Truly revolutionary political transformations are naturally of great interest to historians, and the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century is widely regarded as one of the most influential, serving as a model for building other European democracies. A paper published last summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers new insight into how the members of the first National Constituent Assembly hammered out the details of this new type of governance. Specifically, rhetorical innovations by key influential figures (like Robespierre) played a critical role in persuading others to accept what were, at the time, audacious principles of governance, according to co-author Simon DeDeo, a former physicist who now applies mathematical techniques to the study of historical and current cultural phenomena. And the cutting-edge machine learning methods he developed to reach that conclusion are now being employed by other scholars of history and literature. As more and more archives are digitized, scholars are applying various analytical tools to those rich datasets, such as Google N-gram, Bookworm, and WordNet.

The European Union has added its voice to the growing call for artificial intelligence (AI) to be regulated, with draft ethics guidelines that underline it must be human-centric and trustworthy to be effective. The European Commission's expert group on AI said that, to be trustworthy, the technology had both to respect fundamental rights and values and be technically reliable so it did not cause unintentional harm. The group claimed its first draft guidelines were different from other attempts to define ethical AI because they set out concrete proposals as well as broad principles. Meanwhile, the EU is due to make policy recommendations on regulating AI in May 2019. The experts said they aimed to foster "responsible competitiveness" and not stifle innovation.

In the U.S., according to industry officials, the Federal Communications Commission's reluctance to authorize sales of hardware able to disrupt radio links has hobbled growth of the nascent counterdrone industry. Only a handful of U.S. airports have advanced drone-detection programs under way, according to industry officials, and nearly all are in the testing phase. Congress, however, has instructed the Federal Aviation Administration to develop a strategy to permit wide use of counterdrone technologies across airports. Sponsors of major sports events, some concerts and large open-air gatherings, including the New Year's Eve celebration in New York's Times Square, have called on counterdrone techniques to ensure safety. But like most airports, such entities generally refrain from publicly spelling out their plans.

The startup ecosystem in Kerala has taken off in terms of the latest developments and incubations across the state. With Kerala Startup Mission (KSUM) playing a key role in identifying young talent and nurturing their entrepreneurial dreams, the startup ecosystem has received a major impetus with Kochi emerging as a hub for deep tech companies. One of the primary reason for its success in developing a growing startup ecosystem is its interlinking of colleges, incubators, government institutes and startups. By focussing on developing entrepreneurial skills at the grassroots level and fostering a DIY (do-it-yourself) culture in schools, in addition to mentoring through various innovation and entrepreneurship development cell in colleges, the state government has successfully brought all the stakeholders under one roof. Added to this, is the policy changes that it adopted leading to a massive boost for the startup growth in the state.

Approaching the end of current fiscal year, I take a serene glance at the memorable moments and guess what? I am quick to realize there was hardly any conference, webinar, debate, event or discussion in which there was no mention about Artificial Intelligence and its subset technologies, specifically Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning and Neural Networks. In fact, the latest 3-days conference I attended was titled'When Human Becomes Digital' and was centred around artificial intelligence. Analysts, as well as technologists, believe AI has and will continue to reign the world of technology for at least the next 2-3 years. The Ripple Effect created by these emerging technologies will gradually perish.

Penetration testing is a well-established practical concept for the identification of potentially exploitable security weaknesses and an important component of a security audit. Providing a holistic security assessment for networks consisting of several hundreds hosts is hardly feasible though without some sort of mechanization. Mitigation, prioritizing counter-measures subject to a given budget, currently lacks a solid theoretical understanding and is hence more art than science. In this work, we propose the first approach for conducting comprehensive what-if analyses in order to reason about mitigation in a conceptually well-founded manner. To evaluate and compare mitigation strategies, we use simulated penetration testing, i.e., automated attack-finding, based on a network model to which a subset of a given set of mitigation actions, e.g., changes to the network topology, system updates, configuration changes etc. is applied. Using Stackelberg planning, we determine optimal combinations that minimize the maximal attacker success (similar to a Stackelberg game), and thus provide a well-founded basis for a holistic mitigation strategy. We show that these Stackelberg planning models can largely be derived from network scan, public vulnerability databases and manual inspection with various degrees of automation and detail, and we simulate mitigation analysis on networks of different size and vulnerability.

According to the proposal, the purpose of the restrictions would be to bolster the U.S.'s national security -- after all, AI has many potential military uses, so why would the U.S. want to put that technology in the hands of nations such as China or North Korea? Silicon Valley opposes these AI export restrictions for a few reasons, according to the NYT's story. Perhaps most obviously, they could hurt American companies and help foreign ones. By limiting where companies such as Amazon and Google could sell their AI services, the restrictions would damage those companies' bottom lines. They'll also leave open a market gap that other nations, such as China, could fill.

For the second year in a row, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has cancelled his appearance at CES, though this time around, it's under very different circumstances. According to Politico Pro, both he and Commissioner Brendan Carr have had to cancel their CES plans due to the partial government shutdown that's still ongoing. Pai was supposed to discuss FCC plans with the Consumer Technology Association's Gary Shapiro while Carr was scheduled to take part in a roundtable discussion. Last year, Pai pulled out of CES due to safety concerns, which reportedly stemmed from death threats he had received following the FCC's repeal of net neutrality. Pai issued a statement yesterday that addressed Congress's failure to overturn the FCC's net neutrality decision, applauding the House of Representatives for not reinstating "heavy-handed internet regulation."

Cybersecurity is a hot topic for organizations across every industry. Securing networks, hardening systems, and protecting data from cyber threats has become more important than ever, as cyber incidents are on the rise. We asked a few of our C-level industry experts what they think we'll see as cybersecurity trends in 2019 – here's what they had to say: If I'm thinking of cybersecurity trends, I'm led to the following: Utilization of data across the enterprise – As data is shared across an organization, it must be secured. One way to better understand data utilization and security is to apply analytics, data science, and predictive machine learning (ML) models. As a new crop of data science graduates move into security-related positions, this will spur industry recognition of how the application of data models can result in better, more effective security.

It's been another year of relentless artificial-intelligence hype and incremental AI achievement. Machines still beat humans only in carefully constructed environments or at narrow tasks. The good news is that, as the technology progresses, the race for leadership is still wide open, and even Europe, where politicians fret that the continent is lagging behind China and the U.S., is still quite competitive. According to the Artificial Intelligence Index 2018 annual report, whose steering committee includes leading AI scholars such as Yoav Shoham of Stanford University and Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AI has progressed on all the measures tracked. Some of the metrics, from the number of published papers and conference attendance, to mentions on corporate earnings calls and in parliamentary hearings, measure the hype.