The New York Times has confirmed what some have long suspected: The Chinese government is using a "vast, secret system" of artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology to identify and track Uighurs--a Muslim minority, 1 million of whom are being held in detention camps in China's northwest Xinjiang province. This technology allows the government to extend its control of the Uighur population across the country. It may seem difficult to imagine a similar scenario in the U.S., but related technologies, built by Amazon, are already being used by U.S. law enforcement agencies to identify suspects in photos and video. And echoes of China's system can be heard in plans to deploy these technologies at the U.S.-Mexico border. A.I. systems also decide what information is presented to you on social media, which ads you see, and what prices you're offered for goods and services.

It's common knowledge that Barack Obama met the woman who eventually became his wife, Michelle Robinson, when he came to work at her law firm as a summer associate. George W. Bush met the future Mrs. Bush, who was Laura Welch back then, at a barbecue and took her mini-golfing the next day. And we all remember that Bill and Hillary Clinton were law school sweethearts. The historical record is full of these president-and-first-lady origin stories: Harry Truman was just 6 when he met the woman he would go on to marry, in church. So it's only natural to ask how the current crop of presidential candidates' how-they-met stories stack up.

The UK is about to introduce restrictions on watching pornography of a kind never before seen in the world. The government is planning to stop children being damaged by watching adult content by stopping anyone from doing so unless they go through a "rigorous" age verification process. Websites that aren't part of the blocks could find themselves being punished or blocked entirely within the UK. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

From big players to small and midsize businesses, every organization has faced the impact of cyber threats at some point. But, the new generation of automated cyber attacks will affect multiple businesses to an unimaginable extent. With the onset of the digital age, going online became a necessity for every business. Most business processes, data storage, and data exchange are now handled digitally. Data has become such a significant asset that companies have started monetizing their data.

"Artificial intelligence" can be defined as the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks that normally require human intervention. Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used in new products and services across numerous industries and for a variety of policy-related purposes, raising questions about the resulting legal implications, including its effect on individual privacy. Aspects of AI related to privacy concerns are the ability of systems to make decisions and to learn by adjusting their code in response to inputs received over time, using large volumes of data. Following the European Commission's declaration on AI in April 2018, its High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence (AI HLEG) published Draft Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI in December 2018. A consultation process regarding this working document concluded on February 1, 2019, and a revised draft of the document based on the comments that were received is expected to be delivered to the European Commission in April 2019.

Understanding the dynamics of international politics is important yet challenging for civilians. In this work, we explore unsupervised neural models to infer relations between nations from news articles. We extend existing models by incorporating shallow linguistics information and propose a new automatic evaluation metric that aligns relationship dynamics with manually annotated key events. As understanding international relations requires carefully analyzing complex relationships, we conduct in-person human evaluations with three groups of participants. Overall, humans prefer the outputs of our model and give insightful feedback that suggests future directions for human-centered models. Furthermore, our model reveals interesting regional differences in news coverage. For instance, with respect to US-China relations, Singaporean media focus more on "strengthening" and "purchasing", while US media focus more on "criticizing" and "denouncing".

Big data solutions are designed to cope with data of huge Volume and wide Variety, that need to be ingested at high Velocity and have potential Veracity issues, challenging characteristics that are usually referred to as the "4Vs of Big Data". In order to evaluate possibly complex big data solutions, stress tests require to assess a large number of combinations of sub-components jointly with the possible big data variations. A formalization of the Design of Experiments (DoE) on big data solutions is aimed at ensuring the reproducibility of the experiments, facilitating their partitioning in sub-experiments and guaranteeing the consistency of their outcomes in a global assessment. In this paper, an ontology-based approach is proposed to support the evaluation of a big data system in two ways. Firstly, the approach formalizes a decomposition and recombination of the big data solution, allowing for the aggregation of component evaluation results at inter-component level. Secondly, existing work on DoE is translated into an ontology for supporting the selection of experiments. The proposed ontology-based approach offers the possibility to combine knowledge from the evaluation domain and the application domain. It exploits domain and inter-domain specific restrictions on the factor combinations in order to reduce the number of experiments. Contrary to existing approaches, the proposed use of ontologies is not limited to the assertional description and exploitation of past experiments but offers richer terminological descriptions for the development of a DoE from scratch. As an application example, a maritime big data solution to the problem of detecting and predicting vessel suspicious behaviour through mobility analysis is selected. The article is concluded with a sketch of future works.

The ACLU and other groups urged Amazon to halt selling facial recognition technology to law enforcement departments. Lending tools charge higher interest rates to Hispanics and African Americans. Job hunting tools favor men. Negative emotions are more likely to be assigned to black men's faces than white men. Computer vision systems for self-driving cars have a harder time spotting pedestrians with darker skin tones.

Shares of Qualcomm soared 23% Tuesday – and remained up Wednesday – in the wake of a late-afternoon filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, wherein the company announced that it reached a "multi-year" "global patent license agreement" and "chipset supply agreement" with Apple that settles the companies' yearslong intellectual property litigation and appears likely to work out to the benefit of both parties. In said filing with the SEC, Qualcomm states that as of April 1, 2019, it has directly licensed its relevant patents to Apple for at least the next six years, with the option to extend the agreement for an additional two years. Moreover, Qualcomm will supply chipsets to Apple for use in the latter's devices for several years at least. In exchange, Apple will make a one-time payment of an unspecified amount to Qualcomm, and pay continuing royalties to boot – also in an amount unspecified. Robotic advances: Mush! Watch a team of Boston Dynamics' SpotMini robot dogs pull a truck down the street Finally, "all worldwide litigation" between the two combatants "will be dismissed and withdrawn," including lawsuits against Apple's contract manufacturers. Qualcomm is expected to report earnings on May 1, at which time the company promises to provide "further updates" on the details of its agreement with Apple.

Apple has settled a major argument with chip maker Qualcomm that could help change the future of the iPhone. The two companies were locked in a bitter and worldwide international dispute about the technology that iPhones use to connect to the internet. The pair had been expected to try and resolve the dispute in legal hearings in San Diego, in a case that involved Apple's key iPhone suppliers. But just as that case began, the surprise truce was announced, with few details of the settlement being revealed. We'll tell you what's true.