Notional vignettes depict competence-aware machines performing tasks in dynamic environments. A key ingredient in effective teams – whether athletic, business, or military – is trust, which is based in part on mutual understanding of team members' competence to fulfill assigned roles. When it comes to forming effective teams of humans and autonomous systems, humans need timely and accurate insights about their machine partners' skills, experience, and reliability to trust them in dynamic environments. At present, autonomous systems cannot provide real-time feedback when changing conditions such as weather or lighting cause their competency to fluctuate. The machines' lack of awareness of their own competence and their inability to communicate it to their human partners reduces trust and undermines team effectiveness.

On Wednesday morning, in Britain's House of Commons, Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, rose to ask Prime Minister Theresa May a question. The night before, Parliament had passed an amendment expressing approval for the Brexit withdrawal agreement that May had painstakingly negotiated with the European Union, on one condition: that she renegotiate it. The amendment had been proposed by one of May's fellow Tories, Sir Graham Brady, and passed with her government's support. It demanded that she go straight to Brussels and tell the Europeans to ditch the part of the agreement dealing with the border between Northern Ireland, which is part of Britain, and the Republic of Ireland, which is a member of the E.U.--the most vexed aspect of Brexit. Those provisions would be replaced with what the Brady amendment, mysteriously and Britishly, refers to only as "alternative arrangements."

Bangkok, Thailand - The small park in Bangkok's Rama III district is mostly popular with runners circling its neatly trimmed garden track to the sound of birdsong. But on Thursday, they were joined by a convoy of fire trucks and half a dozen military drones, drawing dozens of curious onlookers. After an hour setting up, the drones and water cannon were pumping thick plumes of water into the empty sky above. Speakers blared warnings about the operation and instructed runners to keep their distance. The odd display was the Thai government's latest attempt at curbing the alarmingly high levels of pollution that have been plaguing the capital for weeks.

NEW DELHI: It faces threats from rising protectionism, data flow curbs and fast-changing technological shifts, but the Indian IT industry is keeping its hopes high for the new year with plans afoot for big investments in automation and artificial intelligence. For the industry body Nasscom, 2018 has been the year of'Digital at Scale' as IT firms focussed on leveraging new technologies and ensuring sustainability by creating right skills with help from innovation, policies and partnerships. The year ahead is "punctuated with several transformative opportunities", Nasscom President Debjani Ghosh said. The industry body has projected exports to grow at 7-9 per cent for 2018-19, almost same as the previous fiscal, but domestic revenue may grow faster at 10-12 per cent and this may make the new year transformative with overseas funds accounting for a lion's share so far. Over years, the industry has graduated from being the back office of the world to being at the forefront of change, helping clients optimise operations and stay ahead of competition.

Along America's west coast, the world's most valuable companies are racing to make artificial intelligence smarter. Google and Facebook have boasted of experiments using billions of photos and thousands of high-powered processors. But late last year, a project in eastern Tennessee quietly exceeded the scale of any corporate AI lab. It was run by the US government. The record-setting project involved the world's most powerful supercomputer, Summit, at Oak Ridge National Lab.

Theresa May is seeking further talks with EU leaders over the Brexit withdrawal agreement. MPs voted for an amendment that calls on the government to pursue "alternative arrangements" to replace the Northern Ireland backstop. The Brexit Secretary, Stephen Barclay, said there were a number of options. "There are issues in terms of having time limits, issues in terms of exit clauses, issues in terms of technology and this will be the nature of the negotiation with the EU in the coming days," he said. The EU says, however, it does not want to renegotiate or reopen the withdrawal agreement.

An unnerving new video that appears to show Steve Buscemi's face seamlessly molded onto Jennifer Lawrence's head is yet another example of the worrying advancements of'deepfakes' videos. The clip will sound familiar to anyone who remembers Lawrence's speech backstage at the 2016 Golden Globes – but the words are instead coming out of Buscemi's mouth. Horrified social media viewers have been have been sharing the clip of'Jennifer Buscemi' across the internet this week, with many calling it the stuff of nightmares. An unnerving new video appears to show Steve Buscemi's face seamlessly molded onto Jennifer Lawrence's body The clip was first posted by Reddit user VillainGuy at the beginning of January. It's since been shared thousands of times.

Making face recognition less biased doesn't make it less scary Three new papers released in the past week are now bringing much-needed attention to this issue. Last Thursday, Buolamwini released an update to Gender Shades by retesting the systems she'd previously examined and expanding her review to include Amazon's Rekognition and a new system from a small AI company called Kairos. There is some good news. She found that IBM, Face, and Microsoft all improved their gender classification accuracy for darker-skinned women, with Microsoft reducing its error rate to below 2%. On the other hand, Amazon's and Kairos's platforms still had accuracy gaps of 31 and 23 percentage points, respectively, between lighter males and darker females.

Leaders in the artificial intelligence sector from the United Nations, the University of Cambridge and leading global AI policy consultation firms will be heading to Malta this February for the debut AI In Business Malta Summit. This will set the stage for the "bigger and more intensive" AI in Business Malta Expo, set to take place in September. "Artificial intelligence is everywhere these days," said Matthew Fenech, an AI Policy Consultant who has advised the UK and Welsh Parliaments. "It has been described by world-leading economists as'the most important general purpose technology of our era, on a par with electricity.' Stephen Hawking himself said that AI could be'the best […] thing ever to happen to humanity'."

Generating explanation to explain its behavior is an essential capability for a robotic teammate. Explanations help human partners better understand the situation and maintain trust of their teammates. Prior work on robot generating explanations focuses on providing the reasoning behind its decision making. These approaches, however, fail to heed the cognitive requirement of understanding an explanation. In other words, while they provide the right explanations from the explainer's perspective, the explainee part of the equation is ignored. In this work, we address an important aspect along this direction that contributes to a better understanding of a given explanation, which we refer to as the progressiveness of explanations. A progressive explanation improves understanding by limiting the cognitive effort required at each step of making the explanation. As a result, such explanations are expected to be smoother and hence easier to understand. A general formulation of progressive explanation is presented. Algorithms are provided based on several alternative quantifications of cognitive effort as an explanation is being made, which are evaluated in a standard planning competition domain.