An artificial intelligence expert has called for countries to ban so-called "killer robots" before activists' warnings against them become a reality. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots recently released a short film, in which autonomous weapons are used to carry out mass killings with frightening efficiency, while people struggle to work out how to combat them. A United Nations panel discussed the issue last week, but next plans to meet next year. Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of AI at UNSW Sydney, says he's "confident" that killer robots will be banned, but is worried that the decision could take a long time to make. "[The] arms race has happened [and] is happening today," he said at the UN, reports AFP.

Companies are increasingly turning to AI and machine learning solutions to combat cyber threats, but sometimes there is no substitute for the insight that comes with human analysis. Threat intelligence specialist Recorded Future recognizes this and is expanding its platform to give security operations centers access to analyst-originated intelligence to offer relevant expert insights and analysis needed for operational improvements and targeted risk reduction. "To effectively combat the risks of cyber attacks, defenders need intelligence from the widest range of sources in real-time," says Dr Christopher Ahlberg, CEO and co-founder at Recorded Future. "The direct access to analyst insights combined with our open, closed and technical threat intelligence sources provides our customers with the most powerful source of advantage against their adversaries. The breadth of threat intelligence sources we arm customers with is unmatched and puts organizations in the best position possible to defend against threats."

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business Section. Good times in the Golden State: We learned Friday that California added 31,700 net jobs in October and the state unemployment rate fell to 4.9% from 5.1% a month earlier. The latest state jobs report follows a strong September, when employers boosted payrolls by a revised 50,300. In October, the leisure and hospitality sector, and the educational and health services sector, saw the largest gains. The Automobile Club of Southern California says this year's Thanksgiving holiday will be the busiest locally since 2007, with 3.87 million residents expected to get away for the long weekend.

In July, China's government issued a sweeping new strategy with a striking aim: draw level with the US in artificial intelligence technology within three years, and become the world leader by 2030. A call for research projects from China's Ministry of Science and Technology posted online last month fills in some detail on the government's plans. And it puts Silicon Valley chipmaker Nvidia, the leading supplier of silicon for machine-learning projects, in the cross hairs. The Ministry of Science and Technology document lays out 13 "transformative" technology projects where it wants to put government money in coming months, hoping for delivery by 2021. One is to invent new chips to run artificial neural networks, the form of software propelling the AI ambitions of Google and other tech companies.

UK Prime Minister, Theresa May today announced a new £20 million (€22.3 million) fund to help public services use UK expertise in innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI). Investment in the sector is always welcome and who knows, says Jeremy Cowan, it could take Mrs May's mind off Brexit for a while. Earlier, the Prime Minister met leading digital entrepreneurs and innovators from across the UK, as she announced a series of measures to support the "continued growth and success" of the country's tech sector. There was plenty of talk of being world class and of the Government's "enduring commitment" to this vital industry. The PM and Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond announced a wide-ranging package of support which includes: Mrs May said: "It is absolutely right that this dynamic sector, which makes such an immense contribution to our economic life and to our society, has the full backing of Government. Technology is at the heart of our modern ...

This article was originally published on cmo.com Every decade or so, a new, game-changing technology platform changes the way the world works. From the desktop, to mobile, and to the cloud, the landscape continues to advance. We are knee-deep in the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution--one so big that it has been compared to the invention of electricity. AI has the potential to power future innovation, especially in terms of customer experiences and the way we do our jobs.

Recent results in coupled or temporal graphical models offer schemes for estimating the relationship structure between features when the data come from related (but distinct) longitudinal sources. A novel application of these ideas is for analyzing group-level differences, i.e., in identifying if trends of estimated objects (e.g., covariance or precision matrices) are different across disparate conditions (e.g., gender or disease). Often, poor effect sizes make detecting the differential signal over the full set of features difficult: for example, dependencies between only a subset of features may manifest differently across groups. In this work, we first give a parametric model for estimating trends in the space of SPD matrices as a function of one or more covariates. We then generalize scan statistics to graph structures, to search over distinct subsets of features (graph partitions) whose temporal dependency structure may show statistically significant group-wise differences. We theoretically analyze the Family Wise Error Rate (FWER) and bounds on Type 1 and Type 2 error. On a cohort of individuals with risk factors for Alzheimer's disease (but otherwise cognitively healthy), we find scientifically interesting group differences where the default analysis, i.e., models estimated on the full graph, do not survive reasonable significance thresholds.

The ubiquity of systems using artificial intelligence or "AI" has brought increasing attention to how those systems should be regulated. The choice of how to regulate AI systems will require care. AI systems have the potential to synthesize large amounts of data, allowing for greater levels of personalization and precision than ever before---applications range from clinical decision support to autonomous driving and predictive policing. That said, there exist legitimate concerns about the intentional and unintentional negative consequences of AI systems. There are many ways to hold AI systems accountable. In this work, we focus on one: explanation. Questions about a legal right to explanation from AI systems was recently debated in the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and thus thinking carefully about when and how explanation from AI systems might improve accountability is timely. In this work, we review contexts in which explanation is currently required under the law, and then list the technical considerations that must be considered if we desired AI systems that could provide kinds of explanations that are currently required of humans.

"ROBOTS ARE NOT taking over the world", was the message given this week during United Nations talks on the issue of autonomous weapons. That's according to the diplomat leading the first official talks on the issue, the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), as they sought to ease criticism over slow progress towards restricting the use of so-called "killer robots". The United Nations was wrapping up an initial five days of discussions on weapons systems that can identify and destroy targets without human control, which experts say will soon be battle ready. The meeting of the CCW marked an initial step towards an agreed set of rules governing such weapons. But activists warned that time was running out and that the glacial pace of the UN-brokered discussions was not responding to an arms race already underway.

In the summer of 1957, the Earth stood witness as a meteorite cratered in rural Pennsylvania, bringing with it a people-eating plague never seen: an alien amoeba with the taste for human flesh. While we had Steve McQueen around for the first invasion, humanity is now defended against microbial marauders from outer space by NASA and its international counterparts. Biological contamination goes both ways, mind you. Just as important as keeping extraterrestrial organisms from reaching the surface (aka "backward contamination") is ensuring that our planetary probes carry as few microbial hitchhikers from Earth as possible ("forward contamination"). To that end, in 1958, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) issued a decree urging "that scientists plan lunar and planetary studies with great care and deep concern so that initial operations do not compromise and make impossible forever after critical scientific experiments."