As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it is having profound impact on a range of sectors seemingly unrelated to it, such as international relations. Some countries are pursuing AI more or less within the confines of international law and generally accepted principles of doing business, while others are choosing to do what is necessary to attempt to achieve AI supremacy outside those boundaries. In the process, AI is slowly altering the balance of power between global actors and among alliances in a number of ways. Just as becoming adept in the cyber arena levels the playing field – giving countries such as Iran and North Korea the ability to go head to head with China, Russia and that US in cyber space – the pursuit of AI supremacy is providing an increased competitive edge in international business to some smaller, otherwise less competitive nations, enhancing their ability to secure preferential trade and investment arrangements with other countries, raising their global profile, and enabling them to progress into previously unimagined areas of international trade, investment, and diplomacy. How AI is deployed by governments can have serious consequences in international relations, particularly if a given government has unusual capabilities in the AI arena.

This paper provides a link between causal inference and machine learning techniques - specifically, Classification and Regression Trees (CART) - in observational studies where the receipt of the treatment is not randomized, but the assignment to the treatment can be assumed to be randomized (irregular assignment mechanism). The paper contributes to the growing applied machine learning literature on causal inference, by proposing a modified version of the Causal Tree (CT) algorithm to draw causal inference from an irregular assignment mechanism. The proposed method is developed by merging the CT approach with the instrumental variable framework to causal inference, hence the name Causal Tree with Instrumental Variable (CT-IV). As compared to CT, the main strength of CT-IV is that it can deal more efficiently with the heterogeneity of causal effects, as demonstrated by a series of numerical results obtained on synthetic data. Then, the proposed algorithm is used to evaluate a public policy implemented by the Tuscan Regional Administration (Italy), which aimed at easing the access to credit for small firms. In this context, CT-IV breaks fresh ground for target-based policies, identifying interesting heterogeneous causal effects.

Acute Kidney Injury (AKI), a sudden decline in kidney function, is associated with increased mortality, morbidity, length of stay, and hospital cost. Since AKI is sometimes preventable, there is great interest in prediction. Most existing studies consider all patients and therefore restrict to features available in the first hours of hospitalization. Here, the focus is instead on rehospitalized patients, a cohort in which rich longitudinal features from prior hospitalizations can be analyzed. Our objective is to provide a risk score directly at hospital re-entry. Gradient boosting, penalized logistic regression (with and without stability selection), and a recurrent neural network are trained on two years of adult inpatient EHR data (3,387 attributes for 34,505 patients who generated 90,013 training samples with 5,618 cases and 84,395 controls). Predictions are internally evaluated with 50 iterations of 5-fold grouped cross-validation with special emphasis on calibration, an analysis of which is performed at the patient as well as hospitalization level. Error is assessed with respect to diagnosis, race, age, gender, AKI identification method, and hospital utilization. In an additional experiment, the regularization penalty is severely increased to induce parsimony and interpretability. Predictors identified for rehospitalized patients are also reported with a special analysis of medications that might be modifiable risk factors. Insights from this study might be used to construct a predictive tool for AKI in rehospitalized patients. An accurate estimate of AKI risk at hospital entry might serve as a prior for an admitting provider or another predictive algorithm.

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What's going on: By sensibility, computer science researchers prefer to leave it to philosophers and policymakers to interpret the societal repercussions of their work. At most, their papers cite a few potential positive impacts of the findings -- and avoid mentioning the negatives altogether. But now, they should be more active to renew public faith, said Jack Clark, strategy and communications director at OpenAI. "We need to regain that trust by showing we're conscious of the impact of what we do," he tells Axios. Researchers whose oppose greater oversight say it's not possible to guess whether their work will be repurposed for ill, or to prevent it from being misused.

"It's not just software, it's an ecosystem," Zhifei Li, Mobvoi's chief executive, said of Google--also a minority investor in his startup. Mr. Li is one of many allies Google has courted in recent years as it tries to keep a foothold in China, a market from which the Alphabet Inc. GOOGL -0.95% unit retreated eight years ago in protest over government hacking and censorship. While its core services like search, Gmail and YouTube remain blocked for most Chinese citizens, the company provides tools and support to a growing number of app developers, manufacturers and advertisers in the region, who rely on Google to reach global customers. Now those allies will likely be crucial as Google embarks on a broader China expansion strategy, according to a number of people either involved in the effort or watching it closely. As part of a project dubbed "Dragonfly," Google is testing a mobile version of its search engine that would adhere to China's strict censors, people familiar with the matter said.

The killing of four Palestinian children aged 10 and 11 by an Israeli air strike on a Gaza beach during the 2014 war could have been prevented, internal documents seen by US website The Intercept show. The boys were killed by an armed Israeli drone that fired two missiles, with the second one hitting and killing four and injuring several others. On July 16, 2014, four children were playing near a shipping container on a jetty that had been destroyed by an Israeli air strike a day earlier because the Israeli military suspected it of being used as a weapons cache by armed members of Hamas. However, experts, journalists and eyewitnesses have all contested the claim weapons were stored in the container, as no members of Hamas were seen in the vicinity and there was no second explosion following the air strike that destroyed it. On the day of the attack, one of the children entered the remains of the container, and was spotted by two Israeli drones, one of which was armed.

My post today is a collaboration with my colleague Dave Boyce, Chief Strategy officer for InsideSales.com Justin is the former CTO of the FBI and the DOJ, where he used data and science to anticipate and thwart terror attacks after 9/11. He holds a bachelors degree and two masters degrees from MIT. Every business needs Customer Relationship Management (CRM). But CRM is now a commodity.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's military said it had shot down a drone that came close to its Syrian air base at Hmeimim on Saturday and was launched from the Idlib "de-escalation" zone controlled by what Moscow calls "illegal military groups", TASS agency reported.

When I walked around the exhibition floor at this week's massive Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, I was struck by the number of companies boasting about how they are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make the world a safer place. But some experts worry vendors aren't paying enough attention to the risks associated with relying heavily on these technologies. "What's happening is a little concerning, and in some cases even dangerous," warns Raffael Marty of security firm Forcepoint. The security industry's hunger for algorithms is understandable. It's facing a tsunami of cyberattacks just as the number of devices being hooked up to the internet is exploding.