There is a growing consensus among policymakers that bringing high-quality evidence to bear on public policy decisions is essential to supporting the effective and efficient government their constituencies want and need. At the U.S. federal level, this view is reflected in a recent Congressional report by the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, which recommends creating a data infrastructure that enables "a future in which rigorous evidence is created efficiently, as a routine part of government operations, and used to construct effective public policy."4 This article describes a new approach to data infrastructure for fact-based policy, developed through a partnership between our interdisciplinary organization Research Improving People's Livesa and the State of Rhode Island.13 Together, we constructed RI 360, an anonymized database that integrates administrative records from siloed databases across nearly every Rhode Island state agency. The comprehensive scope of RI 360 has enabled new insights across a wide range of policy areas, and supports ongoing research into improving policies to alleviate poverty and increase economic opportunity for all Rhode Island residents (see the sidebar "Policy Areas in which RI 360 Has Contributed Insights").

Elon Musk has once again issued a stark warning over his fears about the rise of artificial intelligence. The Telsa CEO shared a pair of tweets today that stated it will not be long until'advanced AI' manipulates social media. Musk has suggested sites closely watch to see if bot swarms are evolving faster, as this could be a dead giveaway of a robot takeover. Elon Musk shared a pair of tweets today that stated it will not be long until'advanced AI' manipulates social media'Anonymous bot swarms deserve a closer examination. If they're evolving rapidly, something is up', reads the second tweet.

A massive $16.28 million microwave weapon system designed to'disrupt' and'damage' drones is set to be tested overseas for operational evaluations. Called PHASER, this military owned devices uses electromagnetic pulse to take down swarms of enemy drones. The news of the high-powered device's deployment comes just weeks after a fleet of 10 drones attacked a refinery and oil field in Saudi Arabia. The weapon is mounted on a 20-ft. The device's parameters can be set to'disrupt' or'damage'.

A timeline for putting the first Europeans on the surface of the moon will be in place by the end of the year, the European Space Agency has announced. David Parker, the agency's Director of Human and Robotic Exploration, made the comments during a space conference in Wales earlier this week. Plans for a European moonshot are already in motion, he added, part of which would see the construction of a space station in orbit above the lunar surface. The lunar gateway would provide not only a stepping stone to the moon but also to Mars, as well as providing a test bed to explore how space living impacts humans. Dr Parker -- who is also the former head of the UK Space Agency -- discussed the plans during the 2019 UK Space Conference that was held in Newport, Wales, from September 24–26.

Even governments are vying for 5G supremacy.

Angelo Yu is not afraid of Donald Trump. This year, Yu's auto startup in southwestern China is set to deliver its first vehicle to a U.S. buyer, but he has not even bothered to check how much President Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods might affect him. After all, he has a workaround -- even if it sounds like the stuff of science fiction. Pix Moving, Yu's company, is using artificial intelligence to design cars and convert the blueprints into instructions for 3D printers. His vision is to upload the data to the cloud and let his team in the U.S. print all the components there.

The threat of a no-deal Brexit is causing staff at several universities in the UK to stockpile scientific equipment, including protective gloves and fly food, New Scientist has learned. Researchers say they want to ensure their experiments can continue should imports of materials be disrupted after the UK's planned exit from the European Union on 31 October. Giorgio Gilestro at Imperial College London says he and his colleagues have collected extra stores of the ingredients needed to make food for the thousands of fruit flies he uses in his experiments. "The yeast is produced in France and travels via Belgium. The agar is imported from Japan. Polenta comes from Italy and fructose from Belgium," he says.

Science needs to understand and predict how climate change--and the growing onslaught of hurricanes, fires, and floods it's bringing--affects tropical forests. Will the forests respond to the assault with shorter trees? Will they store less carbon, or support less tree and plant diversity and fewer wildlife species? To better understand the effects a changing climate will have on tropical forests, Maria Uriarte, Columbia University professor of ecology, evolution, and environmental biology, needs to analyze images of forests. These bird's-eye view images are the size of a postage stamp.

Vivienne Ming, a theoretical neuroscientist and cofounder of Socos Labs in Berkeley, California, defines artificial intelligence (AI) as "any autonomous and artificial system that can make a decision under uncertainty and make expert human judgements cheaper, faster, and increasingly, in some domains, better than a human can." AI has already been widely applied across business, social, and government sectors. But if it's not applied carefully, AI can lead to distorted results or decisions and potentially exclude historically marginalized or underrepresented populations. On a recent episode of the Urban Institute's podcast, Critical Value, Ming discusses three approaches to minimize the risk of AI supporting problematic or biased outcomes. If AI is trained on biased data and learns from biased samples, the system can reproduce bias that originated from discriminatory human decisions and practices.

This month, the NHS signed its first deals with Google. Five NHS trusts have agreed contracts with Google Health, after it swallowed up its UK sister firm DeepMind Health, nearly a year after signalling its intention to do so. New Scientist first revealed the extent of DeepMind's access to the sensitive data of more than a million National Health Service patients back in 2016, in a deal that the UK's data watchdog later found breached the law. The partnership has yielded interesting research, including using artificial intelligence to detect eye disease from scans with an accuracy that matches or exceeds human experts. But is there a material difference now the deals are with the US tech giant rather than DeepMind, and should people who use the NHS be concerned at the change?