Logitech's popular Harmony universal remotes have long been the go-to solution for tech-savvy nerds who want to replace the bounty of ugly rectangles littering their coffee tables with a single, all-powerful option. But universal remotes are still pretty complex on their own, with dozens of buttons and, in some cases, LCD screens. You're basically swapping several remotes for something that looks like it belongs in one of NASA's Mission Control Centers. Now, there's something simpler: the Harmony Express, a compact universal remote that replaces a slew of buttons with Amazon Alexa voice controls. The $250 Express isn't meant to replace the Harmony Elite, which Logitech released back in 2015 and is still one of the best high-end universal remotes around.

A former electronics whiz kid, he has squandered his youth on dilettantish studies in physics and anthropology, followed by a series of botched get-rich-quick schemes. His parents are dead, his friends (if they exist) go unmentioned, and his employment consists of forex trading on an old laptop in his two-room apartment. He seems to leave home only to buy chocolate at a local newsstand or, once, after noticing a pain in his foot, to have an ingrown toenail removed, an apt literalization of his enervating self-involvement. Perhaps out of some desire for correction, Charlie sells his mother's house to finance the purchase of Adam, one of twenty-five cutting-edge androids built to serve as an "intellectual sparring partner, friend and factotum." The impulsive slacker is all too ready to exchange his birthright for a mess of wattage.

Application of decision support systems for conflict modeling in information operations recognition is presented. An information operation is considered as a complex weakly structured system. The model of conflict between two subjects is proposed based on the second-order rank reflexive model. The method is described for construction of the design pattern for knowledge bases of decision support systems. In the talk, the methodology is proposed for using of decision support systems for modeling of conflicts in information operations recognition based on the use of expert knowledge and content monitoring.

Last Wednesday, US lawmakers introduced a new bill that represents one of the country's first major efforts to regulate AI. There are likely to be more to come. It hints at a dramatic shift in Washington's stance toward one of this century's most powerful technologies. Only a few years ago, policymakers had little inclination to regulate AI. Now, as the consequences of not doing so grow increasingly tangible, a small contingent in Congress is advancing a broader strategy to rein the technology in.

AI is continuing to permeate every aspect of human society, and the field of healthcare is no different. In fact, AI is already shaping this incredibly impactful and lucrative sector in such aspects as early-intervention scans, prediction models, and in the monitoring of patients with particular diagnoses. President Trump recently signed an Executive Order prioritizing the regulation and development of AI, and with this important development firmly in mind, it is time to take a look at the future advantages and disadvantages that will likely play out as AI continues to impact upon the healthcare sector. Costs in healthcare are already spiraling out of control as costly research practices, equipment and medicines escalate the financial impact upon ordinary people. Yet the way in which costs most greatly manifest in healthcare is through human resources.

This week, the European Union published a set of ethical guidelines detailing how businesses and governments can achieve trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI)--that is, AI that is lawful, ethical, and socially and technologically robust. While these guidelines are not laws, they set out a framework for lawmakers and companies to achieve trustworthy AI. "The EU's new Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI are a considered and constructive step toward addressing the impact of trustworthy AI on humankind, and toward laying the groundwork for necessary further discussion between key stakeholders in the private, public and governmental sectors," Juan Miguel de Joya, a consultant at the International Telecommunication Union and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's US Technology Policy Committee, told TechRepublic. SEE: Artificial intelligence: A business leader's guide (free PDF) (TechRepublic) The EU's new guidelines should start conversations among businesses worldwide that may not have the resources to independently assess the impact of the technology, de Joya said. "Perhaps most fundamentally and significantly, release of the new guidelines is an opportunity for government, business, computing professionals and other stakeholders--particularly in the United States--to capture and channel the momentum of these discussions into real understanding of AI's potential and pitfalls," de Joya said. These guidelines are "a welcome, solid and significant step forward," Lorraine Kisselburgh, a visiting fellow in the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) at Purdue University, and a member of the Association for Computing Machinery's US Technology Policy Committee, told TechRepublic.

Ask a layman about artificial intelligence and they might point to sci-fi villains such as HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey or the Terminator. But the co-founders of the AI Now Institute, Meredith Whittaker and Kate Crawford, want to change the conversation. Instead of talking about far-flung super-intelligent AI, they argued on the latest episode of Recode Decode, we should be talking about the ways AI is affecting people right now, in everything from education to policing to hiring. Rather than killer robots, you should be concerned about what happens to your résumé when it hits a program like the one Amazon tried to build. "They took two years to design, essentially, an AI automatic résumé scanner," Crawford said. "And they found that it was so biased against any female applicant that if you even had the word'woman' on your résumé that it went to the bottom of the pile." That's a classic example of what Crawford calls "dirty data." Even though people think of algorithms as being ...

Eric Horvitz is a technical fellow and director at Microsoft Research Labs. A recipient of the Feigenbaum and the Allen Newell Prizes for contributions to artificial intelligence (AI), he is also on the US President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He is also part of the standing committee of Stanford University's One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence. Horvitz, who comes at least once a year to the country to interact with the India labs team, spoke about his work at Microsoft Research. He also shared his thoughts on the benefits and fear of AI, and attempts to address the bias in algorithms.

The Chinese government is using facial-recognition software to "track and control" a predominantly Muslim minority group, according to a disturbing new report from The New York Times. The Chinese government has reportedly integrated artificial intelligence into its security cameras to identify the Uighurs and appears to be using the information to monitor the persecuted group. The report, based on the accounts of whistleblowers familiar with the systems and a review of databases used by the government and law enforcement, suggests the authoritarian country has opened up a new frontier in the use of A.I. for racist social control--and raises the discomfiting possibility that other governments could adopt similar practices. Two people familiar with the matter told the Times that police in the Chinese city of Sanmenxia screened whether residents were Uighurs 500,000 times in a single month. Documents provided to the paper reportedly show demand for the technology is ballooning: more than 20 departments in 16 provinces sought access to the camera system, in one case writing that it "should support facial recognition to identify Uighur/non-Uighur attributes." This, experts say, is more than enough to raise red flags.

When Merdis Wells visited the diabetes clinic at the University Medical Center in New Orleans about a year ago, a nurse practitioner checked her eyes to look for signs of diabetic retinopathy, the most common cause of blindness. At her next visit, in February of this year, artificial intelligence software made the call. The clinic had just installed a system that's designed to identify patients who need follow-up attention. The Food and Drug Administration cleared the system -- called IDx-DR -- for use in 2018. The agency said it was the first time it had authorized the marketing of a device that makes a screening decision without a clinician having to get involved in the interpretation.