Numerous, artificially intelligent, networked things will populate the battlefield of the future, operating in close collaboration with human warfighters, and fighting as teams in highly adversarial environments. This chapter explores the characteristics, capabilities and intelli-gence required of such a network of intelligent things and humans - Internet of Battle Things (IOBT). The IOBT will experience unique challenges that are not yet well addressed by the current generation of AI and machine learning.

Considering the interdependencies between water and electricity use is critical for ensuring conservation measures are successful in lowering the net water and electricity use in a city. This water-electricity demand nexus will become even more important as cities continue to grow, causing water and electricity utilities additional stress, especially given the likely impacts of future global climatic and socioeconomic changes. Here, we propose a modeling framework based in statistical learning theory for predicting the climate-sensitive portion of the coupled water-electricity demand nexus. The predictive models were built and tested on six Midwestern cities. The results showed that water use was better predicted than electricity use, indicating that water use is slightly more sensitive to climate than electricity use. Additionally, the results demonstrated the importance of the variability in the El Nino/Southern Oscillation index, which explained the majority of the covariance in the water-electricity nexus. Our modeling results suggest that stronger El Ninos lead to an overall increase in water and electricity use in these cities. The integrated modeling framework presented here can be used to characterize the climate-related sensitivity of the water-electricity demand nexus, accounting for the coupled water and electricity use rather than modeling them separately, as independent variables.

Every time someone in a position of power (for example) says that a cold snap in winter proves that climate change is not a thing, a dutiful chorus responds with a familiar refrain: weather is not climate. Weather happens on the scale of days or weeks, over a distance relevant to cities or states. Climate happens over decades, centuries even, to an entire planet. The problem is, guess what timescale and space-scale people live on? The question of what can make human beings understand climate change is literally an existential one.

The European Commission's digital commissioner has warned the mobile industry to expect it to act over security concerns attached to Chinese network equipment makers. The Commission is considering a defacto ban on kit made by Chinese companies including Huawei in the face of security and espionage concerns, per Reuters. Appearing on stage at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona today, Mariya Gabriel, European commissioner for digital economy and society, flagged network "cybersecurity" during her scheduled keynote, warning delegates it's stating the obvious for her to say that "when 5G services become mission critical 5G networks need to be secure". Geopolitical concerns between the West and China are being accelerated and pushed to the fore as the era of 5G network upgrades approach, as well as by ongoing tensions between the U.S. and China over trade. "I'm well away of the unrest among all of you key actors in the telecoms sectors caused by the ongoing discussions around the cybersecurity of 5G," Gabriel continued, fleshing out the Commission's current thinking.

BARCELONA, SPAIN - A global battle between the U.S. government and Chinese tech company Huawei over allegations that it is a cybersecurity risk overshadowed the opening Monday of the world's biggest mobile industry trade fair. Huawei has an outsize presence at MWC Barcelona, from its displays in three separate show halls down to its red sponsorship logo adorning visitor pass lanyards. The focus at this year's meeting is new 5G networks due to roll out in the coming years. But the dispute over Huawei, the world's biggest maker of networking gear, is casting a pall. The United States government dispatched a big delegation to press its case with telecom executives and government officials that they should not use Huawei as a supplier over national security concerns.

I am a major sci fi fan. Well, at least I thought I was until I went to my first Star Trek convention in my 20s and realized that I was in the minority of people who did not speak Klingon or know episode numbers, titles or dates. Most recently, I have become inspired by Black Mirror, a show originally aired by the BBC and now offered on Netflix. The brainchild of Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror is the Twilight Zone for our times, giving us a glimpse as to how technology trajectories can be used to affect society in unintended ways in the coming decades. As Frederik Pohl used to say, 'A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.' Metaphorically speaking, this show sure is predicting traffic jams.

History and economics – as if you could separate the two – are burgeoning with examples of products being developed for one task and then being used, perhaps after some tweaking, for an entirely new and usually unexpected task. History is also full of stories of technologies aimed squarely at a task that, for one reason or another, miss the mark even if it looks like they were right on target. Product substitution as a means of lowering costs and thereby making a technology more prevalent is one of the primary reasons that economies exist. Some people make money in the transformation, and others lose out, but the overall economy improves from the efficiency engendered in that change. So it is a net good, and if done right, there is some money left over to invest in something else entirely. Every once in a while, you get a product substitution working from two different angles, and you can get a whole bunch of different things converging on a technology.

As such, it should be no surprise that many forward-thinking companies are already experimenting with artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve their processes and service their customers better. Primarily, AI is currently being deployed in customer service as a means to either augment, or in some cases replace human agents. The primary goals of these initiatives are to improve the customer experience, and reduce costs associated with human service agents. While it is of course true that AI and automation technologies are not yet sophisticated enough to perform all of the tasks currently undertaken by human representatives, many routine consumer requests are simple enough for AI to handle without human input. Perhaps more importantly, AI can deliver a level of responsiveness to an influx of customer requests that isn't humanly possible – or at least isn't possible without spending a fortune on staffing.

How do you know if a finding in social science is, well, real? Students of science are taught not to take the results of a single study as the absolute truth. The rule of thumb is to seek out systematic reviews, or meta-analyses, which pull together lots of studies looking at the same question and weigh their rigor to come to a more fully supported conclusion. But can we trust all this meta-science? Positive, confirmatory findings often make their way into the published literature, while negative findings collect dust in file drawers.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has said he wants to use his vast wealth to build the infrastructure needed to make space accessible for startups, rather than simply sending humans to Mars. Speaking at a private event at the Yale Club in New York, Bezos revealed that he considered his space company Blue Origin to be "the most important work" that he does. But such work is only possible by liquidating $1 billion of Amazon stock each year to bankroll it. Other space startups, such as Elon Musk's SpaceX and Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, require similar funding from their billionaire backers due to the high barriers of entry into the space industry. Bezos said space startups are currently unable to flourish in the same way that Amazon and Facebook did because the infrastructure that facilitated such tech firms does not yet exist for space.