Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a strategic imperative with various nations announcing centralized plans and initiatives to remain globally competitive. Automation is on the rise due to recent breakthroughs in deep learning, the availability of big data, decentralized computing via the cloud, and improved AI algorithms. "For governments, there is an urgent need to support both firms and citizens to ensure that they benefit from the AI-powered digital economy. This means preparing workers for rapidly changing job requirements, facilitating AI investment and adoption, and solving for broad-based, productivity-driven economic growth." Globally the most active AI hubs are in Silicon Valley, New York, Beijing, Boston, London, and Shenzhen [1].

With plans for brand new megacities, allowing women to drive and foreign-run cinemas, Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is on a charm offensive trying to promote his country as an international investment destination. The strategy aims at luring foreign money to help the world's biggest oil exporter create a new economy away from oil dependency in order to prevent future instability. On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said Riyadh's break-even oil price for 2018 is likely to be around $88 a barrel. North Sea Brent is currently trading down around $74 a barrel. And although the oil price is up considerably from 2014, the director of the IMF's Middle East department Jihad Azour said the focus in Saudi needs to remain on economic and social reforms.

NASA on Saturday blasted off its latest Mars lander, InSight, designed to perch on the surface and listen for "Marsquakes" in advance of eventual human missions to explore the Red Planet. The spacecraft, launched atop an Atlas V rocket at 4:05am Pacific time (11:05 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, marks NASA's first interplanetary mission from the US west coast. The $993m project aims to expand human knowledge of interior conditions on Mars, inform efforts to send human explorers there, and reveal how rocky planets like the Earth formed billions of years ago. If all goes as planned, the lander should settle on the Red Planet on November 26. Its name, InSight, is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.

Webstresser.org, a popular DDoS-for-Hire website service on Wednesday was taken down by authorities from the US, UK, Netherlands, and various other countries in a major international investigation and arrests have been made. The website is blamed for more than four million cyber attacks globally in the past three years and had over 134,000 registered users at the time of the takedown. The operation, dubbed "Operation Power OFF," targeted Webstresser.org, It involved law enforcement agencies from the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Serbia, Croatia, Spain, Italy, Germany, Australia, Hongkong, Canada, and United States of America, coordinating with Europol. The domain name was seized by the US Department of Defence.

Criminals are increasingly using drones in illegal activity and as a way to counter surveil and disrupt the FBI and other law enforcement agents, according to a report by Defense One. The publication cites one instance where an FBI hostage rescue team set up a raised observation post to monitor a situation. A so-called "swarm" of small drones appeared and assailed the FBI in a series of "high-speed low passes at the agents in the observation post to flush them." That incident was shared by Joe Mazel, head of the agency's operational technology law unit at the AUVSI Xponential conference in Denver. Mazel said the FBI agents lost situational awareness.

Amit Elazari Bar On is a doctoral law candidate (J.S.D.) at UC Berkeley School of Law and a CLTC (Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity) Grantee, Berkeley School of Information, as well as a member of AFOG, Algorithmic Fairness and Opacity Working Group at Berkeley. On 2017, Amit was a CTSP Fellow. We are told opaque algorithms and black-boxes are going to control our world, shaping every aspect of our life. They warn us that without accountability and transparency, and generally without better laws, humanity is doomed to a future of machine-generated bias and deception. From calls to open-the-black box to the limitations of explanations of inscrutable machine-learning models, the regulation of algorithms is one of the most pressing policy concerns in today's digital society.

Artificial intelligence (AI is intelligence displayed by machines. An example of this is machine learning. There are two categories of machine learning: supervised (learning by example) and unsupervised (self-learning). Supervised machine learning requires "labels" in the data. "Labels" are the answers that enable learning by example, such as malware.

The InSight mission, launched today from California's Vandenburg Air Force Base, is now on a six month cruise to Mars. It is expected to arrive in November, but what will it find? Mars may appear to be getting crowded, thanks to its growing robotic population, so why send another lander? Illustrator and planetary scientist James Tuttle Keane takes us inside the Red Planet to explain why InSight is such a unique mission. Set to land in Elysium Planitia, InSight will take up residence just north of the boundary between Mars' older, cratered southern highlands and northern lowland plains.

The societal effects of artificial intelligence are already being felt everyday by Americans -- in the availability of autonomous automobiles, in self-adjusting lighting, heating and air-conditioning systems, in Amazon "learning" what your reading preferences are and suggesting books of interest. These are helpful, if sometimes annoying, conveniences of 21st-century life. However, the algorithmic codes that are capable of learning and acting based on observed patterns in data sets possesses a "darker" side. "Automation, robotics, algorithms and artificial intelligence in recent times have shown they can do equal or sometimes even better work than humans who are dermatologists, insurance claims adjusters, lawyers, seismic testers in oil fields, sports journalists and financial reporters, crew members on guided-missile destroyers, hiring managers, psychological testers, retail salespeople and border patrol agents. "Moreover, there is growing anxiety that technology developments on the near horizon will crush the jobs of the millions who drive cars and trucks, analyze medical tests and data, perform middle management chores, dispense medicine, trade stocks and evaluate markets, fight on battlefields, perform government functions, and even replace those who program software -- that is, the creators of algorithms."

For a computer science professor, Greg Mori doesn't spend nearly as much time staring at a computer as one might think. "A lot of what I do is talk to people," said the director of Simon Fraser University's School of Computing Science. It's fitting, then, that he's using both his human and his computer skills for his next venture: making computers see and perceive the world as humans do. Mori is leading the latest artificial intelligence lab within a network of cross-Canada AI labs that the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) research institute Borealis AI is operating. The lab, announced by the big bank late last month, will be housed in a downtown Vancouver facility where researchers will be tackling fairness, privacy and bias in AI in addition to its mandate for computer vision. Mori said this holistic approach of Borealis AI helped entice him to join.