BEIJING - People.cn, the online unit of China's influential People's Daily, is boosting its numbers of human internet censors backed by artificial intelligence to help firms vet content on apps and adverts, capitalizing on its unmatched Communist Party lineage. Demand for online censoring services provided by the Shanghai-listed People.cn has soared since last year after China tightened its already strict online censorship rules. As a unit of the People's Daily -- the ruling Communist Party's mouthpiece -- it is seen by clients as the go-to online censor. Investors concur, lifting shares in People.cn "The biggest advantage of People.cn is its precise grasp of policy trends," said An Fushuang, an independent analyst based in Shenzhen.

Air pollution kills--scientists have known this for many years. But how do they know? The global scientific community has developed and agreed upon a framework that draws on multiple lines of evidence across different scientific disciplines to assess the existence and strength of links between air pollution and health. In the United States, federal policies require use of this science-based framework to ensure that air pollution standards protect the public's health. But now this science-based policy process--and public health--are at risk.

Amazon's Alexa needs its own robotic body to reach its full potential, creators of the smart assistant say. It may mean future versions of the popular gadget are able to follow their owners around the house and listen to conversations with greater ease. Rohit Prasad, head scientist at Amazon's Alexa division, claims the only way to rid the AI-assistant of its shackles is to'give it eyes and let it explore the world'. He said this would be the only way for the devices to better understand the ambiguity and complexity of human language. Rohit Prasad, head scientists at Amazon's Alexa division, claims the only way to rid the AI-assistant of its shackles is to give it'eyes to explore the world'.

AI software being tested by the US defence department could one day lead to systems for keeping tabs on employees, experts have warned. The Defense Security Service (DSS) project monitors all online activity of employees with top-secret clearance - including emails, social media use and websites visited. It's trained to detect'micro changes' in the behaviour of employees looking for evidence untrustworthy employees and the future risks they may pose. The system would analyse employee data from their online activity and the information they provided through initial screening processes. If the pilot proves successful it could provide a model for the future of corporate AI, civil liberties groups suggest.

President Donald Trump and his top U.S. military adviser met with Google's CEO about concerns that Silicon Valley's AI collaborations in China may benefit the Chinese military. Such worries reflect awareness of how certain technologies developed for civilian purposes can also provide military advantages in the strategic competition playing out between the United States and China. The meeting comes after General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, leveled pointed criticism at Google for pursuing technological collaborations with Chinese partners, during his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on 14 March. The spotlight's glare on Google grew harsher when President Trump followed up on Twitter: "Google is helping China and their military, but not the U.S. Terrible!" But beyond the focus on Google, the Pentagon seems more broadly concerned about U.S. tech companies inadvertently giving China a leg up in developing AI applications with military and national security implications.

The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) is organizing the Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence Forum on April 5. The event will take place at Concordia's 4TH SPACE, an innovative and immersive venue for state-of-the-art installations, which will permit leading experts from around the world to gather to discuss this emerging technology's implication for human rights. MIGS has convened thought leaders and practitioners with the goal of understanding how new technologies are disrupting global affairs. MIGS has worked with Global Affairs Canada and Tech Against Terrorism to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can counter online extremism and how non-state actors might use AI for nefarious purposes. MIGS has also presented work on AI at the Hague Digital Diplomacy Camp organized by the Dutch Foreign Ministry.

Government usually isn't the place to look for innovation in IT or new technologies like artificial intelligence. But Ott Velsberg might change your mind. As Estonia's chief data officer, the 28-year-old graduate student is overseeing the tiny Baltic nation's push to insert artificial intelligence and machine learning into services provided to its 1.3 million citizens. "We want the government to be as lean as possible," says the wiry, bespectacled Velsberg, an Estonian who is writing his PhD thesis at Sweden's Umeå University on using the Internet of Things and sensor data in government services. Estonia's government hired Velsberg last August to run a new project to introduce AI into various ministries to streamline services offered to residents.

The amount of available data raises at large steps. Developing machine learning strategies to cope with the high throughput and changing data streams is a scope of high relevance. Among the prediction tasks in online machine learning, multi-target regression has gained increased attention due to its high applicability and relation with real-world problems. While reliable and effective solutions have been proposed for batch multi-target regression, the few existing solutions in the online scenario present gaps which should be further investigated. Among these problems, none of the existing solutions consider the occurrence of inter-target correlations when making predictions. In this work, we propose an extension to existing decision tree based solutions in online multi-target regression which tackles the problem mentioned above. Our proposal, called Stacked Single-target Hoeffding Tree (SST-HT) uses the inter-target dependencies as an additional information source to enhance accuracy. Throughout an extensive experimental setup, we evaluate our proposal against state-of-the-art decision tree-based solutions for online multi-target regression tasks on sixteen datasets. Our observations show that SST-HT is capable of achieving significantly smaller errors than the other methods, whereas only increasing the needed time and memory requirements in small amounts.

Question answering over knowledge base (KB-QA) has recently become a popular research topic in NLP. One popular way to solve the KB-QA problem is to make use of a pipeline of several NLP modules, including entity discovery and linking (EDL) and relation detection. Recent success on KB-QA task usually involves complex network structures with sophisticated heuristics. Inspired by a previous work that builds a strong KB-QA baseline, we propose a simple but general neural model composed of fixed-size ordinally forgetting encoding (FOFE) and deep neural networks, called FOFE-net to solve KB-QA problem at different stages. For evaluation, we use two popular KB-QA datasets, SimpleQuestions and WebQSP, and a newly created dataset, FreebaseQA. The experimental results show that FOFE-net performs well on KB-QA subtasks, entity discovery and linking (EDL) and relation detection, and in turn pushing overall KB-QA system to achieve strong results on all datasets.

Verizons 5G lab is creating new and innovative ways to take advantage of the speed of 5G. Sure, the next generation of wireless will bring you faster phones, smarter tech and seamless services. But could 5G also make your privacy vulnerable? While you often hear that 5G promises to eventually rev-up health care, self-driving cars, virtual reality, even entire "smart" cities, what you don't hear quite as often is how it raises the stakes on privacy and security. "5G implies faster speeds for good guys and for bad guys," reminds Galina Datskovsky, CEO of Vaporstream, a secure messaging company in Chicago.