The European Union must take a more robust position in defence of free trade. A shift has occurred in the trade policy of the United States and protectionism is on the rise worldwide. This transformed situation allows greater room for the European Union and permits it an enhanced role in international trade and in influencing the future direction of trade. On Wednesday the European Commission published its Reflection Paper on Globalisation. In Finland, exports play a key role as a growth driver and an engine for the country's economy.

China plans to establish a village on the moon with Europe's help by 2036. Now, in a step towards that goal, the nation has created a'Lunar Palace' on Earth to simulate living in isolated conditions on the moon. Four students from the astronautics research university Beihang yesterday entered the 160-square-metre (1,720-square-foot) cabin, dubbed the'Yuegong-1'. Groups of volunteers will live in a sealed lab simulating a lunar-like environment as Beijing prepares for its long-term goal of putting humans on the moon by 2036. Two groups of four volunteers from Beijing's astronautics research university will live in a simulated space cabin, measuring 160 square metres (1,720 square foot), over the next year.

Artificial intelligence already helps run government, with cognitive applications doing everything from reducing backlogs and cutting costs to handling tasks we can't easily do on our own, such as predicting fraudulent transactions and identifying criminal suspects via facial recognition. Indeed, while we expect AI-based technology in the years ahead to fundamentally transform how public-sector employees get work done--eliminating some jobs, redesigning countless others, and even creating entirely new professions1--it's already changing the nature of many jobs and revolutionizing facets of government operations. Agencies today face new choices about whether some work should be fully automated, divided among people and machines, or performed by people but enhanced by machines. Our latest report, AI-augmented government, conservatively estimates that simply automating tasks that computers already routinely do could free up 96.7 million federal government working hours annually, potentially saving $3.3 billion. At the high end, we estimate that AI technology could free up as many as 1.2 billion working hours every year, saving $41.1 billion.

Join Tandem Innovation Alliance on Thursday, May 11th at WeWork in Tysons, VA for an evening devoted to understanding the impact of artificial intelligence and the future it holds for the government and startups. We have invited investors, industry leaders and government officials as part of our ongoing event series focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning. This evening we will focus on the areas where the government is investing in A.I. programs to modernize federal agencies and where startups can fit in. Learn about where they want to invest and the new contracting mechanisms agencies are using to recruit startups and small businesses. Following the panel, Tandem will select companies that feature exciting new A.I. technologies to provide lightning pitches to offer insight into the next great innovations that could transform the industry.

While the most ambitious polls are based on standardized interviews with a few thousand people, millions are tweeting freely and publicly in their own voices about issues they care about. This data offers a vibrant 24/7 snapshot of people's response to various events and topics. The sheer scale of the data on Twitter allows us to measure in aggregate how the various issues are rising and falling in prominence over time. However, the volume of the data also means that an intelligent tool is required to allow the users to make sense of the data. To this end, we built a novel, interactive web-based tool for mapping the conversation landscapes on Twitter. Our system utilizes recent advances in natural language processing and deep neural networks that are robust with respect to the noisy and unconventional nature of tweets, in conjunction with a scalable clustering algorithm an interactive visualization engine to allow users to tap the mine of information that is Twitter. We ran a user study with 40 participants using tweets about the 2016 US presidential election and the summer 2016 Orlando shooting, demonstrating that compared to more conventional methods, our tool can increase the speed and the accuracy with which users can identify and make sense of the various conversation topics on Twitter.

Consumer protection agencies are charged with safeguarding the public from hazardous products, but the thousands of products under their jurisdiction make it challenging to identify and respond to consumer complaints quickly. In this paper, we propose a system to mine Amazon.com reviews to identify products that may pose safety or health hazards. Since labeled data for this task are scarce, our approach combines positive unlabeled learning with domain adaptation to train a classifier from consumer complaints submitted to an online government portal. We find that our approach results in an absolute F1 score improvement of 8% over the best competing baseline. Furthermore, when we apply the classifier to Amazon reviews of known recalled products, we identify safety hazard reports prior to the recall date for 45% of the products. This suggests that the system may be able to provide an early warning system to alert consumers to hazardous products before an official recall is announced.

The AI will help custody sergeants decide whether suspects should be sent into the criminal justice system. It has been called the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (HART) and will be launched within the next three months, Durham police told Sky News. It will classify the suspects as either low, medium, or high risk of reoffending, contributing to whether they are released or remanded in custody. A scientific randomised trial of the forecasts found that only 2% of low-risk suspects turned out to be at high-risk of reoffending. However, it also found that 12% of those forecast as high risk turned out to be low risk.

For decades, artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have sought to enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks once thought to be reserved for humans. In recent years, the technology has moved from science fiction into real life: AI programs can play games, recognize faces and speech, learn, and make informed decisions. As striking as AI programs may be (and as potentially unsettling to filmgoers suffering periodic nightmares about robots becoming self-aware and malevolent), the cognitive technologies behind artificial intelligence are already having a real impact on many people's lives and work. AI-based technologies include machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, and robotics;1 they are powerful, scalable, and improving at an exponential rate. Developers are working on implementing AI solutions in everything from self-driving cars to swarms of autonomous drones, from "intelligent" robots to stunningly accurate speech translation.2 And the public sector is seeking--and finding--applications to improve services; indeed, cognitive technologies could eventually revolutionize every facet of government operations. For instance, the Department of Homeland Security's Citizenship and Immigration and Services has created a virtual assistant, EMMA, that can respond accurately to human language. EMMA uses its intelligence simply, showing relevant answers to questions--almost a half-million questions per month at present. Learning from her own experiences, the virtual assistant gets smarter as she answers more questions. Customer feedback tells EMMA which answers helped, honing her grasp of the data in a process called "supervised learning."3 While EMMA is a relatively simple application, developers are thinking bigger as well: Today's cognitive technologies can track the course, speed, and destination of nearly 2,000 airliners at a time, allowing them to fly safely.4

The timing of the FBI director's dismissal, the Senate minority leader said, raises questions about the integrity of the Justice Department's look at potential collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Traditional network architectures are incapable of meeting the demands of new digital paradigms involving enormous volumes of raw and processed data moving between our devices, our work, community and home networks. In this two-part series, we explore how next-gen network technology can use artificial intelligence and machine learning to become more flexible and automated. Security strategies need to undergo a radical evolution. Tomorrow's security devices will need to see and interoperate with each other to recognize changes in the networked environment, anticipate new risks and automatically update and enforce policies. The devices must be able to monitor and share critical information and synchronize responses to detected threats.