Taiwanese electronics juggernaut and leading Apple supplier Foxconn announced Wednesday that it intends to invest $10 billion in a new manufacturing plant in Wisconsin, where it plans to make LCD panels bound for computers, healthcare devices, and even vehicles. The White House touted the announcement as a victory for senior adviser Jared Kushner's Office of American Innovation, and marked it as a milestone in President Trump's promise to bring manufacturing back to the United States. "Foxconn joins a growing list of industry leaders who understand that America's capabilities are limitless and that America's workers are unmatched," President Trump said at the White House announcement, flanked by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and Foxconn chairman Terry Gou. Yet, the 3,000 jobs Foxconn says it will create in Wisconsin aren't the kind of manufacturing jobs that so many laid off auto and steel workers have been clamoring for. Nor are they a pathway to the American-made iPhone President Trump promised during the 2016 election.

Passengers at all U.S. airports will soon face new security measures for their tablets, e-readers and video game consoles. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers will order travelers to take all devices larger than a cellphone out of their bag and put them in a bin by themselves. Prior rules required only laptops to be removed for separate screening. Officials say it gives X-ray screeners a clearer picture of the devices. Passengers at all U.S. airports will soon face new security measures for their tablets, e-readers and video game consoles (stock image) TSA said the new rules have been in place in a pilot project at ten American airports and will expand to all US airports in the months ahead.

Facebook on Wednesday reported a surge in profits in the past quarter, fueled by strong growth in money-making ads to its more than two billion users. Net profit in the second quarter leapt 71 percent from a year ago to $3.9 billion while revenue climbed 45 percent to $9.3 billion. In after-hours trade, Facebook shares rose some two percent to $166.83 on the stronger-than-expected results. Recent reports suggest Facebook may be working on its own smart speaker to compete with Google Home and Amazon Echo in the budding market for home digital assistants. Facebook could also be working on a smartphone, according to paperwork recently spotted by cyber sleuths which the tech giant filed earlier this year.

As it is typical for any realpolitik, citizens are becoming less relevant in digital realpolitik. They are personally targeted in advertising and surveillance efforts by corporations and governments. Individuals per se are getting lost in big numbers. The individual is just one amongst billions of Facebook users, and just one amongst billions of contributors to Google searches. Governments are increasingly speaking about digital sovereignty and less about the empowerment of individuals. Citizens are becoming more and more the object of digital growth and less and less the engine behind it, as it has been since the early days of the Internet. On a promising note, realpolitik provides a more realistic picture of interests and risks as well as winners and losers resulting from Internet developments. It is in this way that realpolitik can contribute to creating the basis for more solid and sustainable Internet development. Governments are likely to continue striking deals with Internet companies in order to recuperate some taxes. The bilateral deals could be the building blocks for a more structured approach to revenues from the digital economy.

Ford's automotive revenue of $37 billion was in line with Wall Street's expectations. Total revenue rose 1 percent to $39.85 billion. The elevated performance in the second quarter was due mostly to a lowering of the company's corporate tax rate, from 30 percent down to 10 percent, Chief Financial Officer Bob Shanks acknowledged. Ford has put some overseas losses back on its books in anticipation of changes in the U.S. corporate tax code, Shanks said. The company expects to have a 15 percent rate this year, but that will return to 30 percent next year.

At the University of Washington (UW) Medical Center, a radiotherapy system shoots high-powered radiation beams into the heads of patients, to treat cancers of the tongue and esophagus. Any software errors in the system could prove fatal, so engineers at the medical center have teamed with a group of computer scientists from the university to ensure the system will not fail, and that the beam will shut off if prescribed settings go out of tolerance. This is made possible by a process known as software verification, and verifying implementations of critical systems like that radiotherapy setup is one of the things about which Zachary Tatlock is passionate. Over three years ago, Tatlock was a Ph.D. candidate giving a talk at the university on his thesis research in program verification. The lead engineer for the medical center's radiotherapy team was in the audience, and asked Tatlock how they could apply verification to that system.

Scientists at IBM Research – Almaden have demonstrated that the TrueNorth brain-inspired computer chip, with its 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses, can efficiently implement inference with deep networks that approach state-of-the-art classification accuracy on several vision and speech datasets. The essence of the innovation was a new algorithm for training deep networks to run efficiently on a neuromorphic architecture, such as TrueNorth, by using 1-bit neural spikes, low-precision synapses, and constrained block-wise connectivity--a task that was previously thought to be difficult, if not, impossible. "The goal of brain-inspired computing is to deliver a scalable neural network substrate while approaching fundamental limits of time, space, and energy," said IBM Fellow Dharmendra Modha, chief scientist, Brain-inspired Computing, IBM Research. Today, the TrueNorth development ecosystem includes not only the TrueNorth brain-inspired processor, the novel algorithm for training deep networks and the scaled-up NS16e System but also a simulator, a programming language, an integrated programming environment, a library of algorithms and applications, firmware, a teaching curriculum, single-chip boards, and scaled-out systems.

Scientists at IBM Research – Almaden have demonstrated that the TrueNorth brain-inspired computer chip, with its 1 million neurons and 256 million synapses, can efficiently implement inference with deep networks that approach state-of-the-art classification accuracy on several vision and speech datasets. This will open up the possibilities of embedding intelligence in the entire computing stack from the Internet of Things, to smartphones, to robotics, to cars, to cloud computing, and even supercomputing. The novel architecture of the TrueNorth processor can classify image data at between 1,200 and 2,600 frames per second while using a mere 25 to 275 mW, which is effectively greater than 6,000 fps per Watt. Like that kung fu master in the movies who simultaneously fights assaults from many opponents, this processor can detect patterns in real time from 50-100 cameras at once – each with 32 32 color pixels and streaming information at the standard TV rate of 24 fps – while running on a smartphone battery for days without recharging. The breakthrough was published this week in the peer-reviewed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

I was talking to a banking compliance executive recently about how banks are looking to use artificial intelligence to spot clues to crimes being committed by customers or employees. This executive was clearly not buying into the hype. "We've thought about that, but we don't plan to use it at this time," she said. "There's too much risk of innocent people getting caught up in a dragnet." An AI engine could find a pattern of transactions or behavior among law-abiding customers that mimics money laundering or some other crime.

Jul. 25, 2017 - Tech titans Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk recently slugged it out online over the possible threat artificial intelligence (AI) might one day pose to the human race, although you could be forgiven if you don't see why this seems like a pressing question. Thanks to AI, computers are learning to do a variety of tasks that have long eluded them -- everything from driving cars to detecting cancerous skin lesions to writing news stories. But Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, worries that AI systems could soon surpass humans, potentially leading to our deliberate (or inadvertent) extinction. Two weeks ago, Musk warned U.S. governors to get educated and start considering ways to regulate AI in order to ward off the threat. "Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid," he said at the time.