Imagine a world where smart pantries sense when you are running out of your favourite food and order more of it, without you lifting a finger. Where intelligent robots roam your supermarket, ever at your service. Where dynamic food pricing changes minute-to-minute depending on the weather outside, or what the store down the road is offering. Amazon workers'refuse' to build tech for US immigration It may sound like a seismic shift in our food retail world, but these technological frontiers are real and the food sector is gearing up in a big way. What is less certain is what impact such changes will have on our health.

Traditional information retrieval systems represent documents and queries by keyword sets. However, the content of a document or a query is mainly defined by both keywords and named entities occurring in it. Named entities have ontological features, namely, their aliases, classes, and identifiers, which are hidden from their textual appearance. Besides, the meaning of a query may imply latent named entities that are related to the apparent ones in the query. We propose an ontology-based generalized vector space model to semantic text search. It exploits ontological features of named entities and their latently related ones to reveal the semantics of documents and queries. We also propose a framework to combine different ontologies to take their complementary advantages for semantic annotation and searching.

Experts said the trade conflict with the US will have no effect on China's development in AI technology, after an annual report released on Friday said China has become the most attractive country for investment and financing in AI technology, which accounts for 60 percent in the world. The report on China AI Development 2018 was released by Tsinghua University on Friday, which said from 2013 to the first quarter of 2018, the amount of investment and financing in AI technology in China accounts for 60 percent in the world, valued at $27 billion in 2017, Chinese news portal thepaper.com AI is an emerging area for investors with substantial "hot" money in the Chinese financial market, Xiang Yang, an industry expert at Beijing-based CCID Consulting, told the Global Times on Friday. "Many emerging industries will enjoy an investment boom at the beginning, but when the boom subsides, investors will be more rational, and survivors will be very qualified. The quality of China's AI will not suffer and will continue to attract more talent to return to China from the US," Wan said.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. A cogent and forceful argument for the government to regulate face-recognition technology was published on Friday--not by a legislator, pundit, or advocacy group, but by Microsoft. In a lengthy blog post, the Seattle-based tech giant made the case that face recognition is too potent, and comes with too many risks, for the public to leave entirely in the hands of private companies such as itself. The technology, which uses machine-learning software to automatically identify people in photographs and video footage, is increasingly used by social networks and photo apps, and as a security measure on devices like iPhones. It's also being used by a growing number of law enforcement agencies to help identify suspects in crimes such as the mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, in June.

Fake AI-generated videos featuring political figures could be all the rage during the next election cycle, and that's bad news for democracy. A recently released study indicates that DeepFakes, a neural network that creates fake videos of real people, represents one of the largest threats posed by artificial intelligence. AI systems are capable of generating realistic-sounding synthetic voice recordings of any individual for whom there is a sufficiently large voice training dataset. The same is increasingly true for video. As of this writing, "deep fake" forged audio and video looks and sounds noticeably wrong even to untrained individuals. However, at the pace these technologies are making progress, they are likely less than five years away from being able to fool the untrained ear and eye.

Today Microsoft president Brad Smith called for federal regulation of facial recognition software. "In a democratic republic, there is no substitute for decision making by our elected representatives regarding the issues that require the balancing of public safety with the essence of our democratic freedoms. Facial recognition will require the public and private sectors alike to step up -- and to act," Smith wrote in a blog post. Recent events explain why Smith is speaking out now. Last month, while the majority of U.S. citizens was outraged about the idea of separating families who unlawfully entered the United States, Microsoft was criticized by the public and hundreds of its own employees for its contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A protester holds up a sign targeting Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff outside the company's headquarters in San Francisco on Monday. A protester holds up a sign targeting Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff outside the company's headquarters in San Francisco on Monday. Tech workers from Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been putting pressure on their CEOs to cut ties and end contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, and other government agencies. It's a rare occurrence for employees to tell their bosses to turn away business. But there is a growing concern among tech workers that the cutting-edge tools they create can be used in immoral ways.

Quantum computing promises enough computational power to solve problems far beyond the capabilities of the fastest digital computers, so the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is laying the groundwork for applying the technology to real-world problems. In a request for information, DARPA is asking how quantum computing can enable new capabilities when it comes to solving science and technology problems, such as understanding complex physical systems, optimizing artificial intelligence and machine learning and enhancing distributed sensing. Noting that it is not interested in solving cryptology issues, DARPA is asking the research community to help solve challenges of scale, environmental interactions, connectivity and memory and suggest "hard" science and technology problems the technology could be leveraged to solve. Establishing the fundamental limits of quantum computing in terms of how problems should be framed, when a model's scale requires a quantum-based solution, how to manage connectivity and errors, the size of potential speed gains and the ability to break large problems into smaller pieces that can map to several quantum platforms. Improving machine learning by leveraging a hybrid quantum/classical computing approach to decrease the time required to train machine learning models.

If we don't harness the power of artificial intelligence into cybersecurity then, hackers will eventually do this. Now to look at AI as a disruptor Cyber security has to keep up with technological advancements and use the power of AI to stay relevant.

Facial-recognition technology has become deeply integrated in tech giants' products, whether the key feature for unlocking Apple's iPhone X or identifying people in Google's photos app. In his latest missive, Mr. Smith tackles the potential "sobering" uses for facial-recognition technology, such as creating a database of everyone who attended a political rally or governmental tracking of residents as they move about without their permission or knowledge. "The only effective way to manage the use of technology by a government is for the government proactively to manage this use itself," Mr. Smith wrote in a blog post scheduled for Friday. But he also challenged the notion companies could regulate themselves alone. Change won't occur, he said, if a few companies adopt new standards while rivals ignore them.