably best known for its oldest items. The longest-surviving pieces among its 200 million-strong collection are Chinese oracle bones believed to date from about 1,500 BC. Other notable items in its ownership include one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks and, fittingly for the world's largest library, a copy of what it is recognised as the world's oldest mechanically printed book – the Gutenberg Bible. But for all its ties to the past, the library (pictured above) also houses a growing movement towards the future. Founded in 2015, The Alan Turing Institute is the UK's national research institution for data science and – since 2017 – artificial intelligence.