Fox News Flash top headlines for August 30 are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com A personal assistant to President Trump who had been with the administration since Trump took office, Madeleine Westerhout, abruptly resigned Thursday, reportedly after it was determined she shared private information about the president with reporters. Westerhout allegedly shared intimate details about the president's family and life during an off-the-record dinner with reporters near Bedminster, N.J., where Trump was on vacation. Her desk sat outside the Oval Office and she was often seen alongside Trump.

In her new book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Ruha Benjamin breaks down the "New Jim Code," technology design that promises a utopian future but serves racial hierarchies and racial bias. When people change how they speak or act in order to conform to dominant norms, we call it "code-switching." And, like other types of codes, the practice of code-switching is power-laden. Justine Cassell, a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute, creates educational programs for children and found that avatars using African American Vernacular English lead Black children "to achieve better results in teaching scientific concepts than when the computer spoke in standard English." But when it came to tutoring the children for class presentations, she explained that, "We wanted it [the avatar] to practice with them in'proper English.' Standard American English is still the code of power, so we needed to develop an agent that would train them in code-switching."

There is a joke spies like to tell. They say prostitution is the world's oldest profession, and espionage is the second. Now, that self-proclaimed second-oldest profession is facing a seismic shift: Artificial intelligence is pervading to the intelligence community. American intelligence isn't what it used to be. Some of the types of secrets are changing, morphing from hidden gems cemented behind walls of government hush-hush to emerging signals washed out by open-source noise.

The 2019 World Artificial Intelligence (AI) Conference (WAIC) took place in Shanghai (China) on 27 August. The Conference was devoted to AI applications in relation to Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). The Conference was sponsored by the Government of the Jinshan District, which hosts the "UAS Base", and organised by the Aircraft owner and Pilot Association (AOPA) of China. In was attended by about 200 international experts from several countries of the world. In addition to Chinese experts, presentations were delivered by speakers coming from Germany, Malaysia, Korea, Thailand, USA and Italy.

Machine Learning Digest is a curated weekly news overview for those who are concerned about the Machine Learning development across a spectrum of industries. It provides brief summaries and links to articles and news, describing the most remarkable events in the ML sphere. Banana is the world's most popular fruit and its global population is going to amount to 10 billion in 2050. Banana is a crucial source of nutrition and is an essential fruit for many people. Still, a number of pests and diseases are to damage the plants.

Welcome back to EURACTIV's Digital Brief, your weekly update on all things digital in the EU. You can subscribe to the newsletter here. Jumping straight back into the EU's digital agenda for the coming mandate, we recently heard Greek MEP Eva Kaili's thoughts on the big issues for the next five years. She highlighted concerns that the EU's data protection framework, the GDPR, could obstruct AI development on the bloc, saying that "if Article 22 of the GDPR is applied to AI tools, automated decision-making systems would be faced with regulatory backstops aimed at safeguarding the rights of data subjects." Staying with Artificial Intelligence, EU defence ministers are convening in Helsinki this week to discuss, amongst other things, the intersections between Artificial Intelligence and Defence.

A robot pilot is learning to fly. It has passed its pilot's test and flown its first plane, but it has also had its first mishap too. Unlike a traditional autopilot, the ROBOpilot Unmanned Aircraft Conversion System literally takes the controls, pressing on foot pedals and handling the yoke using robotic arms. It reads the dials and meters with a computer vision system. The robot can take off, follow a flight plan and land without human intervention. ROBOpilot is a drop-in system meaning that the pilot's seat is removed and replaced with the robot.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning must be judiciously used, such as when monitoring internet of things devices, says David De Roure, professor of e-research at the University of Oxford, who offers insights on IoT risk management. "We can use AI and ML to improve the resilience of our systems and improve the responsiveness to the changing circumstances," De Roure says in an interview with Information Security Media Group during IoT India Congress held in Bengaluru. "But every time we add anything to these already complex systems [for IoT devices], we are introducing new complexity, new vulnerabilities, new opportunities both for failure and for susceptibility to attack." De Roure is a professor of e-research at the University of Oxford. From 2009 to 2013 he held the post of National Strategic Director for e-Social Science and was subsequently a Strategic Advisor to the UK Economic and Social Research Council.

Billionaire techpreneurs Jack Ma and Elon Musk faced off over AI in a much-anticipated morning session at the Shanghai World Artificial Intelligence Conference on Thursday, and although sparks didn't actually fly it was clear to the packed audience that they each have a different vision of the future. "AI will open a new chapter so that humans will know themselves better," said Jack Ma, Alibaba Group Holding founder. "Most of the projections about AI are wrong … people who are street-smart about AI are not scared by it." The conference has attracted executives from nearly 300 companies including US firms Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Qualcomm as well as scientists and scholars from across the world. Both men had to condense their visions of the future into a compact 45-minute session, which also included answering a series of pre-prepared questions from Chinese netizens.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may help develop safe, clean and virtually limitless fusion energy for generating electricity, scientists say. A team, including researchers from Princeton University and Harvard University, are applying deep learning to forecast sudden disruptions that can halt fusion reactions and damage the doughnut-shaped tokamaks or apparatus that house the reactions. Deep learning is a powerful new version of the machine learning form of AI, according to the findings published in the journal Nature magazine. "This research opens a promising new chapter in the effort to bring unlimited energy to Earth," Steven Cowley, director of US Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). "Artificial intelligence is exploding across the sciences and now it's beginning to contribute to the worldwide quest for fusion power," Cowley said in a statement.