Mosquitos kill more humans every year than any other animal on the planet and conventional methods to reduce mosquito-borne illnesses haven't worked as well as many hoped. So we've been hard at work since receiving this USAID grant six months ago to reduce Zika incidence and related threats to public health. Our partners at the joint FAO/IAEA Insect Pest Control Lab in Vienna, Austria have been working to perfect the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) in order to sterilize and release male mosquitos in Zika hotspots. Releasing millions of said male mosquitos increases competition for female mosquitos, making it more difficult for non-sterilized males to find a mate. We learned last year at a USAID Co-Ideation Workshop that this technique can reduce the overall mosquito population in a given area by 90%.

The US Department of Defense is struggling to get its arms around all of the new security issues that have come with our current technological explosion. One unexpected consideration on the table is placing stricter limitations on investment capital from China flowing into American companies that are working on artificial intelligence. Technology is the fastest growing industry in the American economy according to recent data. And with all the political talk about "JOBS, JOBS, JOBS," it's a bit surprising to see the government floating plans to limit investment in American companies. But that's exactly what the Pentagon is proposing according to Reuters. Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years.

Artificial intelligence is the key to unlocking the challenge and promise of self-driving cars, NVIDIA told Congress today. In testimony before a packed hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, Rob Csongor, vice president and general manager of the company's Automotive business, said that AI will in the years ahead enable self-driving cars that save tens of thousands of lives, provide mobility to the disabled, improve urban design and save vast amounts of unproductive time. "Today, we are working with virtually every automaker on research and development of advanced self-driving vehicles using AI," said Csongor at the start of the two-hour hearing, which was attended by more than a dozen senators, and some 150 staffers, lobbyists, reporters and a few stray tourists. "Our technology is being used by more than 225 automotive companies worldwide, including Audi, Tesla, Toyota, Volvo, Mercedes and others. We are now at the point where we can create AI systems that have levels of perception and performance far beyond humans, and importantly, do not get distracted, fatigued or impaired," he said.

When Hollywood inevitably makes a biopic about Travis Kalanick, the embattled CEO of Uber--the most valuable private company in the world--screenwriters will have a hard time toning down reality to make it sound halfway believable. In the past few months alone, details have emerged about stolen trade secrets from Google regarding self-driving cars, sneaky tracking techniques for evading authorities, and, most alarmingly, allegations of ignored sexual harassment complaints and the most noxious office environment west of Wall Street. There were even reports that a top executive obtained the medical report of a woman who was raped by an Uber driver--and that CEO Travis Kalanick viewed the document. It all culminated in the company tapping former US attorney general Eric Holder to conduct an independent investigation into Uber's policies and culture. On Tuesday morning, during a highly anticipated all-hands meeting at Uber's headquarters in San Francisco, the board of directors shared the results of Holder's investigation: a 13-page document filled with recommendations for how to fix Uber's culture, including ceding some of Kalanick's power to a chief operating officer, who has yet to be hired, one of more than a dozen executive roles that are now empty.

Scientists have harnessed the power of'the Beast' to answer some of the most baffling questions about religion. The custom-built computer has developed a simulated virtual human mind capable of creating the impacts of terror on behavior - with the hopes of uncovering the truth behind why people become radicalized. The model had revealed that religious ritual observance would increase after terror-inspiring events drove people beyond a certain threshold of fear. Researches at Boston University first designed a computer simulation that predicts how many people would stay in a religion based on its strictness. It was then compared with defection rates from 18 Christian denominations.

Robin Bylenga, 52, the founder and owner of Pedal Chic in Greenville, S.C., is the epitome of a smart, successful female entrepreneur. Before opening her women's cycling and athletic boutique in 2010, she worked for a bike shop to understand prospective customers. She invested $500 for a tiny inventory of women's biking apparel that she spun into $1,500 in sales at an area bike race. Bylenga also asked the Clemson Regional Small Business Development Center for advice, connected with a retired retail exec through the U.S. Small Business Administration's SCORE program and tapped her own network to find mentors. "I've had to push through at every stage, and there have been setbacks, but the demand is there and growing," says Bylenga, whose shop is profitable today.

Fearing the appropriation of technologies that are said to affect US national security, a federal agency in Washington is considering limiting Beijing's ability to invest in Silicon Valley companies and startups, as China seeks to modernize its military forces. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a secretive group that documents the purchase of US companies by foreign entities, is poised to strengthen its regulatory role, particularly regarding China, based on a call from US lawmakers to improve national security. New technologies, including machine learning and artificial intelligence currently in development in the high-tech Silicon Valley corridor in California are increasingly fertile ground for Chinese investment, and CFIUS wants to make sure the US isn't giving away the farm. According to the unreleased Pentagon report, which was viewed by Reuters, China seeks to use new US tech to upgrade its military, and CFIUS has been tasked with stepping up its oversight, as lawmakers demand greater security. "We're examining CFIUS to look at the long-term health and security of the US economy, given China's predatory practices," said an official with the Trump administration who was not authorized to speak publicly, according to Reuters.

Many modern data sets are sampled with error from complex high-dimensional surfaces. Methods such as tensor product splines or Gaussian processes are effective/well suited for characterizing a surface in two or three dimensions but may suffer from difficulties when representing higher dimensional surfaces. Motivated by high throughput toxicity testing where observed dose-response curves are cross sections of a surface defined by a chemical's structural properties, a model is developed to characterize this surface to predict untested chemicals' dose-responses. This manuscript proposes a novel approach that models the multidimensional surface as a sum of learned basis functions formed as the tensor product of lower dimensional functions, which are themselves representable by a basis expansion learned from the data. The model is described, a Gibbs sampling algorithm proposed, and is investigated in a simulation study as well as data taken from the US EPA's ToxCast high throughput toxicity testing platform.

U.S. officials reportedly are rethinking the advisability of allowing the Chinese to invest in sensitive technologies seen as vital to national security. Reuters reported Wednesday U.S. officials are concerned such cutting-edge technologies as artificial intelligence and machine learning could be used by the Chinese to augment their military capabilities and achieve greater advancements in strategic industries. Technology is the fastest growing industry in the United States, and China has funneled $45.6 billion into U.S. acquisitions and Greenfield investments in the last year, Rhodium Group found. That investment is expected to double this year. Read: What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Reuters – The United States appears poised to heighten scrutiny of Chinese investment in Silicon Valley to better shield sensitive technologies seen as vital to U.S. national security, current and former U.S. officials tell Reuters. Of particular concern is China's interest in fields such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, which have increasingly attracted Chinese capital in recent years. The worry is that cutting-edge technologies developed in the United States could be used by China to bolster its military capabilities and perhaps even push it ahead in strategic industries. The U.S. government is now looking to strengthen the role of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the inter-agency committee that reviews foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies on national security grounds.