Government
Yemen's war on body parts sparks cottage industry in prosthetic limbs
A look at how Yemen's brutal civil war is creating a market for prosthetic limbs. Each is missing a vital part of their body โ a hand, a leg, an arm. Inside that building is new hope for each: Prosthetic limbs are being cut, carved, melted and molded. Young patient recently outfitted with a new leg waits for his training session outside the Ma'rib prosthetics center in Yemen (Fox News/Hollie McKay) "Sometimes I go to my office to cry for each of these miserable stories," Dr. Haitham Ahmed Ali Ahmed, a Sudanese volunteer with Physicians Across Continents, told Fox News. "It isn't fair, but we do whatever we can to give them another chance."
11-year-old hacks replica of Florida state website, changes election results
A group of hackers at last year's DefCon computer security conference in Las Vegas attempt to (legally) break in to a touch screen voting machine. The effort was part of a weekend-long Voting Machine Hacking Village at the conference aimed at raising awareness about vulnerabilities to the U.S. election system. The safety of our election systems didn't exactly earn a vote of confidence following this weekend's DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas. One session reportedly featured an 11-year-old who successfully hacked into a replica website for the Florida Secretary of State and changed election results. It took the young hacker only 10 minutes to break in and gain access. The child took part in a DefCon Voting Machine Hacking Village, PBS reports, where kids as young as eight years old attempted to access replica web pages and change information.
Back to the Future... the Future of Work - ITEdgeNews.ng
When we think about job displacement our minds often go to factory workers and calls centers, but as leading artificial Intelligence expert Dr. Vivienne Ming points out in a recent interview with the Financial Times, the middle class in professional services may be the most challenged in this computed future. Ming cites a recent competition at Columbia University between human lawyers and AI counterparts reviewing agreements with loopholes. The AI found 95 per cent of them in 22 seconds, it took the humans over an hour. As a lawyer reading this you may have two conflicting emotions: concern, but the other should be joy that your life is about to get easier; free of the day to day drudgery of reviewing agreements, allowing you to concentrate on what really matters. This is what technology does โ an advantage to highly complementary skills.
Tim Hwang's FiscalNote is revolutionizing Washington lobbying with big data
Sue Zoldak is a public relations expert with a fierce competitive streak. Her surname in Slovak, as she likes to point out, means "mercenary." Her firm, the Zoldak Agency, uses targeted advertising and grassroots campaigning to help clients spur voters to press elected officials into voting yes or no on specific bills. While not strictly a lobbyist--she doesn't communicate directly with lawmakers--Zoldak fits squarely into the influence-peddling milieu of Washington, DC, with 15 years' experience on K Street, where lobbying firms are traditionally headquartered. Put simply, she's a go-to person for companies and organizations determined to shape public policy.
Does Amazon already have a tech hub in your city? Check here
An Amazon office building at 27 Melcher St. in Boston, which houses some of the 1,200 Amazon corporate staff who work in the greater Boston area. The newly refurbished building was formerly a Necco wafer candy factory. Amazon has 17 tech hubs in North America outside Seattle that employ more than 17,500 corporate, as opposed to warehouse and fulfillment, staff. That number is anticipated to rise to 26,200 by 2023. Here's where they are -- and why. Why: Silicon Valley is here, in addition to Stanford University, University of California-Berkeley and other universities with strong computer science and engineering programs.
Emmanuel Macron's AI Strategy: Controlled Disruption - ICT&health
Beside healthcare, he is also impressed by the use of AI in the mobility sector, especially autonomous driving. Macron emphasizes, that "artificial intelligence will disrupt all the different business models." Now is the right time to make a choice: to be a part of the change or to become a subject of disruption and to lose some opportunities, for example new jobs. The first objective of the strategy is to build champions on the AI field. It requires adaptable national structures, modern financing system and friendly regulations.
Facing the Future of Work
In the last few years, it has felt like every big election has focused on jobs and the threats they (supposedly) face: from trade, from immigrants, and, most accurately, from technology. Until recently, the forecasts were almost unanimously grim: The robots were coming, we were told, and they'd soon make us humans redundant. In the summer of 2015, the Atlantic captured the panic with a cover story titled "A World Without Work," which warned that the moment when machines make workers obsolete "may finally be arriving." Then, on March 18 of this year, a self-driving car hit and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona -- and the conversation began to shift. Suddenly the fear that humans would soon be superfluous started to seem a little less likely.
Artificial Intelligence in healthcare โ what does the NHS workforce think? - Critical Future
Digital transformation has been the recent focal point in the discussion surrounding healthcare, and with AI at the forefront, continuously popping up as an example of ways the NHS could achieve its aims stated in the Five Year Forward View. The tech focused Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Matt Hancock, announced an investment of ยฃ400 million in tech transformation and supported AI as providing "huge opportunities to improve patient outcomes and to make life easier for staff." The Prime Minister herself has even spoken at length about AIs potential improve health provision in the UK. However, AI not only provides opportunities to the NHS, it is also draws our attention to the areas where the NHS needs improving. The House of Lords Select Committee report'AI in the UK: Ready, willing and able?' showed that obtaining applicable data from other organisations remains the most significant barrier to adoption of AI and could force the implantation to stand still whilst other changes are made. This leave us with one question, what does the NHS workforce think?
UAE Artificial Intelligence camp hosts more than 600 Emiratis
The UAE Artificial Intelligence camp has hosted more than 600 Emirati pupils and university students in its first month. The camp is part of the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, which launched in October 2017, and includes programmes to develop the skills of government employees and young people. More than 5,000 people will participate directly or in partnership programmes organised through the camp, the state-news agency Wam has reported. "We, in the UAE, are pioneering the use of AI technologies and applications to build a better future for all and ensuring that we, as a country, assume a global leadership position across all sectors," said Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence, Omar Al Olama. "The UAE AI Camp is an educational platform that contributes to the development of youth. It reflects the successful partnership between government, private and education sectors to achieve the objectives of the UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence and supports the strategic direction of the UAE in this field."
The Growing Cyber-AI Nexus
While the debate about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and augmented reality rages, virtual terrorists--those who operate primarily on the Dark Web--are getting smarter and thinking of new ways to benefit from both, creating methods to operate autonomously in this brave new world. Malware is being designed with adaptive, success-based learning to improve the accuracy and efficacy of cyberattacks. The coming generation of malware will be situation-aware, meaning that it will understand the environment it is in and make calculated decisions about what to do next, behaving like a human attacker: performing reconnaissance, identifying targets, choosing methods of attack, and intelligently evading detection. This next generation of malware uses code that is a precursor to AI, replacing traditional "if not this, then that" code logic with more complex decision-making trees. Autonomous malware operates much like branch prediction technology, designed to guess which branch of a decision tree a transaction will take before it is executed.