WASHINGTON – A group of Republican and Democratic U.S. lawmakers asked Alphabet Inc.'s Google on Wednesday to reconsider its work with Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., which they described as a security threat. In a letter to Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai, the lawmakers said Google recently decided not to renew "Project Maven," an artificial intelligence research partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense. "While we regret that Google did not want to continue a long and fruitful tradition of collaboration between the military and technology companies, we are even more disappointed that Google apparently is more willing to support the Chinese Communist Party than the U.S. military," they wrote. The letter was signed by Republican Sens. Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, Republican Reps. Alphabet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sophia's uncanny-valley face, made of Hanson Robotics' patented Frubber, is rapidly becoming an iconic image in the field of artificial intelligence. She has been interviewed on shows like 60 Minutes, made a Saudi citizen, and even appeared before the United Nations. Every media appearance sparks comments about how artificial intelligence is going to completely transform the world. This is pretty good PR for a chatbot in a robot suit. But it's also riding the hype around artificial intelligence, and more importantly, people's uncertainty around what constitutes artificial intelligence, what can feasibly be done with it, and how close various milestones may be.

Machine learning models are susceptible to adversarial perturbations: small changes to input that can cause large changes in output. It is also demonstrated that there exist input-agnostic perturbations, called universal adversarial perturbations, which can change the inference of target model on most of the data samples. However, existing methods to craft universal perturbations are (i) task specific, (ii) require samples from the training data distribution, and (iii) perform complex optimizations. Additionally, because of the data dependence, fooling ability of the crafted perturbations is proportional to the available training data. In this paper, we present a novel, generalizable and data-free approaches for crafting universal adversarial perturbations. Independent of the underlying task, our objective achieves fooling via corrupting the extracted features at multiple layers. Therefore, the proposed objective is generalizable to craft image-agnostic perturbations across multiple vision tasks such as object recognition, semantic segmentation, and depth estimation. In the practical setting of black-box attack scenario (when the attacker does not have access to the target model and it's training data), we show that our objective outperforms the data dependent objectives to fool the learned models. Further, via exploiting simple priors related to the data distribution, our objective remarkably boosts the fooling ability of the crafted perturbations. Significant fooling rates achieved by our objective emphasize that the current deep learning models are now at an increased risk, since our objective generalizes across multiple tasks without the requirement of training data for crafting the perturbations. To encourage reproducible research, we have released the codes for our proposed algorithm.

Today, New America and the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Initiative (AI Initiative), a project of MIT's Media Lab and Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center, formed a new partnership to strengthen international understanding of Chinese artificial intelligence policies and developments. The AI Initiative will contribute $250,000 to support the work of New America's DigiChina project, a collaborative effort to translate, analyze, and contextualize Chinese digital policy developments. DigiChina, which published its first work in July 2017, emerged organically from a group of scholars and analysts on technology in China and has so far published translations and analysis by 12 scholars from 10 different organizations. In 2017, DigiChina published the first complete English-language translation of China's New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, which lays out ambitions for AI development and policy stretching to 2030. See below for links to other work so far on AI-related issues.

Artificial intelligence could give internet giants like Facebook and Amazon even more power to reshape the Canadian economy, threatening the viability of domestic businesses, researchers warn. A December presentation to senior civil servants said that Canadian companies were losing ownership of -- and access to -- data to the likes of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, requiring a federal policy response. Artificial intelligence "will reinforce this trend," presenters from the National Research Council warned top officials, adding that a national data strategy would be necessary to prevent Canada from becoming "a nation of'data cows' for other countries." The presentation, among other documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, provides a window into the scale of the problem the Liberals are trying to tackle by crafting a national data strategy, and the breadth of departments involved in its creation. The Liberals took another step towards the creation of the strategy by launching online and in-person consultations that will run through the summer in order to inform a final policy.

NASA's Curiosity Rover is living its best life through a massive dust storm on Mars, while Opportunity has been forced to hunker down. An artist's conception of a Martian dust storm, which might also crackle with electricity. A giant dust storm has enveloped the entire planet of Mars, with dust clouds reaching up to 40 miles high, NASA announced Wednesday. The dust storm has silenced NASA's solar-powered rover Opportunity since last week, by obscuring the sun. The robot rover has gone to sleep because its solar panels are unable to provide or recharge its batteries.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Earlier this week, the Justice Department announced that a grand jury had indicted former CIA employee Joshua Schulte for leaking classified information in 2016. While the indictment does not specify which leaks Schulte is tied to, several news organizations have reported that he provided the WikiLeaks Vault 7 documents, which comprised thousands of pages of classified material detailing the CIA's cyber operations and digital surveillance efforts. Among other revelations, the documents showed the U.S. intelligence community making widespread use of existing or repurposed techniques and computer programs to carry out its own operations. Unfortunately, the indictment offers frustratingly few clues as to how the government believes Schulte, a 29-year-old former member of the CIA's Engineering Development Group, carried out these leaks two years ago and how he was caught.

This week, Google is scrambling to fix a security bug in its Google Home and Chromecast devices that enables malicious third parties to access a device user's precise location via mapped Wi-Fi networks. But the bug itself isn't the only thing that has Slate's Christina Bonnington concerned. The issue highlights just how much Google knows about you, and how insecure our connected homes can be. Moving on to more intentional tracking devices: Think the Health app on your iPhone is only good for making you feel guilty about skimping on steps yesterday? That's because Apple is in the process of transforming the iOS app, which now--in addition to tracking and storing personal health data such as activity, sleep, nutrition, heart rate, and vitals--can also store medical history like test results, prescriptions, and immunizations.

In the wake of national security concerns over Huawei's interest in entering the US market, legislators from both the Senate and the House sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai urging him to reconsider working with the Chinese phone maker, who made Google's Nexus 6P. "Chinese telecommunications companies, such as Huawei, have extensive ties with the Chinese Communist Party," said the letter. "As a result, this partnership between Google and Huawei could pose a serious risk to U.S. national security and American consumers." The missive was signed by a bi-partisan group of lawmakers, including Senators Tom Cotton and Marco Rubio, along with Congress members Mike Conway, Liz Cheney and Dutch Ruppersberger. The legislators make the point that Google recently refused to renew its participation in Project Maven, an AI system that was created to improve US military drones.

From cofounding Sirius Satellite Radio to launching a biotech company to find a cure for her daughter's illness, Martine Rothblatt has had so much career success that any one of her accomplishments would be a crowning achievement for another entrepreneur. "I always try to convert a moonshot into an earthshot," Rothblatt told hundreds at the Forbes Women's Summit on Tuesday. As the CEO of United Therapeutics, which now sells five FDA-approved pills for pulmonary arterial hypertension, Rothblatt is constantly innovating. Her company has been experimenting with pig cloning and genetic modification to create organ transplants the body doesn't reject. She's also now figured out how to save the some 80% of donated lungs that end up unusable. On the side, Rothblatt is also working on the first electric helicopter and, as a transhumanist, Rothblatt experiments with robots.