In the lead-up to the 2016 election, very few predicted the degree to which online misinformation would disrupt the democratic process. Now, as we edge closer to 2020, there is a heightened sense of vigilance around new threats to truth in our already fragile information ecosystem. At the top of the list of concerns is no longer Russian bots, but deepfakes, the artifical intelligence-manipulated media that can make people appear to do or say things that they never did or said. The threat is being taken so seriously that last Thursday, the House intelligence committee held Congress's first hearing on the subject. In his opening remarks, Representative Adam Schiff, the committee chairman, talked of society being "on the cusp of a technological revolution" that will qualitatively transform how fake news is made.

TEHRAN - Iran said on Sunday a "spy drone" had encroached its airspace in May, about a month before it downed an American drone as part of a series of escalatory incidents between Tehran and Washington. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted a map saying the U.S.-made MQ9 Reaper drone -- also widely used for carrying out military strikes -- had entered his country's airspace on May 26. Iran shot down a U.S. Global Hawk drone Thursday, saying it had violated its airspace near the strategic Strait of Hormuz -- a claim the United States denies. U.S. President Donald Trump called off a planned retaliatory military strike Friday, saying the response would not have been "proportionate," with Tehran warning any attack would see Washington's interests across the Middle East go up in flames. On Sunday U.S. national security adviser John Bolton cautioned Iran against misinterpreting the last-minute cancellation.

Dell EMC, subsidiary of Dell Technologies brands, said Wednesday it was looking into investing in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, blockchain, data analytics, and cloud-compliance. This new investment plan was designed with the aim of retaining the company's top position in India's server market. "The clients are looking to tap these technologies, which is why we are bringing in servers that allow them to optimize on traditional workloads as well as invest into new age workloads such as cloud, artificial intelligence, analytics, and blockchain," said Manish Gupta, senior director and general manager of Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell EMC India, the Economic Times, an Indian daily, reported. The clients of Dell EMC India include major local IT firms, banks, financial organizations, and insurance companies. This list also includes the Indian government which is reportedly taking a keen interest in blockchain applications.

The EU's top AI experts say regulation should focus on high-risk applications. Europe needs rules to make sure artificial intelligence won't be used to build up a China-style high-tech surveillance state, the European Union's top AI experts warn. An expert panel is set to present to the bloc's leaders a list of 33 recommendations on how to move forward on AI governance Wednesday, including a stark warning against the use of AI to control and monitor citizens. In a 48-page final draft of the document, obtained by POLITICO, the experts urge policymakers to define "red lines" for high-risk AI applications -- such as systems to mass monitor individuals or rank them according to their behavior -- and discuss outlawing some controversial technology. "Ban AI-enabled mass-scale scoring of individuals," the expert group demands, adding that there needs to be "very clear and strict rules for surveillance for national security purposes and other purposes claimed to be in the public or national interest."

Nisha Rataria remembers the moment that she understood the power of technology to significantly improve a child's learning and comprehension. As a teacher at the public Vidhya Nagar Primary School in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, Rataria teaches students from across the spectrum – bright, struggling, poor and middle class. A few years ago, her school implemented an artificial-intelligence based education program called EnglishHelper that provides a suite of tools to help children learn to speak, read and write English. Many of her students, who she says could not even recognize the alphabet, could now read English with some confidence. By the end of the 2019-2020 school year, EnglishHelper and ReadToMe could be used by nearly 20 million students worldwide.

Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley Jr., director of Defense Intelligence Agency, gives insight on recent Iranian attacks on tankers and a surveillance drone. EXCLUSIVE – Iran is likely at "an inflection point," and the recent attacks on tankers and the downing of a U.S. surveillance drone appear to be part of an effort to change "the status quo," the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) told Fox News exclusively. "I'd say that they're probably at an inflection point right now," the director, Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley Jr., explained in his first national TV interview as the leader of the nearly 17-thousand strong agency. Director Ashley said, based on their activity over the last several years, the Iranians would probably say they were in a "favorable" position with their influence over the Iraqi government and the likelihood their longtime regional ally -- Syrian President Bashar al-Assad -- will remain in power. But, Director Ashley -- whose agency's mission is to understand foreign militaries and the operational environment -- said the United States' withdrawal from the Iran deal and subsequent sanctions made a major impact on the regime.

Danelle is CMO at Blue Hexagon. She has more than 15 years of experience bringing new technologies to market. Prior to Blue Hexagon, Danelle was VP Marketing at SafeBreach where she built the marketing team and defined the Breach and Attack Simulation category. Previously, she led strategy and marketing at Adallom, a cloud security company acquired by Microsoft. She was also Director, Security Solutions at Palo Alto Networks, driving growth in critical IT initiatives like virtualization, network segmentation and mobility.

Lastly, any use of AI that might lead to a lethal result would require the greatest level of oversight of all DoD's AI systems. This top layer could include systems that are weaponized (even if the weapon itself is not initiated by AI) and systems that may have lethal outcomes (such as cyber tools that may result in lethal effects). One of the goals of a working group overseeing this top layer may be the creation of an oversight body that includes members from outside of the executive branch, including from the legislative branch and from nongovernmental organizations (such as civil liberties advocates and experts from academia). The working group could create policies to dictate how often programs are reviewed by this oversight body, which milestones trigger a review, and so on.

Combining the concepts of individual and group fairness, we search for discrimination by matching individuals in different protected groups to each other, and comparing their classifier outcomes. Specifically, we formulate a GAN-based approximation of the optimal transport mapping, and use it to translate the distribution of one protected group to that of another, returning pairs of in-distribution samples that statistically correspond to one another. We then define the flipset: the set of individuals whose classifier output changes post-translation, which intuitively corresponds to the set of people who were harmed because of their protected group membership. To shed light on why the model treats a given subgroup differently, we introduce the transparency report: a ranking of features that are most associated with the model's behavior on the flipset. We show that this provides a computationally inexpensive way to identify subgroups that are harmed by model discrimination, including in cases where the model satisfies population-level group fairness criteria.

In the last five years, private companies, research institutions as well as public sector organisations have issued principles and guidelines for ethical AI, yet there is debate about both what constitutes "ethical AI" and which ethical requirements, technical standards and best practices are needed for its realization. To investigate whether a global agreement on these questions is emerging, we mapped and analyzed the current corpus of principles and guidelines on ethical AI. Our results reveal a global convergence emerging around five ethical principles (transparency, justice and fairness, non-maleficence, responsibility and privacy), with substantive divergence in relation to how these principles are interpreted; why they are deemed important; what issue, domain or actors they pertain to; and how they should be implemented. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating guideline-development efforts with substantive ethical analysis and adequate implementation strategies.