Decatur Youth Services implemented Girls STEAM, also a first-year program, for girls ages 9-13 to explore robotics, drones and programming. In Camp Invention, held at Priceville Junior High, campers designed smart homes and interacted with self-driving robots. At First Baptist Church in Decatur, 30 students participated in Seize the Brain Summer Camp. And Athens Center for Lifelong Learning introduced children to engineering through a Dr. Seuss STEM Camp, which featured building a tower for Yertle.

Nine days ago, we learned that Cambridge Analytica, the firm engaged by the Trump campaign to lead its digital strategy leading up to the 2016 United States presidential elections, illegitimately gained access to the Facebook data of more than 50 million users, many of them American voters. This revelation came on the heels of the announcement made last month by the Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller of the indictment of 13 Russians who worked for the Internet Research Agency, a "troll farm" tied to the Kremlin, charging that they wielded fake social media accounts to influence the 2016 presidential elections. But as Facebook, Google, Twitter and like companies now contritely cover their tracks and comply with the government's requests, they simultaneously remain quiet about a critical trend that promises to subvert the nation's political integrity yet again if left unaddressed: the systemic integration of artificial intelligence into the same digital marketing technologies that were exploited by both Cambridge Analytica and the Internet Research Agency. According to the F.B.I.'s findings, the tactics used to date by Russia have, technologically speaking, not been particularly sophisticated. Those tactics have included the direct control of fake social media accounts and manual drafting of subversive messages. These were often timed for release with politically charged incidents in the real world -- including, for instance, the suicide bombings in Brussels, the declaration of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee and Mr. Trump's staging of a town hall in New Hampshire, each of which occurred weeks before election night in 2016.

The plot-lines of the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are debated and contested. But it is safe to predict that it will become one of the central technologies of the 21st century. It is fashionable these days to speak about data as the new oil. But if we want to "refine" the vast quantities of data we are collecting today and make sense of it, we will need potent AI. The consequences of the AI revolution could not be more far reaching.

Amy O'Connor, chief information officer at Cloudera and Patrick Sullivan, global director of Security Strategy at Akamai, discuss the growing use of artificial intelligence in both public and private sector cyber security, The latest agency to consider using artificial intelligence to augment their cybersecurity systems is the Internal Revenue Service. A request for proposals went out in June for an analytics platform to identify risks at the agency, and AI cloud providers are jumping at the opportunity. "I think it's encouraging that the IRS is going down this path. We see both in the private sector and public sector that people are turning to machine learning. One of the challenges that we face is not only are the threats growing… but just the challenge of finding qualified security professionals is daunting. There's estimates from ISACA that we will be about two million security personnel short next year and that grows to three and a half million based on estimates a couple of years from there," said Patrick Sullivan, global director of Security Strategy at Akamai "So what you end up with is a lot of great security tools that there's no human there that is trained to consume those, to inspect those. That's one opportunity with machine learning is to have better inspection of that enormous security perimeter that you have there."

President Donald Trump's July 19 executive order establishing the President's National Council for the American Worker is directed at preparing Americans for the workplace of the future. Although short on specifics, the order sends a powerful message about the need for revitalizing educational opportunities if Americans are to thrive in the era of big data, robots and artificial intelligence. The president's intent is to lay the groundwork for tackling a national "skills crisis." His order accepts that Americans need additional skills to fill the current 6.7 million job vacancies. In fact, the executive order gives official imprimatur to what many in industry and academia have feared for some time: "The economy is changing at a rapid pace because of the technology, automation, and artificial intelligence," and existing programs have "prepared Americans for the economy of the past."

Having visited more than 40 countries, 200 cities and lived in six countries in the last 10 years as well as working in the disruptive Internet of Things (IoT) space, the subject of how to make cities smarter and more citizen friendly is of particular interest to me for both professional and personal reasons. More than half of the world's population now live in cities - and the figure will rise to more than two thirds by 2050, according to a United Nations forecast. Growing numbers of city residents put pressure on energy and water resources, transport networks, environment, national healthcare budgets as well as many more aspects of the city. In the last few weeks I have been thinking about the most important problems that the most cities around the world may face, but they can be solved or reduced by Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (AI) enabled solutions. By IoT we simply mean when objects are connected to the Internet and exchange data.

The United States enjoys a long track record of dominating conventional military operations, driven in large part by our technological superiority -- the nation's ability to develop new capabilities and rapidly integrate them into military operations. However, continued dominance is not assured. Whereas in the past the military funded most major technology breakthroughs and thus could prevent potential adversaries' access, today commercial entities lead the development of cutting-edge technology, providing rivals with the opportunity to obtain and rapidly operationalize advanced capabilities, weakening America's traditional advantages. To protect the U.S. military's technological edge, government, industry and academia must work together to develop and operationalize artificial intelligence, the technology most likely to drive outcomes on future battlefields. The 2018 National Defense Strategy places a strong focus on AI as an emerging technology that will change society and ultimately the character of war.

ROBO Global's Jeremie Capron examines how the trade war between the US and China could be good for robotics. You've heard it over and over again: No one wins in a trade war. As the trade war between the US and China continues to escalate, the tariffs and barriers on imported products threaten to slow business activity, create supply chain friction, and dampen international trade – not only between the two countries themselves, but around the globe. No one wins a trade war. But robotics, automation, and AI (or RAAI) is notorious for breaking the rules.

When it comes to autonomous-vehicle testing, Waymo is one of the obvious leaders. Earlier this March, Navigant Research named Waymo, because of its vision, partners, go-to market strategy, technology, production strategy, product quality and reliability sales, marketing and distribution, product capability, staying power, and product portfolio, as a leader in the race. As a leader, Waymo announced that its autonomous vehicles had impressively traveled a total of 5 million miles earlier this year. That was an impressive figure, as it took the company just three months to reach -- three months from breaking the 4-million mile mark. At the time, the technology company claimed that its vehicles were traveling the same amount of miles the average American driver travels in a year in one day.

ISLAMABAD – Over the years, Pakistan's Imran Khan has been known for his anti-American rhetoric, once even suggesting he might, as prime minister, order the shooting down of U.S. drones targeting al-Qaida figures along the Pakistan-Afghan border. Now that Khan is poised to become nuclear-armed Pakistan's leader, Washington will be watching closely for signs of whether he will follow a path of confrontation or continue with the conciliatory tone he struck in his election victory speech. His attitude toward the United States and President Donald Trump -- to whom Khan has often been compared as a populist shaking up the established political order -- could determine the future of a crucial but fraught relationship. Officially allies in fighting terrorism, Pakistan and the United States have a complicated relationship, bound by Washington's dependence on Pakistan to supply its troops in Afghanistan but plagued by accusations that Islamabad is playing a double game. Tensions have grown over U.S. complaints that the Afghan Taliban and al-Haqqani network that target American troops in Afghanistan are allowed to shelter on Pakistani soil.