Next time you can't find the perfect angle for your selfie, just thank the universe you're not NASA's InSight lander. The spacecraft had to take 11 images with a camera attached to its robotic arm and then stitch them together to create its first self-portrait. InSight clearly took a cue from the Curiosity rover, which has years of experience taking composite selfies with the Martian landscape as its background. You can clearly see InSight's solar panels on full display in the photo, which was captured on December 6th, along with some of its science instruments. InSight touched down on Mars on November 26th after traveling through space for six months. It was NASA's first Martian landing since 2012.

Today, Google shared information about some of the AI work it's doing in Asia, but in a blog post about the work, it also made a pretty clear statement about how its facial recognition technology will and won't be used for the time being. The company noted that while facial recognition systems stand to be quite useful in a variety of situations, from assistive technologies to locating missing people, they also comes with risks. "Like many technologies with multiple uses, facial recognition merits careful consideration to ensure its use is aligned with our principles and values, and avoids abuse and harmful outcomes," Google said. "We continue to work with many organizations to identify and address these challenges, and unlike some other companies, Google Cloud has chosen not to offer general-purpose facial recognition APIs before working through important technology and policy questions." Facial recognition technology has come under the spotlight in recent years, with everyone from local law enforcement to Taylor Swift employing it in some way.

In science news around the world, China's largest research funding agency expresses support for the goals of Plan S, the push by European science funders for immediate open access to research publications. For the second year in a row, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are projected to hit a new high, growing 2.7% this year. NASA's Voyager 2 probe becomes only the second humanmade object to enter interstellar space. Empathy expert Tania Singer resigns as director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, after a commission confirmed allegations of bullying. Dozens of African researchers are denied visas for an artificial intelligence (AI) meeting in Montreal, Canada, even as the Canadian government takes steps to advance the country's standing in AI.

Technology researchers in China have been ordered to not travel to the US unless it is absolutely necessary, amid rising tensions between the two countries. Staff working in sensitive tech sectors were given the warning following the arrest of a Chinese tech executive in Canada, a source told the South China Morning Post. Workers at a research agency were also told to remove any sensitive data from laptops, mobile phones and other devices if travel to the US was essential. The warning comes after a similar order from US tech giant Cisco to some of its employees, which asked them the to any non-essential travel to China. Cisco has since said the email to its employees was "sent in error."

The future depends on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars to telemedicine and mixed reality to as yet undreamt technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier will require high-speed, always-on internet connections. The FCC regulates who can use which ranges, or bands, of frequencies to prevent users from interfering with each other's signals. Low-Band Frequencies Bands below 1 GHz traditionally used by broadcast radio and television as well as mobile networks; they easily cover large distances and travel through walls, but those are now so crowded that carriers are turning to the higher range of the spectrum. Mid-Band Spectrum The range of the wireless spectrum from 1 GHz to 6 GHz, used by Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, mobile networks, and many other applications.

Last year, at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a graduate student set up an artificial intelligence system based on Microsoft's facial-recognition tools, which he used to predict their emotional state. The idea, the university explained at a national education conference in February 2018, would be to allow teachers to gather real-time information on how their lessons were being received, in order to maximize "student engagement." Although the program was only tested as a short experiment, and was never adopted by the university, such a system has the potential to be rife with flaws and primed for abuse, warn experts at the research group AI Now. The St. Thomas proof-of-concept system is just one of a number of data points that AI Now--a group composed of tech employees from companies including Microsoft and Google, and affiliated with New York University--says exemplify the need for stricter regulation of artificial intelligence. The group's report, published Thursday, underscores the inherent dangers in using A.I. to do things like amplify surveillance in fields including finance and policing, and argues that accountability and oversight are necessities where this type of nascent technology is concerned.

MADE IN CHINA 2025: The Chinese initiative aims to create leading companies in fields like artificial intelligence, electric cars and robotics. The Trump administration says the government is unfairly subsidizing Chinese companies and discriminating against foreign rivals. Along with disputes over China's handling of intellectual property, it's a significant contributor to trade tensions. The Wall Street Journal reported a revised plan would allow greater access for foreign companies to Chinese markets and investment.

Recent advances in word embedding provide significant benefit to various information processing tasks. Yet these dense representations and their estimation of word-to-word relatedness remain difficult to interpret and hard to analyze. As an alternative, explicit word representations i.e. vectors with clearly-defined dimensions, which can be words, windows of words, or documents are easily interpretable, and recent methods show competitive performance to the dense vectors. In this work, we propose a method to transfer word2vec SkipGram embedding model to its explicit representation model. The method provides interpretable explicit vectors while keeping the effectiveness of the original model, tested by evaluating the model on several word association collections. Based on the proposed explicit representation, we propose a novel method to quantify the degree of the existence of gender bias in the English language (used in Wikipedia) with regard to a set of occupations. By measuring the bias towards explicit Female and Male factors, the work demonstrates a general tendency of the majority of the occupations to male and a strong bias in a few specific occupations (e.g. nurse) to female.

On 10 October 2017, the development of a Digital Agenda of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis) has started (Statistisches Bundesamt 2018). One of many topics that were intensively discussed was Machine Learning. In a meeting at 13-15 November 2017, the office and department heads of Destatis evaluated and prioritised 59 measures of the Digital Agenda according to their benefits and costs. A "Proof of Concept Machine Learning" was given high priority and classified as one of four lighthouse projects of the Digital Agenda. The content specification was "Proof of Concept Machine Learning - Set up Proof of Concept for Machine Learning, e.g. in business statistics, to perform automatic categorization and improve analysis potential". The deadline for completion of the project was set for mid-2018.

Nasa's InSight lander has sent back its first full selfie while sitting on Mars. The robot has sent back stunning photos of the world that just became its home, as well as the first audio of the Martian wind. And now it has sent back a whole photo of itself, sat on the planet and getting ready to work. Or, more accurately, it sent back 11 photos that were stitched together to get a look at the lander as it is on the surface. "I'm feeling healthy, energized and whole. This is me on Mars."