WASHINGTON – One U.S. special operations soldier was killed and four U.S. service members were wounded in an "enemy attack" Friday in Somalia, the U.S. military said -- casualties that are likely to put renewed scrutiny on America's counterterrorism operations in Africa. It was the first public announcement of a U.S. military combat death on the continent since four U.S. service members were killed in a militant ambush in the west African nation of Niger in October. President Donald Trump paid tribute on Twitter on Friday night, offering "thoughts and prayers" to the families of the soldier who was killed and those who were wounded. "They are truly all HEROES," he tweeted. U.S. Africa Command said in a statement that U.S. troops with Somali and Kenyan forces came under mortar and small-arms fire in Jubaland, Somalia, at around 2:45 p.m.

As the world's biggest militaries embrace artificial intelligence, Google says it will no longer be involved. The Silicon Valley tech giant announced AI principles Thursday, saying it wouldn't pursue weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose is to cause harm. It also said it won't pursue surveillance technologies that violate international norms. And it won't pursue AI technologies that violate human rights. Google has endured a recent employee backlash due to its involvement in a US Air Force project that used drones to automatically identify objects with the company's technology.

One of Nigeria's foremost innovation platform Data Science Nigeria, took a significant step in its drive for repositioning Nigeria as Africa's leader in Analytics, Research and Data-Driven solutions with the official opening of the first-ever Artificial Intelligence Hub in the University of Lagos.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 1939 TCM Tue. 7 p.m. Mean Streets 1973 Cinemax Sun. 6 a.m. Batman Begins 2005 AMC Sun. Throw Momma From the Train 1987 EPIX Sun. Die Hard 1988 IFC Sun. I Know What You Did Last Summer 1997 Starz Tue. Gone in 60 Seconds 2000 CMT Wed. 8 p.m., Thur. Total Recall 1990 Encore Thur. 2 a.m. A Fish Called Wanda 1988 Encore Thur. 2 p.m., 9 p.m. The World Is Not Enough 1999 EPIX Sat. 4 p.m. Look Who's Talking 1989 OVA Sun. Die Hard With a Vengeance 1995 IFC Thur. Oil-platform workers, including an estranged couple, and a Navy SEAL make a startling deep-sea discovery. A clueless politician falls in love with a waitress whose erratic behavior is caused by a nail stuck in her head. After glimpsing his future, an ambitious politician battles the agents of Fate itself to be with the woman he loves. To help a friend, a suburban baby sitter drives into downtown Chicago with her two charges and a neighbor. Two teenage baby sitters and a group of children spend a wild night ...

The US just took back the title for the world's fastest supercomputer. On Friday, the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee unveiled the'Summit' supercomputer that can deliver a peak performance of 200 petaflops, or about 200 quadrillion calculations per second. It managed to beat out the previous record holder that was China's Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. Summit is 60% faster than the TaihuLight supercomputer, which could achieve a peak performance of 93 petaflops. The feat puts the US at the front of the top 500 supercomputers in the world -- the first time it has held such ranking since June 2013. Summit has been in development for several years now and is made up of thousands of chips.

According to a report by Gizmodo, Google has decided not to renew its controversial contract for Project Maven with the Department of Defense. The project involved analyzing drone footage using artificial intelligence with the ultimate goal of automatically classifying images of objects and people. The contract is set to expire in 2019, and the decision not to renew was announced internally during a weekly meeting by Google Cloud chief Diane Greene, who added that the company will announce new ethical principles surrounding artificial intelligence and the military. Three sources who were at the meeting told Gizmodo that Greene attributed Google's decision to let the contract expire "because the backlash has been terrible for the company." She added that the decision to embark on the project had been made "at a time when Google was more aggressively pursuing military work."

On Thursday, Google released a document entitled "Artificial Intelligence at Google: Our Principles," vowing to avoid Pentagon projects to develop AI weapons. However, they'll continue to work with the US military on a host of other projects, including AI projects, so long as they don't include surveillance that runs counter to human rights. "Google is in a spot at the moment," Wallis, editor-at-large for Digital Journal and author of more than a dozen books, told Loud & Clear hosts John Kiriakou and Nicole Roussell. "This is gold rush time for artificial intelligence; everybody wants a piece of it, and we're not talking about the sort of generic type of artificial intelligence -- we're talking about possibly thousands or millions of different kinds of artificial intelligence." In other words, the advent of artificially intelligent weapons is "inevitable," Wallis said.

On Thursday, Google released a document entitled "Artificial Intelligence at Google: Our Principles," vowing to avoid Pentagon projects to develop AI weapons. However, they'll continue to work with the US military on a host of other projects, including AI projects, so long as they don't include surveillance that runs counter to human rights. "Google is in a spot at the moment," Wallis, editor-at-large for Digital Journal and author of more than a dozen books, told Loud & Clear hosts John Kiriakou and Nicole Roussell. "This is gold rush time for artificial intelligence; everybody wants a piece of it, and we're not talking about the sort of generic type of artificial intelligence -- we're talking about possibly thousands or millions of different kinds of artificial intelligence." In other words, the advent of artificially intelligent weapons is "inevitable," Wallis said.

A measure of relative importance of variables is often desired by researchers when the explanatory aspects of econometric methods are of interest. To this end, the author briefly reviews the limitations of conventional econometrics in constructing a reliable measure of variable importance. The author highlights the relative stature of explanatory and predictive analysis in economics and the emergence of fruitful collaborations between econometrics and computer science. Learning lessons from both, the author proposes a hybrid approach based on conventional econometrics and advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms, which are otherwise, used in predictive analytics. The purpose of this article is two-fold, to propose a hybrid approach to assess relative importance and demonstrate its applicability in addressing policy priority issues with an example of food inflation in India, followed by a broader aim to introduce the possibility of conflation of ML and conventional econometrics to an audience of researchers in economics and social sciences, in general.

This document gives a knowledge-oriented analysis of about 20 interesting Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE) examples, drawn from the 2005 RTE5 competition test set. The analysis ignores shallow statistical matching techniques between T and H, and rather asks: What would it take to reasonably infer that T implies H? What world knowledge would be needed for this task? Although such knowledge-intensive techniques have not had much success in RTE evaluations, ultimately an intelligent system should be expected to know and deploy this kind of world knowledge required to perform this kind of reasoning. The selected examples are typically ones which our RTE system (called BLUE) got wrong and ones which require world knowledge to answer. In particular, the analysis covers cases where there was near-perfect lexical overlap between T and H, yet the entailment was NO, i.e., examples that most likely all current RTE systems will have got wrong. A nice example is #341 (page 26), that requires inferring from "a river floods" that "a river overflows its banks". Seems it should be easy, right? Enjoy!