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myanmar-hearing-held-for-reporters-charged-with-flying-drone.html

FOX News

YANGON, Myanmar – Two foreign journalists accused of illegally flying a drone over parliament buildings in Myanmar have appeared in court for the first time since their arrest last month. The two Malaysians appeared during a hearing in the capital, Naypyitaw, along with their local interpreter and driver. The four men working for Turkish Radio and Television were charged under the Export and Import Law and face up to three years in prison if found guilty. The four were detained on Oct. 27.


US says drone strike in Somalia kills 'several militants'

FOX News

MOGADISHU, Somalia – A U.S. drone strike killed "several militants" with al-Shabab in Somalia, the military said, as the Trump administration increasingly targets what has become the deadliest Islamic extremist group in Africa. The strike was carried out Thursday afternoon in the Bay Region, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of the capital, Mogadishu, according to a statement by the U.S. Africa Command. A spokeswoman told The Associated Press that no civilians were anywhere near the strike. The U.S. military says it has carried out 22 airstrikes this year against the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab and the smaller Islamic State group presence in Somalia after the Trump administration approved expanded military efforts. The U.S. says the latest airstrike, like others, occurred in cooperation with Somalia's government.


China is building a police station powered by AI, not humans

#artificialintelligence

China this week announced an AI-powered unmanned police station will open in one of its capitol cities, proving once again that no other country quite embraces artificial intelligence like it does. The station appears to be designed with driver and vehicle related matters in mind, making it more like a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) than a cop shop. It will provide driver's examinations via simulator, registration services, and feature advanced face-scanning technology developed by Tencent, according to a report from Chinese financial paper Caijing Neican. Setting aside the myriad of law enforcement related implications, there's still plenty to unpack concerning the idea of unmanned government buildings. This station will be open to the public 24/7, and since citizens will presumably be dealing with dedicated hardware there should be far less points of failure than web-based solutions tend to have.


Time Is Right To Capitalise On Artificial Intelligence

#artificialintelligence

Just weeks after the publication of the UK government's review of the country's capabilities in artificial intelligence, Southampton Professor Dame Wendy Hall, co-chair of the review, says the time is right to capitalise while the time is right. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for a long time as a concept but in reality, we're now seeing a major surge in the technological development of AI which is likely to see automation continue to escalate and accelerate. The machines we're building today are so much more powerful than ever before in terms of their processing power and storage ability, and because of the huge amounts of data available, we've vastly improved our capacity to build intelligent systems that can learn and begin to'think' for themselves, although it's still an open question as to whether they will ever really be able to outperform the human brain. But we now need to act in order to realise the full potential of AI and achieve the positive benefits it can deliver. Through our review, we made 18 specific recommendations including a number that focus on ways in which universities, research institutes, industry and government can come together to better prepare us for the AI landscape of the future.


Project Loon delivers internet to 100,000 people in Puerto Rico

Engadget

The FCC granted Alphabet's Project Loon, which delivers internet via balloons, an experimental license last month to help get Puerto Ricans online after Hurricane Maria decimated the island's infrastructure. While the team cautiously tweeted that it would'explore of it was possible to help,' Project Loon announced today that it has worked with AT&T and T-Mobile to successfully deliver basic internet to over 100,000 Puerto Ricans to the internet. Since turning on service, #ProjectLoon has delivered basic internet connectivity to more than 100K people in Puerto Rico. It's not a total success, which isn't to be expected after Puerto Ricans' communications infrastructure suffered so much damage. But the team was able to work with AT&T and T-Mobile to get "communication and internet activities like sending text messages and accessing information online for some people with LTE enabled phones," head of Project Loon Alastair Westgarth wrote in a blog post.


Dynamic Analysis of Executables to Detect and Characterize Malware

arXiv.org Machine Learning

It is needed to ensure the integrity of systems that process sensitive information and control many aspects of everyday life. We examine the use of machine learning algorithms to detect malware using the system calls generated by executables-alleviating attempts at obfuscation as the behavior is monitored rather than the bytes of an executable. We examine several machine learning techniques for detecting malware including random forests, deep learning techniques, and liquid state machines. The experiments examine the effects of concept drift on each algorithm to understand how well the algorithms generalize to novel malware samples by testing them on data that was collected after the training data. The results suggest that each of the examined machine learning algorithms is a viable solution to detect malware-achieving between 90% and 95% class-averaged accuracy (CAA). In real-world scenarios, the performance evaluation on an operational network may not match the performance achieved in training. Namely, the CAA may be about the same, but the values for precision and recall over the malware can change significantly. We structure experiments to highlight these caveats and offer insights into expected performance in operational environments. In addition, we use the induced models to gain a better understanding about what differentiates the malware samples from the goodware, which can further be used as a forensics tool to understand what the malware (or goodware) was doing to provide directions for investigation and remediation.


Top Data Sources for Journalists in 2018 (350 Sources)

@machinelearnbot

There are many different types of sites that provide a wealth of free, freemium and paid data that can help audience developers and journalists with their reporting and storytelling efforts, The team at State of Digital Publishing would like to acknowledge these, as derived from manual searches and recognition from our existing audience. Kaggle's a site that allows users to discover machine learning while writing and sharing cloud-based code. Relying primarily on the enthusiasm of its sizable community, the site hosts dataset competitions for cash prizes and as a result it has massive amounts of data compiled into it. Whether you're looking for historical data from the New York Stock Exchange, an overview of candy production trends in the US, or cutting edge code, this site is chockful of information. It's impossible to be on the Internet for long without running into a Wikipedia article.


Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking - Issue 54: The Unspoken

Nautilus

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. "I don't think the university was paying him on a regular basis," recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years. From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience. Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he'd wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did. As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself. It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.


Is There Beer in Space? - Issue 54: The Unspoken

Nautilus

Space is a cold and barren place. Nothing can exist there, nothing!" Ludwig Von Drake, an obscure uncle of Donald Duck and a professor of astronomy, is sitting on a high stool in his observatory. When he sees that he is being filmed, he falls off and lands on the floor with a loud thump. "Now I can see stars I've never seen before!" he groans. He walks over to a table with a large pile of books on it. The thickest of them all is a guide to space travel that he wrote himself. In a 45 -minute- long monologue, he tells us in a thick German accent how mankind discovered the planets in our solar system and has fantasized about everything that might be crawling around on them. Every now and then, he picks up a book from the large pile and reads from it, and then throws it nonchalantly into a corner of the room. He tells us about Copernicus and Galileo, and about Kepler's dreams about Martians, Fontenelle's speculations about life on other planets, and even John Herschel's Great Moon Hoax. Science fiction comes to life in the colorful cartoon: Hairy space beings and flying saucers shoot across the screen. At the end, the professor has the last word. He finds all these fantasies poppycock; nothing can live in that empty, barren space! But, as he is speaking, Von Drake is kidnapped by a black Martian robot from one of his stories. The cartoon, Inside Outer Space, is part of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, a television series from the 1960s. The absent minded duck professor hosts a number of episodes, each with their own topic: the history of flight, the color spectrum, space--all exciting stuff for American kids in the Space Age. Lou Allamandola spent his teenage years in the science- crazy 1960s. He grew up in a Catholic family in the state of New Jersey. His grandparents were immigrants from Italy, and he didn't learn to speak English until he went to school. He still clearly remembers the Disney cartoons with Ludwig Von Drake, which were broadcast on Saturday evenings. "Von Drake called the interstellar medium--the empty space between the stars and the planets--a barren place where nothing could exist," he tells me. "That was all we knew in the '60s.


How AI Could Reshape Economies

#artificialintelligence

As the field of artificial intelligence continues to expand, prominent scientists, business leaders, and politicians are expressing concerns about what this will mean for the future of work. Many conversations focus on the probability of robots taking away people's jobs, but economies could be impacted in other ways. According to experts, AI technologies may also change the nature of work and affect financial services. Even if you keep your job, your day to day duties could be drastically altered by new AI-powered tools. Instead of probing these economic nuances, the news media has largely favored more apocalyptic interpretations.