The anonymous street artist Banksy has donated £205,000 from the sale of a protest piece to anti-arms campaigners. The artwork, Civilian Drone Strike, was on display at the Stop the Arms Fair art exhibition in east London. It depicts drones destroying a cartoon image of a house, while a child and her dog look on in distress. The exhibition was held alongside the world's largest arms fair, the Defence and Security Equipment International - both exhibitions closed on Friday. The art exhibition claimed to highlight "the inhumanity of the arms trade" through art, with work by more than 1,600 exhibitors from 54 countries.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. If you haven't seen this blooper reel of rocket mishaps from SpaceX, it's spectacular: I love this because it's a reminder that robotics (and space robotics especially) is very very hard, and part of the normal process of discovery and learning is trying things and having them go wrong. What should be a normal part of that process is also sharing the failures on video to help the rest of us feel better about our own projects, so especially if you're doing research, make sure and keep a copy of all of those outtakes, and send them to us! We wrote about Fable when we first saw it at IROS 2014 in Chicago, and a few years later, they've shipped hundreds of robots to customers in Denmark and are now starting to ship to the rest of the world.

Apple finally announced the iPhone X this week, complete with a facial recognition system that Apple calls FaceID. Preliminary impressions are that FaceID will be difficult to trick, and should be secure for the average user, but researchers are eager to test its robustness. Consumer facial recognition has been around, but not yet at this scale, inviting questions about what its implications will be, particularly for privacy. Apple's new iOS 11 mobile operating system does have more crucial privacy protections against muggers and government officials alike but researchers detailed doubts this week about the "differential privacy" techniques Apple uses that are meant to aggregate and analyze customer data without invading their privacy. Over at the astounding, ongoing dumpster fire that is the Equifax data breach, Equifax admitted that hackers accessed its network through an Apache Struts web application vulnerability that had a patch available for two months before the initial intrusion.

The first genuinely impressive AI assistant may well have a Canadian accent. Facebook announced today that it is tapping into Canada's impressive supply of artificial-intelligence talent and expertise by creating a major AI research center in Montreal. Several big recent advances in AI can be traced back to Canadian research labs, and Facebook is hoping that the new lab may help it take advantage of whatever comes next. The new center will focus, in particular, on an area of AI known as reinforcement learning (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017: Reinforcement Learning"). The center will seek to apply this and other novel approaches to language, with the aim of producing more coherent and useful virtual assistants, says Yann LeCun, director of AI research at Facebook.

Artificial intelligence has jumped from sci-fi movie plots into mainstream news headlines in just a couple of years. And the headlines are often contradictory. AI is either a technological leap into greater prosperity or mass unemployment; it will either be our most valuable servant or terrifying master. But what is AI, how does it work, and what are the benefits and the concerns? AI is a computer system that can do tasks that humans need intelligence to do. "An intelligent computer system could be as simple as a program that plays chess or as complex as a driverless car," Mary-Anne Williams, professor of social robotics at the University of Technology, Sydney, said.

For the past two years, our expert panelists have been informing the public about the extent to which economists agree or disagree on important public policy issues. This week, we are delighted to announce that we are expanding the IGM Economic Experts Panel to add ten new distinguished economists. Like our other experts, these new panelists have impeccable qualifications to speak on public policy matters, and their names will be familiar to other economists and the media. To give the public a broad sense of their views on policy issues, each new expert has responded to a selection of 16 statements that our panel had previously addressed. We chose these 16 statements, which cover a wide range of important policy areas, because the original panelists' responses to them were analyzed in a paper comparing the views of our economic experts with those of the American public.

On behalf of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Cyber Warfare and the Naval Sea Systems Command Chief Engineer, we are excited to have you join us at the U.S. Navy's premiere digital experience for Building a Community of Practice in Maritime Security. This is not just another hackathon. This is the Blue Angels for geeks! Sure there are contests on challenging problems, but HACKtheMACHINE is really about inspiring an innovation generation, and assuring our citizens that despite an ever-growing list of cyber crimes reported in the media the U.S. Navy is on call and ready to execute cyber warfare in defense of our nation and our allies. We are inviting everyone to get a hands on experience in maritime cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality team building.

The vehicle to represent Knowledge Organization Systems (KOSs) in the environment of the Semantic Web and linked data is the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS). SKOS provides a way to assign a URI to each concept, and this URI functions as a surrogate for the concept. This fact makes of main concern the need to clarify the URIs' ontological meaning. The aim of this study is to investigate the relation between the ontological substance of KOS concepts and concepts revealed through the grammatical and syntactic formalisms of natural language. For this purpose, we examined the dividableness of concepts in specific KOSs (i.e. a thesaurus, a subject headings system and a classification scheme) by applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques (i.e. morphosyntactic analysis) to the lexical representations (i.e. RDF literals) of SKOS concepts. The results of the comparative analysis reveal that, despite the use of multi-word units, thesauri tend to represent concepts in a way that can hardly be further divided conceptually, while Subject Headings and Classification Schemes - to a certain extent - comprise terms that can be decomposed into more conceptual constituents. Consequently, SKOS concepts deriving from thesauri are more likely to represent atomic conceptual units and thus be more appropriate tools for inference and reasoning. Since identifiers represent the meaning of a concept, complex concepts are neither the most appropriate nor the most efficient way of modelling a KOS for the Semantic Web.

We consider a graphical model where a multivariate normal vector is associated with each node of the underlying graph and estimate the graphical structure. We minimize a loss function obtained by regressing the vector at each node on those at the remaining ones under a group penalty. We show that the proposed estimator can be computed by a fast convex optimization algorithm. We show that as the sample size increases, the estimated regression coefficients and the correct graphical structure are correctly estimated with probability tending to one. By extensive simulations, we show the superiority of the proposed method over comparable procedures. We apply the technique on two real datasets. The first one is to identify gene and protein networks showing up in cancer cell lines, and the second one is to reveal the connections among different industries in the US. 1 2 Introduction

The future of labour cannot involve protecting workers against disruption at the expense of new business models, Second Minister for Manpower and Home Affairs Josephine Teo said yesterday. Businesses and governments must work together to allay workers' concerns and make sure employees are able to take up the new jobs that will be created from automation and digitisation. "The catch is that the prospect of a net addition of jobs is comforting only to the extent that the workers involved can find ways to access the new opportunities," she said. "Otherwise, it is a frightening thought, and you could have a very unhappy situation where unemployment is rising and yet, at the same time, businesses are growing below potential." Mrs Teo, who is alsoMinister in the Prime Minister's Office, was speaking at the conclusion of the Milken Institute Asia Summit as part of a panel on preparing for jobs some two decades down the road.