Facebook announced on Sunday that it will help create an independent ethics research center for artificial intelligence (AI) with the Technical University of Munich (TUM). The technology giant said it will provide $7.5 million over five years as "an initial funding grant." With the AI industry growing at unprecedented levels, its use and impact have come under increased scrutiny, with some experts warning of the potential for unexpected consequences from its application. Technology companies, including Facebook and Google, have come under significant pressure from governments and research institutes to do more to protect people affected by AI applications. "From Facebook potentially inciting ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, to Cambridge Analytica seeking to manipulate elections, to Google building a secret censored search engine for the Chinese, to anger over Microsoft contracts with (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to multiple worker uprisings over conditions in Amazon's algorithmically managed warehouses -- the headlines haven't stopped," said New York-based research institute AI Now last month.

As businesses, governments and consumers rely on digital systems to fulfil most of their daily operations, so do the risks of those systems being hacked increase. The more the technologies they adopt, the greater the hazards they have to face. In fact, new solutions to ease businesses daily operations such as Artificial Intelligence tech embedded in Operative Systems and IT software managing huge databases, bring even more complexity to an already convoluted world. However, these new techs can also become their strongest allies! If properly developed and embraced, they can deliver new layers of security that build up a strong shield of protection against hackers.

Tokyo AI company Exawizards is using deep learning to analyze unstructured nursing care data such as audio and video recordings. Faced with a rapidly aging population, Japan is turning to new solutions for a many-faceted problem. Amid a low birthrate, more than one-fifth of Japanese are now 70 or older, according to government data. Meanwhile, there are not enough people to care for this cohort. By 2025, there will be a shortfall of 340,000 nursing care workers. Under the Abe administration, Japan has actively welcomed foreign professionals as one measure to address this issue.

The Technical University of Munich (Technische Universität München TUM) has launched the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML). MCML is funded by Germany's Federal Ministry of Research. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are crucial technologies for today's and tomorrow's digital economy. TUM says that MCML will be connecting key areas of expertise from computer science, data science, and statistics. AI or artificial intelligence includes software technologies that make machines and other devices think like humans.

Governments in advanced countries are adopting Blockchain technology and artificial intelligence at a rapid pace. From Estonia, to Malta, The Netherlands to the United States, all countries busy themselves to become fully digitalized societies, hopefully before the expiration of the current decade. As I have written on a previous article, blockchain, AI and the Internet of Things are evolving at an unimaginable speed, particularly in advanced economies. Thus governments necessarily need to look at blockchain technology as being the best tech to cope with an increasingly interconnected and complex world. The reason why blockchain can be so useful pertains to its characteristics in terms of enhanced trust and because they are designed at their core to be transparent.

The Army is looking at artificial intelligence to increase lethality, and a senior Army official said the key to A.I. is keeping a proper level of decision-making in the hands of Soldiers. Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Dr. Bruce Jette spoke about artificial intelligence, modernization and acquisition reform Jan. 10 at a Defense Writers Group breakfast. Jette said response times against enemy fire could be a crucial element in determining the outcome of a battle, and A.I. could definitely assist with that. "A.I. is critically important," he said. "You'll hear a theme inside of ASA(ALT), 'time is a weapon.' That's one of the aspects that we're looking at with respect to A.I." Army Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy has been very active in positioning the Army so that it can pick up such critical new technology, Jette said.

The Army is looking at artificial intelligence to increase lethality, and a senior Army official said the key to A.I. is keeping a proper level of decision-making in the hands of Soldiers. Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology Dr. Bruce Jette spoke about artificial intelligence, modernization and acquisition reform Jan. 10 at a Defense Writers Group breakfast. Jette said response times against enemy fire could be a crucial element in determining the outcome of a battle, and A.I. could definitely assist with that. "A.I. is critically important," he said. "You'll hear a theme inside of ASA(ALT), 'time is a weapon.' That's one of the aspects that we're looking at with respect to A.I." Army Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy has been very active in positioning the Army so that it can pick up such critical new technology, Jette said.

Loss functions with a large number of saddle points are one of the main obstacles to training many modern machine learning models. Gradient descent (GD) is a fundamental algorithm for machine learning and converges to a saddle point for certain initial data. We call the region formed by these initial values the "attraction region." For quadratic functions, GD converges to a saddle point if the initial data is in a subspace of up to n-1 dimensions. In this paper, we prove that a small modification of the recently proposed Laplacian smoothing gradient descent (LSGD) [Osher, et al., arXiv:1806.06317] contributes to avoiding saddle points without sacrificing the convergence rate of GD. In particular, we show that the dimension of the LSGD's attraction region is at most floor((n-1)/2) for a class of quadratic functions which is significantly smaller than GD's (n-1)-dimensional attraction region.

Transportation Security Administration agents help passengers through a security checkpoint at Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark. New figures released Sunday reveal a record number of agents are not showing up to work. The Transportation Security Administration has reported that the number of airport security agents not showing up to work reached an all-time high over the holiday weekend, according to the Washington Post, a side-effect of the government shutdown that the Department of Homeland Security previously stated was non a concern. TSA agents are among the estimated 800,000 federal workers who are furloughed or working without pay during a government shutdown that is reaching its 30th day. The Washington Post reported that the number of unscheduled absences hit 8 percent nationally this weekend, up from a 3 percent a year ago.

A live demonstration uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition in dense crowd spatial-temporal technology at the Horizon Robotics exhibit at the Las Vegas Convention Center during CES 2019 in Las Vegas on January 10, 2019. Venture capitalists are warning the Trump administration not to overly restrict the export of new technology such as artificial intelligence -- insisting that could make it much harder for American start-ups to sell their products abroad. The Commerce Department is considering whether to slap tighter export controls on a long list of new technologies, including AI and quantum computers, to prevent U.S. technology from falling into the hands of foreign adversaries. But the National Venture Capital Association, in public comments on the potential rule last week, voiced concerns that the list of technology the government defines as critical to national security is far too broad. The venture capitalists only want to see the department limit the export of technology specific to defense -- not a whole category of technology so broad it could include consumer products such as self-driving cars and voice assistants.