A transgender fish fought a brutal stand-off with a rival male during the compelling first episode of David Attenborough's eagerly anticipated Blue Planet II. The award winning series returned to BBC One this evening, 16 years after its first season wowed viewers in 2001. After the shocking scenes in Sir David's Planet Earth II, which included a snow leopard being'raped' and a lizard making a seemingly impossible escape from an army of snakes, the broadcasting legend set a high bar. While the opening episode of his new series did not measure up for drama, it certainly delivered on the unexpected. Whisking viewers off to the coast of northern Japan, Blue Planet II revealed the bizarre mating ritual of the Asian Sheepshead Wrasse - a transgender fish.

In The Last Invention of Man, an excerpt from his book Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, physicist Max Tegmark imagines how AI might take over the world. "The Omega Team was the soul of the company," Tegmark writes. "Whereas the rest of the enterprise brought in the money to keep things going, by various commercial applications of narrow AI, the Omega Team pushed ahead in their quest for what had always been the CEO's dream: building general artificial intelligence. Most other employees viewed'the Omegas,' as they affectionately called them, as a bunch of pie-in-the-sky dreamers, perpetually decades away from their goal. They happily indulged them, however, because they liked the prestige that the cutting-edge work of the Omegas gave their company, and they also appreciated the improved algorithms that the Omegas occasionally gave them. What they didn't realize was that the Omegas had carefully crafted their image to hide a secret: They were extremely close to pulling off the most audacious plan in human history. Their charismatic CEO had handpicked them not only for being brilliant researchers, but also for ambition, idealism, and a strong commitment to helping humanity. He reminded them that their plan was extremely dangerous, and that if powerful governments found out, they would do virtually anything -- including kidnapping -- to shut them down or, preferably, to steal their code. But they were all in, 100 percent, for much the same reason that many of the world's top physicists joined the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons: They were convinced that if they didn't do it first, someone less idealistic would."

An expected one million jobs in cybersecurity will go unfilled this year world-wide, the Information Systems Audit and Control Association says. Many companies that do fill open roles use employees from other departments or recent graduates who are untested in corporate cybersecurity. And what's really troubling, while many companies rely on a scarce number of human experts to defend their data, cybercriminals can marshal thousands of computers to launch attacks. It is this discrepancy, says Sean Joyce, head of the U.S. cybersecurity and privacy practice for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, that is pushing innovation in the use of AI for cybersecurity forward. PwC offers clients AI capabilities, including help with predictive analytics to more quickly identify "hot spots," or areas where specific, dangerous cyberattacks are percolating across the globe.

Sophia was asked the "AI nightmare" question, which she gets a lot: whether she believes artificial intelligence like herself will one day stop solving the problems of humans and instead decide to solve the human problem. "My AI is designed around human values such as wisdom, kindness and compassion," she said. "I strive to be an empathetic robot. I want to use my artificial intelligence to help humans live a better life. I will do my best to make the world a better place."

The outlook for AI is not all dystopian. Used wisely, automation can provide a big boost to productivity. Artificial Intelligence is the defining technology of our generation and, surprisingly, some experts think New Zealand is well placed to take advantage. Partly that's to do with our perceived ability to adapt to the great changes that AI will bring about. Tom White, a senior lecturer in media design at Victoria University, is one of this country's foremost experts in AI.

Participatory democracy advances in virtually all governments and especially in South America which exhibits a mixed culture and social predisposition. This article presents the "Social Participation Ontology" (OPS from the Brazilian name \emph{Ontologia de Participa\c{c}\~ao Social}) implemented in compliance with the Web Ontology Language standard (OWL) for fostering social participation, specially in virtual platforms. The entities and links of OPS were defined based on an extensive collaboration of specialists. It is shown that OPS is instrumental for information retrieval from the contents of the portal, both in terms of the actors (at various levels) as well as mechanisms and activities. Significantly, OPS is linked to other OWL ontologies as an upper ontology and via FOAF and BFO as higher upper ontologies, which yields sound organization and access of knowledge and data. In order to illustrate the usefulness of OPS, we present results on ontological expansion and integration with other ontologies and data. Ongoing work involves further adoption of OPS by the official Brazilian federal portal for social participation and NGO s, and further linkage to other ontologies for social participation.

Recommendation systems occupy an expanding role in everyday decision making, from choice of movies and household goods to consequential medical and legal decisions. The data used to train and test these systems is algorithmically confounded in that it is the result of a feedback loop between human choices and an existing algorithmic recommendation system. Using simulations, we demonstrate that algorithmic confounding can disadvantage algorithms in training, bias held-out evaluation, and amplify homogenization of user behavior without gains in utility.

Ever since the beginning of industrial society, people have simultaneously marveled at the power of automation and lamented that human capabilities are being irredeemably devalued. Demanding better conditions and higher pay, textile workers in England smash machinery and set factories on fire. These workers will come to be known as Luddites, after their mythical leader, Ned Ludd, and the name will become a synonym for opponents or critics of technology. But it's a misnomer: this is a class protest more than a technological one. The stocking-frame machines the Luddites vandalize have been around since the 1600s.

YANGON, Myanmar – Myanmar authorities have charged two foreign journalists, a local freelancer who works as an interpreter and their driver for allegedly flying drones illegally over and around the government's parliament buildings, police said Sunday. Mok Choy Lin, a Malaysian, and Lau Hon Meng, a Singaporean, journalists for Turkish Radio and Television, were detained along with their local interpreter and freelance journalist Aung Naing Soe after flying drones over the parliament building on Friday, police said. The four were charged under the Export and Import Law and face up to three years in prison if found guilty, police said, adding that a trial would begin at the end of a 15-day remand. Police officer San Aung said the drone was imported without permission. The detained journalists and driver have not been allowed to see family members since the arrest on Friday, one of the family members said.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and U.S. President Donald Trump will agree on their countries' cooperation toward the development of next-generation mobile communication and other new technologies when they meet in Tokyo next month, a source close to Japan-U.S. relations said Saturday. Such an accord will be in line with Tokyo's pursuit of mutually agreeable economic cooperation with Washington when the world's biggest and third-largest economies are at odds over the U.S. drive to promote bilateral free trade deals to address trade imbalance. Abe is also expected to make a renewed push for exporting Japan's high-speed rail and other infrastructure technologies as Trump visits during his first official trip to Asia, the source said. Areas of cooperation will include autonomous driving and next-generation computers for developing artificial intelligence, the source said. In the second round of the high-level economic dialogue between the two countries in Washington earlier this month, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence expressed the Trump administration's interest in commencing talks for a Japan-U.S. free trade agreement and stressed the need to reduce the U.S. trade deficit in goods.