Access Now is a growing international human rights organisation dedicated to defending and extending the digital rights of users at risk around the world, including issues of privacy, security, freedom of expression, and transparency. Our policy, advocacy, technology, and operations teams have staff presences in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East/North Africa (MENA), North America, and South/Southeast Asia, to provide global support to our mission. Access Now's Policy team works globally and supports our mission by developing and promoting rights-respecting practices and policies. The Policy team seek to advance laws and global norms to affect long-term systemic change in the area of digital rights and online security, developing insightful, rights-based, and well-researched policy guidance to governments, corporations, and civil society. The need to hold both the public and private sectors accountable leads the Policy team to use diverse fora, including domestic and regional courts, intergovernmental bodies, and expert offices to promote norms and best practices.

According to the US Government Accountability Office, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's database contains over 30 million mugshots of criminals and ID card images from 16 states. This is just one of many law enforcement databases which also contain further identity information, including fingerprints and text data. With needs to improve investigation times and streamline the task of matching suspect images within a pool of numerous identities, government officials, law enforcement offices, and commercial vendors are researching how AI, specifically computer vision, can be used to improve facial recognition. Through our research, we aim to show insights on how various law enforcement agencies and companies are implementing facial recognition technologies. Readers interested in AI for law enforcement might be interested in our founder's presentation at a joint INTERPOL-UN conference on AI in law enforcement given in the summer of 2018.

Kai-Fu Lee built his career working for the giants of Silicon Valley: Apple, Microsoft, and Google. But today, as one of the most successful venture capitalists in the field of artificial intelligence, Lee has decided that best place to be an AI capitalist is in communist China. Lee's firm, Sinovation Ventures, has funded 140 AI startups, including shared-bicycle companies, education companies, and a firm that's developing dishwashing robots. Lee says that the future for AI companies in China offers more promise than anywhere else, because of the simple fact that in a country of 1.4 billion, there's just more data than anywhere else. In China, data has become its own kind of abundant natural resource.

This past year has seen a number of remarkable technological advancements in several arenas, AI not the least among them. In particular, it has been both an exciting and busy year at HPE, with advancements made in AI and supercomputing that have already benefited several industries. Take a look through this 2018 AI review to discover more about HPE's recent advancements in the AI space. One of the most prominent beneficiaries of these AI advances is the U.S. military. Back in February 2018, HPE announced it had been selected by the US Department of Defense (DoD) to provide supercomputers for its High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP).

With this ebook, Booz Allen's Peter Guerra and Paul Tamburello provide examples that demonstrate how integrating AI can make your cybersecurity operations more effective and efficient in risk analysis, threat monitoring, and detection. AI-automated cybersecurity processes will enable you to more swiftly and accurately identify new and emerging threats in this continually changing landscape. This ebook demonstrates a powerful tool for leveling the playing field.

The revolutionary development in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and its dramatic consequences, is a global economic upheaval and one that will both provide opportunities for and challenge India dramatically. Discussing India's response to this global upheaval, Martin Wolf, associate editor and chief economics commentator, Financial Times, London, said, "India needs to devote careful thought to the domestic implications of the revolution in artificial intelligence." He explained, "As a country with a growing population and labour force and huge employment in services, the implications might be very radical, both creating and destroying opportunities on a massive scale." Wolf, who delivered the seventh NCAER CD Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2019 in New Delhi on Tuesday, spoke on the theme of Challenges for India from the Global Economic Upheavals. The other upheavals he addressed were the rapid economic rise of Asia, the strategic rivalry between the US and China, growing protectionism in the US and the associated erosion of the liberal global economic order and the threat of climate change. Wolf, who has many times described India as a "premature superpower", summed up his arguments, saying that all these global upheavals will have profound implications for India as "they alter the environment in which it [India] hopes to develop, they demand substantial and far-sighted domestic responses and they will force it to clarify its global stance."

If it's the SC18 supercomputing conference, then there must be lists. The twice-yearly show is most famous for the Top500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers that use the Linpack parallel Fortan benchmark, a list that helps the industry gauge progress in performance, the growing influence of new technologies like GPU accelerators from Nvidia and AMD and the rise of new architectures, as marked this year by the introduction of the first supercomputer on the list powered by Arm-based processors. The "Astra" supercomputer, built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and deployed at the Sandia National Laboratories, runs on 125,328 Cavium ThunderX2 cores and now sits in the number 205 slot. The list also helps fuel the ongoing global competition for supercomputer supremacy, with the United States this year finally retaking the top spot from China's Sunway TaihuLight in July with the Summit system based on IBM Power9 and Nvidia Volta compute engines, and then Sierra, a similarly architected machine, taking the number-two slot at this week's SC18 show in Dallas, pushing TaihuLight to number-three. However, China now claims 227 systems – or about 45 percent of the total number – on the Top500 list, with the United States dropping to an all-time low of 109, or 22 percent. The Green500 ranks supercomputers based on power efficiency.

There is a disconnect between explanatory artificial intelligence (XAI) methods and the types of explanations that are useful for and demanded by society (policy makers, government officials, etc.) Questions that experts in artificial intelligence (AI) ask opaque systems provide inside explanations, focused on debugging, reliability, and validation. These are different from those that society will ask of these systems to build trust and confidence in their decisions. Although explanatory AI systems can answer many questions that experts desire, they often don't explain why they made decisions in a way that is precise (true to the model) and understandable to humans. These outside explanations can be used to build trust, comply with regulatory and policy changes, and act as external validation. In this paper, we focus on XAI methods for deep neural networks (DNNs) because of DNNs' use in decision-making and inherent opacity. We explore the types of questions that explanatory DNN systems can answer and discuss challenges in building explanatory systems that provide outside explanations for societal requirements and benefit.

Trends in terrestrial temperature variability are perhaps more relevant for species viability than trends in mean temperature. In this paper, we develop methodology for estimating such trends using multi-resolution climate data from polar orbiting weather satellites. We derive two novel algorithms for computation that are tailored for dense, gridded observations over both space and time. We evaluate our methods with a simulation that mimics these data's features and on a large, publicly available, global temperature dataset with the eventual goal of tracking trends in cloud reflectance temperature variability.

Decades of sci-fi flicks have instilled a fear of AI in some people – with a new report suggesting many remain unconvinced it will benefit humanity. The report, from the Center for the Governance of AI based at Oxford University, reveals concerns artificial intelligence may harm or endanger humankind. Baobao Zhang and Allan Dafoe, authors of the report, wrote in its summary: "Public sentiments have shaped many policy debates, including those about immigration, free trade, international conflicts, and climate change mitigation. As in these other policy domains, we expect the public to become more influential over time. It is thus vital to have a better understanding of how the public thinks about AI and the governance of AI." 41 of respondents'strongly' or'somewhat strongly' support the continued development of AI, compared to 22 that it to some degree.