Leading scientists have drawn up plans for a vast multinational European institute devoted to world-class artificial intelligence (AI) research in a desperate bid to nurture and retain top talent in Europe. The new institute would be set up for similar reasons as Cern, the particle physics lab near Geneva, which was created after the second world war to rebuild European physics and reverse the brain drain of the brightest and best scientists to the US. Named the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems, or Ellis, the proposed AI institute would have major centres in a handful of countries, the UK included, with each employing hundreds of computer engineers, mathematicians and other scientists with the express aim of keeping Europe at the forefront of AI research. In an open letter that urges governments to act, the scientists describe how Europe has not kept up with the US and China, where the vast majority of leading AI firms and universities are based. The letter adds that while a few "research hotspots" still exist in Europe, "virtually all of the top people in those places are continuously being pursued for recruitment by US companies."

A former employee of Cambridge Analytica who claims the firm used the personal data of tens of millions of Facebook profiles to allegedly help Donald Trump's election campaign, is to testify before US Congress. Christopher Wylie said he had accepted an invitation to give evidence to the US House Intelligence Committee and House Judiciary Committee this week. He disclosed last month that the political consultancy firm had harvested data from users of the social media site by using personality quizzes to build up psychological profiles. As the US election approached, he said it then used this data to target them with bespoke political advertising. His revelations triggered investigations in the UK and US.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a moment in the national security space. While the public may still equate the notion of artificial intelligence in the military context with the humanoid robots of the Terminator franchise, there has been a significant growth in discussions about the national security consequences of artificial intelligence. These discussions span academia, business, and governments, from Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom's concern about the existential risk to humanity posed by artificial intelligence to Telsa founder Elon Musk's concern that artificial intelligence could trigger World War III to Vladimir Putin's statement that leadership in AI will be essential to global power in the 21st century. What does this really mean, especially when you move beyond the rhetoric of revolutionary change and think about the real world consequences of potential applications of artificial intelligence to militaries? Artificial intelligence is not a weapon.

The plan by the European Commission to give robots legal status of "electronic person" is quite interesting. Imagine your car with rights. I can just see this changing into something ambiguous, reaching the point where it gets out of control as more and more persons want to add to what is already there. Over a hundred leading experts tried to talk some sense into the European Commission. These experts tried to show the extent to which creating legal personality for robots could go wrong.

In 2011, The Onion aired a satirical news report called "CIA's'Facebook' Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Cost." Ahead of its time, The Onion captured the conundrum that marketers would face in the era of big data and artificial intelligence (AI). In the video, a fake CIA director says, "After years of secretly monitoring the public, we were astounded so many people would willingly publicize where they live, their religious views and political views, an alphabetized list of all their friends' personal email addresses, phone numbers, hundreds of photos of themselves, and even status updates about what they're doing moment to moment. It's truly a dream come true for the CIA." Facebook was a dream come true for marketers too.

Niger Air Base 201 is expected to be functional early next year. The base, a few miles outside Agadez and built at the request of Niger's government, will eventually house fighter jets and MQ-9 drones transferred from the capital Niamey. The drones, with surveillance and added striking capabilities, will have a range enabling them to reach a number of West and North African countries.

Facial recognition technology will be deployed at major airports in fiscal 2019 to screen foreign visitors as they leave Japan, a Justice Ministry official said Monday. Similar gates are being used at Tokyo's Haneda airport to screen returning Japanese, but the new plan will allow the Immigration Bureau to allocate more human resources to the processing of foreign arrivals, shortening waiting times, the official said. They also said it would allow more immigration staff to be tasked with counterterrorism duties ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. The gates scan faces and compare the images with the photographic data encrypted on microchips in passports. The gates automatically open if the computer verifies a match.

AGADEZ, Niger – On the scorching edge of the Sahara Desert, the U.S. Air Force is building a base for armed drones, the newest front in America's battle against the growing extremist threat in Africa's vast Sahel region. Niger Air Base 201 is expected to be functional early next year. The base, a few miles outside Agadez and built at the request of Niger's government, will eventually house fighter jets and MQ-9 drones transferred from the capital Niamey. The drones, with surveillance and added striking capabilities, will have a range enabling them to reach a number of West and North African countries. Few knew of the American military's presence in this desperately poor, remote West African country until October, when an ambush by Islamic State group-linked extremists killed four U.S. soldiers and five Nigeriens.

If they haven't done so already, cyber attackers may soon be arming themselves with artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) strategies and algorithms. Before long, it may not be a fair fight if defenders remain naive to what AI and ML can do on both sides of the battle. So suggests a new report by IEEE and the Canadian tech consulting firm Syntegrity. The report -- stemming from a three-day intensive meeting last October of cybersecurity experts from government, the military, and industry -- aggregates the group's findings into what it calls the six "dimensions" at the intersection of AI, ML, and cybersecurity. First, the report advocates ways to keep cybersecurity regulations and laws up to speed with the latest developments in the field.

With the House of Lords having reported in the opportunities and threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI), I have asked what my sector – the PR industry – is doing in anticipation of AI's rise. Are the machines really coming for our jobs or will AI free us up from our time-consuming tasks so we can focus on our core strength: creativity. On 16 April, the House of Lords released its Select Committee report on the impact of AI on British life. For context, the definition of AI that it followed was; "Technologies with the ability to perform tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition and language translation." The impact of AI on jobs, in particular, is something that has caused much discussion in recent years.