A team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed an artificial intelligence system that automatically transfers content from one film into the style of another. In the vein of "deep fakes", the A.I.-augmented videos infamous for superimposing one person's face onto another's body, the CMU system presents another case for how difficult it could be to distinguish fiction from reality in the future. The CMU researches have named their system Recycle-GAN, after a class of algorithms that help make deep fakes possible by applying the style of one image or video to another. In a video released early this month, the researchers demonstrated how a source video of Barack Obama speaking can be processed to make it seem as though Donald Trump is mouthing the word. Or a monologue from John Oliver can be transformed into one from Stephen Colbert. Recycle-GAN isn't limited to human faces either.

Seven members of the US Congress have sent letters to the Federal Trade Commission (pdf), Federal Bureau of Investigation (pdf), and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (pdf) asking whether the agencies have vetted the potential biases of artificial intelligence algorithms being used for commerce, surveillance, and hiring. "We are concerned by the mounting evidence that these technologies can perpetuate gender, racial, age, and other biases," a letter to the FTC says. "As a result, their use may violate civil rights laws and could be unfair and deceptive." The letters request that the agencies respond by the end of September with complaints they've received of unfair use of facial recognition or artificial intelligence, as well as details on how these algorithms are tested for fairness before being implemented by the government. In the letter to the EEOC, senators Kamala Harris, Patty Murray, and Elizabeth Warren specifically ask the agency to determine whether this technology could violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Internet of Things Release 3 is published by oneM2M, the worldwide Internet of Things interoperability standards initiative. The third set of specifications deals with 3GPP interworking, especially as it relates to cellular IoT connectivity, among other features. The release is said to enable seamless interworking with narrowband IoT and LTE-M connectivity through the 3GPP Service Capability Exposure Function. More information is available here. FogHorn Systems says its Lightning Edge Industrial IoT platform received Industrial Software Competency status from Amazon Web Services, attesting that the software is capable of working in product design, production design, production, and operations.

Artificial intelligence scientist Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio and her team at Yale University have created a robotic skin to wrap around everyday objects and turn them into a functioning robot. Video footage shows the skin being wrapped around a teddy bear in order to help it walk. But it can be used on a number of different objects as well as being directly wearable – and that's why it is so helpful for the space agency. Currenly building, programming and sending robots on missions outside of Earth is very expensive.

RAD's suite of products which presently includes SCOT, WALLY and FRED provides recurring monthly revenue for RAD. On average, each SCOT, WALLY and FRED respectively can generate, over a 4 year period, $60,000, $25,000 and $12,000 of total revenue for the Company. To date the aggregate of all units presently deployed, at purchase order stage and client verbal commitment stage equal more than $2,400,000 worth of total potential revenue. RAD expects to reach $100,000 of monthly recurring revenue by this fiscal year end February 28, 2019, which represents approximately $5,000,000 of total potential revenue. RAD already has total deployments, purchase orders and verbal commitments for half of this amount to date.

On 18 September, Dentons hosted an Energy Institute event in our London office with the title "The Clash of Digitalisations". Speakers from Upside Energy, Powervault and Mixergy spoke about the Pete Project, an initiative funded by Innovate UK, that is exploring the potential of domestic hot water tanks and batteries to provide flexibility services to National Grid. Fascinating as the technological and energy-regulatory aspects of this kind of household demand-side response aggregation services are, a key common theme of the evening was the central role played in them by the analysis of large amounts of "personal data", and whether recent changes in privacy legislation help or hinder the development of such services. We produced this short article to put that discussion in context. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force across the European Union (EU) on 25 May 2018 and is intended to overhaul the way that companies collect and use personal data.

Police forces around the UK have realised the potential of artificial intelligence – and now they're starting to use it. Tests include facial recognition systems, ways to predict where crime will happen and systems that help with making decisions. But the setup is a complex mess and there's little proof that the technologies are actually benefitting anyone. "These trials don't appear to be evaluated in a very transparent way," says Alexander Babuta, a national security and resilience research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI). "Before we move ahead with large scale deployment of this kind of technology we really need more evidence of how it affects decision making in the field."

In the early, optimistic days of the internet, we thought it would be a repository of high-quality information. Instead, it's starting to feel like a bottomless ocean of lies that rewards attention-grabbing disinformation and pollutes the political process. That's the note of alarm that three members of Congress sounded in a letter this week to Daniel Coats, the U.S. director of national intelligence. In it, the lawmakers warned specifically about the technology called deepfake, which lets computer users with little tech savvy create convincing footage of people doing and saying things that they never actually did. "Hyper-realistic digital forgeries -- popularly referred to as'deep fakes' [sic] -- use sophisticated machine learning techniques to produce convincing depictions of individuals doing or saying things they never did, without their consent or knowledge," read the letter.

A Hong Kong start-up whose face- and image-recognition technology is being used for smart cities, online entertainment and finance has been hand-picked by Beijing to power China's ambition to be a global tech leader. SenseTime, founded by Chinese University professor Sean Tang Xiaoou and other academics, will join a bevy of technology giants including Baidu and Tencent in spurring the development of next-generation artificial intelligence. On Thursday, China's Minister of Science and Technology Wang Zhigang announced his ministry would entrust SenseTime to establish an "open innovation platform for next-generation AI" on intelligent vision. A spokesman for SenseTime said Beijing's endorsement indicated that the company's research in intelligent vision, or computer vision, was recognised as the best in China. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor hailed the involvement of SenseTime as a "vote of confidence in Hong Kong's strengths in innovation and technology", as she met Wang Zhigang on Thursday. She and Wang witnessed the signing of an agreement where both sides pledged further cooperation in innovation and technology.

The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote, "Each generation thinks it invented sex." He was presumably referring to the pride each generation takes in defining its own sexual practices and ethics. But his comment hit the mark in another sense: Every generation has to reinvent sex because the previous generation did a lousy job of teaching it. In the United States, the conversations we have with our children about sex are often awkward, limited, and brimming with euphemism. At school, if kids are lucky enough to live in a state that allows it, they'll get something like 10 total hours of sex education.1