A missile fired by Iraqi government forces. Last week I wrote about how deep learning image recognition algorithms offer a potential solution to the epidemic of violent imagery cascading across the online world, especially with respect to the rising issue of live streaming violent acts that can reach vast audiences before any human reviewer has a chance to examine the footage. What might this actually look like in practice? For the past year my open data GDELT Project has been applying Google's Cloud Vision API (its cloud-based deep learning image cataloging service) to global news imagery from every country in the world, totaling more than a quarter billion images to date. While no algorithm is perfect and the Vision API does make mistakes, it has proven remarkably adept at recognizing an incredible wealth of violence-related indicators from imagery spanning the entire globe.

When British charity The Samaritans was forced to abandon its'Radar' Twitter app in 2014, many in the health community worried that emerging AI technology was poorly suited to the sensitivity of mental illness. The app, designed to read users' tweets for evidence of suicidal thoughts, was criticised for a host of reasons, with one online petition accusing Radar of breaching the privacy of vulnerable Twitter users by alerting everybody – friends and foe alike – of their condition. But three years on, it appears the incident has not halted AI's incursion into psychological healthcare, which artificial intelligence developers believe could be one of their technology's most exciting applications. One such backer is Jim Schwoebel, CEO of US-based NeuroLex, who made headlines last year with his tool to help doctors screen patients for schizophrenia. When Schwoebel's brother developed psychosis, he told The Atlantic last year, doctors required more than 10 primary-care appointments before he was diagnosed.

Sean Ruddy and his team of operator-soldiers from the US Cyber Brigade entered a Locked Shields, a NATO-organized cyber-defense war game that pits teams from dozens of countries against "live-fire" attacks. It was their first time. And of the 19 countries represented, the US finished dead last. This week, they got their shot at redemption. Locked Shields challenges participating countries to show off their defensive prowess, rather than offensive firepower.

California is the favorite destination for technology and automotive companies to test out their self-driving technology -- around 27 companies are testing their self-driving vehicles in the state. Keeping in mind the scale of the technology in the state, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) proposed some regulations governing the use of the technology on the state roads in March. On Friday, some companies invested in the technology -- including tech giant Apple -- petitioned the state to consider changing its proposed rules. "Apple believes that all those developing and deploying automated vehicles should follow rigorous safety principles in design, testing, and production. Such principles should not, however, inhibit companies from making consequential progress--there is no need to compromise safety or innovation," Steve Kenner Director of Product Integrity, Apple said in a letter addressed to Brian G. Soublet, deputy director and chief counsel, Department of Motor Vehicles, Legal Affairs Division, State of California. "NHTSA's Policy explicitly states that the Safety Assessment requested in the Vehicle Performance Guidance is a voluntary submission that is not a necessary precursor to testing AVs on public roads or as part of a state's test program," the company wrote in the letter.

The Trump tax plan: The White House set out its big tax reform plan, which managed to fit on a single page with some bullet points. It has a "slim-to-none" chance of ever getting through Congress, according to CNN reporter Phil Mattingly. Nah-FTA: The one big thing to mark day 100 was supposed to come tonight in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: the United States' unilateral withdrawal from NAFTA. Canada and Mexico caught wind of that on Wednesday and called up Trump to get the 411. So did a bunch of big CEOs.

Less than six months ago, Mark Zuckerberg dismissed the idea that the social publishing platform he founded was being used to manipulate voters as "pretty crazy." But in a new report, Facebook now says it has data that "does not contradict" a key U.S. intelligence report that describes "information warfare" ordered by Russian President Vladimir Putin and carried out on Facebook and across the web. "Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency," officials wrote in a declassified version of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence report in January. Guided by the Russian government's "clear preference" for Donald Trump, the DNI report said, Moscow followed a strategy "that blends covert intelligence operations--such as cyber activity--with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or'trolls.'" Scholars have long theorized about the possibility of people manipulating public opinion on Facebook--Facebook itself carried out a mood experiment on its users--but U.S. intelligence officials call Moscow's latest meddling "unprecedented."

This question originally appeared on Quora. This means if you were to remove everything you can see and interact with in the visible universe (people, food, home appliances, planets, stars, galaxies, nebulae, etc.), there would still be 95% of the universe remaining! The result is that there is more dark matter and dark energy in the room you are currently in than normal matter. It is percolating through your body as you read this answer! The general rule is that dark matter holds galaxies together and dark energy drives the expansion of the universe. It is the ultimate tug of war. At the beginning of the universe, dark matter was much more powerful than dark energy, which is what allowed early galaxies to form. But dark energy has now taken over and is causing distant galaxies to recede from us at a rate faster than the speed of light. As you may know, no object with mass can exceed the speed of light, however there is no limit on the speed at which the spacetime medium (which ...

Text IQ chief executive Apoorv Agarwal says his software's job is to spot a needle in a haystack – but a costly one. Make a mistake in discovery during litigation, and a company can face sanctions of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, he says. Like other startups, Text IQ's raised funding to solve that problem. Unlike others, Text IQ is profitable. And for its first outside funding, it's taking only about $3 million from top investor Floodgate and a group of veteran legal counsels in a seed round its founders say could be the only money it ever needs.

Out of nearly 70,000 bills introduced in the U.S. Congress from 2001 to 2015, only 2,513 were enacted. We developed a machine learning approach to forecasting the probability that any bill will become law. Starting in 2001 with the 107th Congress, we trained models on data from previous Congresses, predicted all bills in the current Congress, and repeated until the 113th Congress served as the test. For prediction we scored each sentence of a bill with a language model that embeds legislative vocabulary into a high-dimensional, semantic-laden vector space. This language representation enables our investigation into which words increase the probability of enactment for any topic. To test the relative importance of text and context, we compared the text model to a context-only model that uses variables such as whether the bill's sponsor is in the majority party. To test the effect of changes to bills after their introduction on our ability to predict their final outcome, we compared using the bill text and meta-data available at the time of introduction with using the most recent data. At the time of introduction context-only predictions outperform text-only, and with the newest data text-only outperforms context-only. Combining text and context always performs best. We conducted a global sensitivity analysis on the combined model to determine important variables predicting enactment.

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. This is Walt, Audi's new collaborative robot. As part of a Flemish research project lead by prof.