It's high time for government officials to get up to speed on the promise and potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence, two U.S. senators leading the charge said today. "I think we're entering an age where artificial intelligence is going to provide great benefits," Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said during an AI conference presented in Washington, D.C., as part of The Washington Post's Transformers program. Cantwell compared the state of the AI field to the state of the internet or the drone industry during the early days, when policymakers weren't completely sure how those technologies were going to be used. Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., acknowledged that members of Congress aren't sufficiently equipped to deal with all of the issues raised by AI. "I like a measure of humility from our legislators," he said. To remedy that gap, Cantwell and Young are among the sponsors of a bill known as the FUTURE of AI Act.

All eyes are on Facebook as more and more information rolls out regarding Cambridge Analytica, its involvement in recent elections and forums and how it came to obtain 50 million Facebook users' profile information. Now, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is joining those demanding more information from the social network giant. "Consumers have a right to know how their information is used -- and companies like Facebook have a fundamental responsibility to protect their users' personal information," Schneiderman said in a statement. "Today, along with Massachusetts Attorney General Healey, we sent a demand letter to Facebook -- the first step in our joint investigation to get to the bottom of what happened."

In China, officials and companies have deployed facial-recognition technology to a degree uncommon elsewhere, both commercially and--more controversially--for widespread surveillance. The government of the southwestern Guizhou province, Tsinghua University, and Beijing-based d-Ear Technologies announced they are collaborating on a pilot project that will link unique voice features to people's national ID information and create, maintain, and secure a database of "voiceprints." China's digitally-connected population has enabled the government to track people in many forms, such as using facial recognition to prevent toilet paper theft and jaywalking. But d-Ear (link in Chinese) and other companies say that voice recognition is a better and cheaper way to verify identity. Cheng Ge, marketing director of d-Ear, founded in 2002, told Quartz this week that the d-Ear pilot would be similar to social media giant Tencent's December pilot program in the southern city of Guangzhou, which allowed people to use facial recognition within its all-purpose WeChat app to create a digital version of their government-issued ID card.

This summer, the US Air Force will begin testing a laser mounted on an F-15 warplane, an official said Monday. The Pentagon last year awarded a $26 million contract to Lockheed Martin for a laser program called SHiELD (Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator.) The idea is to put a laser system on aircraft with an output of about 50 kilowatts to test their ability to zap drones or cruise missiles. Air Force scientists hope to have a laser that can defeat drones and missiles ready to put on an F-15 by summer 2019. 'We have got tests starting this summer and the flight tests next summer,' Jeff Stanley, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for science, technology and engineering, told reporters. 'There are still some technical challenges that we have to overcome, mainly size, weight, power.'

A public report by Harvard reveals how unprepared the US Military is when it comes to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology known as Deep Learning. The study by Harvard's Kennedy center was published in July 2017, written by Greg Allen Taniel Chan, and was conducted with funding from IARPA. The research is titled "Artificial Intelligence and National Security". I've written about the many tribes of AI and about the use of the term AI being too ambiguous and meaning too many things to too many people. Where do we find Deep Learning in this report from Harvard?

The service is an expansion of a nearly four-year old partnership between Apple and IBM in which the two companies create corporate apps together for Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad. They've already created apps that help healthcare workers better track medical records and apps for workers in to field to more easily share information they gather with colleagues. The idea is for IBM to sell corporate apps co-created with Apple's design team for business customers to use on mobile devices, and for Apple to then sell those iPhones and iPads to businesses. Apple is increasingly trying to make headway in selling its devices to corporations, an area in which it has previously played a supporting role as it focused on the consumer market. But as the overall consumer smartphone market declines, Apple sees business customers--long the domain of companies like Microsoft and Dell Technologies--as a new area of growth.

Whether the U.S. would succeed at becoming a leader in new military technology will be determined by how fast the U.S. Department of Defense recognizes the potential of AI and advanced autonomous systems, invest in associated technologies such as advanced computing, artificial neural networks, computer vision, natural language processing, big data, machine learning, and unmanned systems and robotics, as well as find use cases for them in the battlefield, the report shows. According to data from the International Data Corporation (IDC), a global market intelligence firm based in Massachusetts, the United States is still the largest market for cognitive/AI spending, reaching almost $10 billion in revenue in 2017. China, on the other hand, is constantly looking at investing and benefiting from American innovation in the military, putting money in U.S. startups when Washington seems reluctant.

A disgruntled Minecraft gamer is believed to be behind a bomb hoax email sent to more than 400 schools and colleges. Some students were evacuated from school and college buildings across the country on Monday after an email threatening to detonate a bomb if they refused to hand over cash was sent out. The email appeared to come from gaming network VeltPvP – a server which allows users to compete in the game Minecraft – but the US company said that the account had been "spoofed". Carson Kallen, the US firm's 17-year-old CEO, told the BBC he suspected the hoax emails had been sent by a disgruntled Minecraft player in a bid to damage VeltPvP's reputation. He said: "Everyone who plays it is between the ages of eight and 18 years old - it's all kids playing. "Every now and then we have a little rebel who will try to do something bad like this.

LONDON – Britain is investigating whether Facebook did enough to protect data after a whistleblower said a London-based political consultancy hired by Donald Trump improperly accessed information on 50 million Facebook users to sway public opinion. Facebook shares closed down nearly 7 percent on Monday, wiping nearly $40 billion off its market value as investors worried that damage to the reputation of the world's largest social media network would deter users and advertisers. Elizabeth Denham, the head of Britain's Information Commission, is seeking a warrant to search the offices of consultancy Cambridge Analytica after a whistleblower revealed it had harvested the private information of millions of people to support Trump's 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. U.S. and European lawmakers have demanded an explanation of how the consulting firm gained access to the data in 2014 and why Facebook failed to inform its users, raising broader industry questions about consumer privacy. "We are looking at whether or not Facebook secured and safeguarded personal information on the platform and whether when they found out about the loss of the data they acted robustly and whether or not people were informed," Denham told BBC Radio.

British data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica is at the centre of controversy in the US and UK after two newspapers reported the company harvested personal data about Facebook users beginning in 2014. Best known for assisting the 2016 presidential campaign of US President Donald Trump, Cambridge Analytica is now facing a government search of its London office, questions from US state authorities, and a demand by Facebook that it submit to a forensic audit. The UK's Information Commissioner has announced she is seeking a warrant to probe the company's servers – and also that she was forced to tell Facebook to "stand down" its own enquiries after its auditors and lawyers visited Cambridge Analytica's offices. "Such a search would potentially compromise a regulatory investigation," Elizabeth Denham said. Here is some of what is known about Cambridge Analytica.