Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained geo-strategic importance. Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted that whoever became the leader in the field would rule the world. Countries are jostling to stay ahead of the game. China, UK, France, Germany, Finland, Canada, Japan, South Korea, India, Singapore, Mexico, Kenya, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), among others, have released national plans to promote the development and use of AI. They are very different, each building on the country's strengths.

The Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) has issued a warning of a new type of cyber attack, using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to impersonate senior company executives. In this method, instructions are given to the companies staff members to perform transactions such as money transfers, as well as malicious activity on the company's network. Recently, reports on cyber attacks of this kind were received at the operations centre of the INCD, Xinhua news agency reported. The new offensive is of the business email compromise (BEC) type -- frauds by email against commercial and government organizations to motivate employees using social engineering methods to act for the attacker"s benefit. The most common types are phishing messages and an invoicing fraud in which the attacker impersonates the vendor, submits an invoice to the company and tries to motivate an employee under time pressure to make a bank transfer, provide information or allow access to the company"s network.

The Pentagon is set to award a $10bn "war cloud" contract to a technology company next month, with both Amazon and Microsoft competing for the chance to build a military-grade AI computing system. The Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (Jedi) plan faces a number of obstacles before the US defence department makes its decision next month, not least from within the companies' own work forces. Microsoft employees published an open letter on Medium last year, pleading the tech giant to not bid on the Jedi contract. "Many Microsoft employees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war," they wrote. We'll tell you what's true.

Facial recognition could be used to replace swipe cards on public transport, the New South Wales government has suggested, but the opposition and digital rights groups say it would pose a risk to privacy. The transport minister, Andrew Constance, said on Tuesday he wanted commuters "in the not too distant future" to be able to board trains using only their faces, with no need for Opal cards, barriers or turnstiles. "I'm about to outline some concepts which may seem pretty crazy and far-fetched," he told the Sydney Institute on Tuesday. "But look at it this way – who would have thought in 1970 that you'd be able to use a handheld device to have a video conversation with someone on the other side of the world? "I want people to not think about their travel.

All deep learning systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks; while cause for concern, it also sparks research that may lead to better, more accountable, artificial intelligence. All deep learning systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, researchers warn. Tiny alterations to the input can cause these neural networks to classify pictures or other data totally incorrectly. While cause for concern, this also sparks research that may lead to better, more accountable, artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (AI) based on neural networks has made spectacular progress in recent years.

Topic modeling analyzes documents to learn meaningful patterns of words. Dynamic topic models capture how these patterns vary over time for a set of documents that were collected over a large time span. We develop the dynamic embedded topic model (D-ETM), a generative model of documents that combines dynamic latent Dirichlet allocation (D-LDA) and word embeddings. The D-ETM models each word with a categorical distribution whose parameter is given by the inner product between the word embedding and an embedding representation of its assigned topic at a particular time step. The word embeddings allow the D-ETM to generalize to rare words. The D-ETM learns smooth topic trajectories by defining a random walk prior over the embeddings of the topics. We fit the D-ETM using structured amortized variational inference. On a collection of United Nations debates, we find that the D-ETM learns interpretable topics and outperforms D-LDA in terms of both topic quality and predictive performance.

Koios Medical, the leader in ultrasound diagnosis decision support software, announces its second 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Koios DS (Decision Support) Breast 2.0 is intended for use to assist physicians analyzing breast ultrasound images and aligns a machine learning generated probability of malignancy with the appropriate BI-RADS category. This milestone is an important step in advancing the company's mission of empowering physicians to improve diagnostic accuracy. Now cleared for use at the point of care (or connected to an image viewer for studies stored on PACS), Koios Medical's advancements represent a huge leap forward in using artificial intelligence in healthcare by bringing the power of deep learning to physicians' fingertips. Koios DS Breast 2.0 represents the most advanced AI-based diagnostic technology for ultrasound image analysis to date.

Technology can be dazzling but also debilitating to real human progress, and when I say "progress" I do not mean advancements in the world of machines but advancements in the world of people, and one does not necessarily lead to the other. First, I fully recognize that whenever anyone attempts to criticize technological innovation they take the risk of being labeled a "crackpot" or an "outdated fossil", a barbaric relic of a foregone era. However, this attitude is an ignorant one. It assumes that the path we are on as a species is one of perpetual improvement as long as we continue to follow the great technology god; but what if this assumption is completely wrong? What if we are actually devolving rather than evolving? I'm not here to grunt and shake my spear at the wheel and the combustion engine and the programmable computer – I like all these things.

The next SpaceX mission to the International Space Station (ISS) may be uncrewed, but it could nonetheless eventually help humanity extend its footprint far beyond low Earth orbit. The company's robotic Dragon cargo capsule is scheduled to launch toward the ISS atop a Falcon 9 rocket on July 21 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. In addition to food, water and other supplies, Dragon will be toting 2,500 lbs. A fair number of these payloads have a distinct space-settlement flavor. For example, the BioRocks experiment will investigate how microbes interact with rocks in a low-gravity environment, potentially paving the way for "biomining" on the moon and Mars.

Employees and contractors at the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services spend countless hours every year reviewing thousands of medical records to ensure the accuracy of Medicare Advantage payments. An automated intake tool is working to change that. Using emerging technologies such as robotic process automation, optical character recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence, KPMG's Intake Process Automation Tool ingests records as they are submitted and identifies potential problems according to set parameters, submission rules and coding guidance. Specifically, RPA orchestrates the steps of the intake process, OCR digitizes the scanned document and then AI and machine learning are applied to understand the document and extract the information necessary to validate the information. Intake PA stands to save CMS time and money, said Payam Mousavi, KPMG's lead director for intelligent automation for governments and the technical lead for the CMS project.