Britons could have lost hundreds of pounds through online scams over the Christmas period – and are set to be hit by even more attacks by the presents they have managed to buy. That is the warning from cyber security experts who see Christmas as one of the riskiest time of the year, with the rush to find bargains and last-minute deals leading people to malicious websites. Tens of billions of pounds have been spent online in the run-up to the Christmas period, but despite the growth of internet shopping, many customers are still running the risk of buying with unidentified and often unsafe websites. Brits – who together will spend nearly £25 billion over the Christmas period – are at risk of having £725 stolen from their accounts, according to the cyber security firm McAfee. Scams from such websites are often so significant they can lead to people cancelling Christmas, but shoppers are often enticed to them with the promise of saving money.

All of us have seen those fear mongering headlines about how artificial intelligence is going to steal our jobs and how we should be very careful with biased AI algorithms. Bias means that the algorithm favors certain groups of people or otherwise guides decisions towards an unfair outcome. Bias can mean giving a raise only to white male employees, increasing criminal risk factors of certain ethnic groups and filling your news feed only with topics and point of views that you are currently consuming -- instead of giving a broad, balanced view of the world and educating you. It is important to be aware that a machine learning model can be biased, but this hardly opens up any new topics to the discussion of AI ethics compared to ethical decisions in general. White males are more likely to get a promotion anyways, court judges may get tired and hand out stricter verdicts and we tend to consume news that we agree with.

IT IS something of an American tourist tradition to gaze through the iron fences around the White House lawn, but citizens think little about how government might be gazing back. A pilot program by the Secret Service to test the use of facial recognition in and around 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. should prompt everyone, and especially Congress, to start paying attention. The Department of Homeland Security published details recently on its plans to scan feeds from existing cameras in the executive complex and run them through recognition software. This is slightly less scary than it sounds: The cameras will capture people in adjacent public spaces, but only consenting Secret Service employees will be in the program database -- so, barring false positives, faces of passersby that do not match participants' photos will not be stored. More concerning is the potential for future misuse of the technology.

Many of Boxing Day's front pages feature pictures of the Royal Family attending the Christmas Day church service at Sandringham. Much of the attention is focused on the Duchesses of Cambridge and Sussex amid reports they had fallen out. The Daily Mirror says the pair presented a "united front", while the Daily Express says it was "Christmas peace" for Kate and Meghan and the Daily Telegraph says they "put paid to rumours of a rift". However, the Sun takes a more sceptical approach, saying the two women called "a Christmas truce". It quotes one royal source telling the paper that their appearance was "a bit uncomfortable".

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in various applications involving image, text, audio, and graph data. However, recent studies have shown that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attack. Though there are several works studying adversarial attack and defense on domains such as images and text processing, it is difficult to directly transfer the learned knowledge to graph data due to its representation challenge. Given the importance of graph analysis, increasing number of works start to analyze the robustness of machine learning models on graph. Nevertheless, current studies considering adversarial behaviors on graph data usually focus on specific types of attacks with certain assumptions. In addition, each work proposes its own mathematical formulation which makes the comparison among different methods difficult. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to survey existing adversarial attack strategies on graph data and provide an unified problem formulation which can cover all current adversarial learning studies on graph. We also compare different attacks on graph data and discuss their corresponding contributions and limitations. Finally, we discuss several future research directions in this area.

As it looks to bring a massive number of foreign blue-collar workers into the country from April, the Cabinet on Tuesday adopted a package of policy measures that it says will provide greater support for those hoping to benefit from the new visa categories. The 126 measures, backed by a collective budget of ¥22.4 billion for the next fiscal year, are supplementary to the immigration control law that was revised earlier this month. The measures include the establishment of about 100 consultation centers nationwide offering support in 11 languages: Japanese, English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, Nepalese, Indonesian, Thai and Tagalog. The central government also pledged to introduce stricter screening processes to crack down on rogue brokers that exploit migrant foreign workers through debt-bondage. The government is also allocating ¥600 million for a Japanese-language education program for non-Japanese that will include a standardized curriculum and textbooks.

Bomb disposal experts won't have to put their lives at stake every time they have to disarm an explosive if they can do their job with the help of a proxy -- like a robot they can control from afar. According to the UK Ministry of Defence, the British Army has received four cutting-edge robots that can do just that. Unlike other bomb disposal machines, these ones come with "advanced haptic feedback" that allows their operators to feel what their mechanical arm holds or touches through a remote-control hand grip. Seeing as bomb disposal requires a high level of dexterity, especially when dealing with potentially booby-trapped improvised explosive devices, haptic feedback could be just what experts need. The four machines delivered to the British Army are but a small fraction of what the UK military ordered from military contractor Harris. In addition to haptic feedback, the unmanned robot called T7 also comes equipped with HD cameras and all-terrain treads.

In this Oct. 31, 2018, photo, Watrix employees demonstrate their firm's gait recognition software at their company's offices in Beijing. A Chinese technology startup hopes to begin selling software that recognizes people by their body shape and how they walk, enabling identification when faces are hidden from cameras. By hook or by crook, Europe needs to differentiate itself, in its approach to artificial intelligence, from mighty competitors such as the U.S. and China. To be fair, competitors might not be the right word given that, for the time being at least, there's no real competition. According to some of the latest data available, AI investment in Europe totaled $3 to $4 billion in 2016, compared with $8 to $12 billion in Asia and $15 to $23 billion in North America.

Stephen Hawking has said, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Elon Musk claims that AI is humanity's "biggest existential threat." That might have people asking: Wait, what? But these grand worries are rooted in research. Along with Hawking and Musk, prominent figures at Oxford and UC Berkeley and many of the researchers working in AI today believe that advanced AI systems, if deployed carelessly, could end all life on earth. This concern has been raised since the dawn of computing. But it has come into particular focus in recent years, as advances in machine-learning techniques have given us a more concrete understanding of what we can do with AI, what AI can do for (and to) us, and how much we still don't know. Some of them think advanced AI is so distant that there's no point in thinking about it now. Others are worried that excessive hype about the power of their field might kill it prematurely. And even among the people who broadly agree that AI poses unique dangers, there are varying takes on what steps make the most sense today.

If the United States wants to maintain its leadership stance in the world for development and use of artificial intelligence, it's time to adopt a national strategy. That's the conclusion of a report developed by the Center for Data Innovation, a self-described thinktank that studies the "intersection of data, technology and public policy." According to Senior Policy Analyst Joshua New, finding success with AI requires more than a bunch of companies investing in it. It also needs the federal government to support the development and adoption of AI in areas such as research, skills development and data usage. According to New, many other countries, including China, France and the United Kingdom, are setting up "significant initiatives" to grab global market share in AI.