The European Union's executive body is doubling down on its push for platforms to pre-filter the Internet, publishing a proposal today for all websites to monitor uploads in order to be able to quickly remove terrorist uploads. The Commission handed platforms an informal one-hour rule for removing terrorist content back in March. It's now proposing turning that into a law to prevent such content spreading its violent propaganda over the Internet. For now the'rule of thumb' regime continues to apply. But it's putting meat on the bones of its thinking, fleshing out a more expansive proposal for a regulation aimed at "preventing the dissemination of terrorist content online".

Japan Post Co. has said that it will start test deliveries using a drone between post offices in Fukushima Prefecture. The transport ministry on Friday approved an application by the company for flying a drone without an operator watching the airborne device or an assistant who monitors its movements. In past test flights, operators flew drones with assistants checking the movements of the devices by eye. This time, flights will be conducted without such an assistant for the first time. The mail delivery arm of Japan Post Holdings Co. is expected to start the test flights early next month.

Microsoft said on Friday that it would sell the military and intelligence agencies whatever advanced technologies they needed "to build a strong defense," just months after Google told the Pentagon it would refuse to provide artificial intelligence products that could build more accurate drones or compete with China for next-generation weapons. The announcement -- made quietly in a small, town-hall-style meeting with the software giant's leadership and employees on Thursday, then published on a blog on Friday afternoon -- starkly illustrated the radically different paths these leading American technology companies are taking as they struggle with their role in creating a new generation of cyberweapons to help, and perhaps someday replace, American warriors. But the divergent paths also underscore concerns inside the American defense and intelligence establishments about how the United States will take on a rising China. In the past two years, the Chinese government has set goals for dominance in the next decade in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and other technologies that it believes will allow its military and intelligence agencies to surpass those of the United States. Pentagon officials have questioned how committed domestic technology companies are to keeping the country on the leading edge, the way Raytheon, Boeing, IBM and McDonnell Douglas did during the Cold War.

Microsoft plans to continue to provide its technology to the U.S. military, despite worries among the software maker's own employees that advances in the field of artificial intelligence could empower weapons to act autonomously and kill people. The company laid out its reasoning Friday in a blog post by Brad Smith, Microsoft's president. He wrote that he and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed employee concerns about the issue in a meeting Thursday, and conceded not all the workers were satisfied. In a letter published on blogging site Medium, the employees wrote that they joined Microsoft with'the expectation that the technologies we build will not cause harm or human suffering.' Microsoft has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) on a'longstanding and reliable basis' for four decades.

As we write this paper there is a team of researchers who are working toward the creation of a "Brain Simulation Platform", software that will map the human brain down to a minute level of detail (see https://www.humanbrainproject.eu). This research has incredible implications for many scientific fields of study. The completion of this project will also represent the completion of the first two criteria set forth by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom in their paper Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap [1], which would imply that we will be well on our way toward our first functional brain emulation. With the apparent eminence of, at least a simplistic version, of whole brain emulation, we must begin to consider some implications for the future. The goal of whole brain emulation is the eventual use of the technology to emulate a human mind.

Classical anomaly detection is principally concerned with point-based anomalies, those anomalies that occur at a single point in time. Yet, many real-world anomalies are range-based, meaning they occur over a period of time. Motivated by this observation, we present a new mathematical model to evaluate the accuracy of time series classification algorithms. Our model expands the well-known Precision and Recall metrics to measure ranges, while simultaneously enabling customization support for domain-specific preferences.

The ACLU, along with nearly 70 other civil rights organizations, has asked Amazon to stop selling facial recognition technology to the government and further called on Congress to enact a moratorium on government uses of facial recognition technology. The media weighed in, and important voices expressed anxiety. Over at the Washington Post, the editorial board declared, "Congress should intervene soon." Even some members of Congress -- many of whom were recently misidentified by Amazon's facial recognition software -- are rightly worried. Along with a group of other scholars, we asked Amazon to change its ways.

In what ways is artificial intelligence leveraged to harm people? Currently most AI is used for purposes that are either beneficial to people, or not actively harmful. But any powerful tool can be abused, and we should expect increasing weaponization of AI. Social manipulation: Companies and organizations use big data to spread propaganda, influence elections and foment social discord via targeted marketing. Political actors like Cambridge Analytica and the Internet Research Agency have been prominent in this.

Microsoft plans to continue to provide its technology to the U.S. military, despite worries among the software maker's own employees that advances in the field of artificial intelligence could empower weapons to act autonomously and kill people.

Imagine this breakthrough: the ocean off South Carolina being explored by drones that act like flying fish -- zipping over the sea surface and diving below. They're considered drone "gliders," flying to specific programmed spots in the ocean before going under to take measurements before resurfacing to fly back. "Just imagine, in a few years, we will have swarms of these things," said Christian de Moustier, IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society president. With that and other emerging technology, "we will have an amazing amount of data, ways to monitor the changes in the ocean and see where the changes are going," he said. And there will be torpedo-like, remotely operated submarines that will record and give forecasters temperatures in the water under a storm's core -- a critical, previously missing piece of data that already helped forecast Hurricane Florence's strength and track.