The ability of governments and law enforcement agencies to monitor the public using facial recognition was once the province of dystopian science fiction. But modern technology is increasingly bringing versions of these scenarios to life. A recent investigation found that U.S. law enforcement agencies are using state Department of Motor Vehicles records to identify individual Americans without their consent, including those with no criminal record. And countries such as China have made facial recognition technology a cornerstone of their strategies to police the behaviors and activities of their publics. Despite these high-profile examples from fiction and reality, a new Pew Research Center survey finds that a majority of Americans (56%) trust law enforcement agencies to use these technologies responsibly.

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The latest research from MeriTalk finds what while artificial technology (AI) development is viewed by many in government and industry as still in the blush of youth, the technology is poised to rapidly outgrow its present suit of clothes. The research project – conducted by MeriTalk and underwritten by Pure Storage – polled government and industry executives and IT decision makers at this summer's AI World Government event, who said among other top-line findings that hybrid cloud infrastructure is a key enabler for AI adoption, and that the military and intelligence agencies are expected to lead Federal government's push into AI tech adoption. We sat down last week with Nick Psaki, Federal CTO at Pure Storage, to get his thoughts on the research results, and his longer-term outlook on how AI adoption is likely to gain momentum in the coming years before becoming an ultimately ubiquitous technology layer that will leave an indelible mark on society. MeriTalk: In examining the AI study results, what are the most important findings for Federal government officials that are currently undertaking AI or robotic process automation (RPA), or are considering doing so? Psaki: Two things jump out – the current feelings about AI maturity, and then the time to breakthrough to mission-critical tasks. On the first one, if you add respondents who said AI development is between "a little" (42 percent) and "moderately" (48 percent) mature, combined that's a big number (90 percent).

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) are pleased to announce that Marietje Schaake has been named to international policy roles in each of their organizations. At FSI, Schaake will serve as the first international policy director of the Cyber Policy Center. With a focus on cybersecurity, disinformation, digital democracy and election security, the Cyber Policy Center's research, teaching and policy engagement aims to bring new insights and solutions to national governments, international institutions and industry. Schaake will also be an international policy fellow at Stanford HAI, which seeks to advance artificial intelligence (AI) research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition. The university-wide institute is committed to working with industry, governments and civil society organizations that share the goal of a better future for humanity through AI.

Facebook together with the Partnership on AI, Microsoft, and academics are making a deepfake dataset, benchmark, and public challenge with up to $10 million in grants and awards to spur innovation and make it easier to spot fake content. The Deepfake Detection Challenge will be put together with support from academics at Cornell Tech, MIT, University of Oxford, UC Berkeley, University at Albany-SUNY, and University of Maryland, College Park. The challenge will also have a leaderboard to identify top deepfake detection systems. The deepfake dataset will be released during the NeurIPS conference, which takes in December in Vancouver, Canada. "This is a constantly evolving problem, much like spam or other adversarial challenges, and our hope is that by helping the industry and AI community come together we can make faster progress," Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer said in a blog post to announce the competition today.

Government interest in AI has picked up recently, and lots of government officials are actually beginning to question the very same issues company professionals have been asking 2 or maybe 3 years back. Governments as well as big NGOs are actually beginning to purchase AI, spending budget as well as time on pilot programs for different AI talks and applications with folks of the field on the future implications of the technology. With the summer, our founder spoke at a joint UN INTERPOL conference of Singapore on the implications of AI for police. Much more recently, he spoke at the UN in Geneva on the present uses of AI, completed a speaking tour for the World Bank across Asia and Europe during which he discussed how AI might help improve healthcare in developing nations, as well as spoke with generals as well as colonels learning at National Defense Faculty in Washington DC. As machine learning abilities develop, world governments will probably spend a lot more in AI studies. IDC estimated the US government's investment in artificial and cognitive intelligence technologies will develop at a CAGR of 54.3 % between 2018 2021.

Must have: cool head, moral compass and the will to say no to generals, scientists and even presidents. The Pentagon is looking for the right person to help it navigate the morally murky waters of artificial intelligence (AI), billed as the battlefield of the 21st century. "One of the positions we are going to fill will be someone who's not just looking at technical standards, but who's an ethicist," Lt Gen Jack Shanahan, director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) at the US defense department, told reporters last week. "I think that's a very important point that we would not have thought about this a year ago, I'll be honest with you. In Maven [a pilot AI machine learning project], these questions really did not rise to the surface every day, because it was really still humans looking at object detection, classification and tracking. There were no weapons involved in that."

The experiment will test whether machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) can effectively cluster similar proposals and recommendations from'like minded citizens' on the Consul digital democracy platform. This should make it easier for citizens on the platform with shared interests to find each other and work together. The experiment will generate insights on whether this increases the number of citizen proposals that receive sufficient support from other citizens to trigger further action by local governments. NLP allows computers to understand, interpret and extract key information from human language. Around the world digital democracy platforms are engaging new groups of people and empowering citizens to contribute to policy making.

Trips to other parts of Tokyo's technology centers helped round out the impression that Japan was becoming a major player--albeit quieter than its neighbors--within the global startup ecosystem. Visiting ZMP Inc. demonstrated the future of mobility, as this company is focused on the goal of being the "robot of everything" driving a more convenient lifestyle for everyone. This means level-four completely autonomous self-driving vehicles (a 2020 goal of Prime Minister Abe and Information Technology Minister Hirai), mass deployment of logistics robots (automated delivery) and focus on the needs of the country's aging society. Spending time with Shift Technology, I saw the well-demonstrated results of its partnership with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to innovate within Japan's second largest insurance market by leveraging technology to make insurance claims more efficient. Peter Haslebacher of Shift said, "If you succeed in Japan, you can make it in any market", referring to the complexity and homogeneity found within the Japanese ecosystem--a great challenge for any ambitious startup.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently attended the 5th Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok, Russia. PM Modi was invited as the chief guest of the forum by Mr.Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. Speaking at the forum, PM Modi announced that India would extend a $1 billion line of credit towards the development of the Russian Far East. He reminded that this move was in line with India's policy of'Act East'. Along with PM Modi, a delegation of business leaders from India attended the forum.