Foreign policy analysis has been struggling to find ways to measure policy preferences and paradigm shifts in international political systems. This paper presents a novel, potential solution to this challenge, through the application of a neural word embedding (Word2vec) model on a dataset featuring speeches by heads of state or government in the United Nations General Debate. The paper provides three key contributions based on the output of the Word2vec model. First, it presents a set of policy attention indices, synthesizing the semantic proximity of political speeches to specific policy themes. Second, it introduces country-specific semantic centrality indices, based on topological analyses of countries' semantic positions with respect to each other. Third, it tests the hypothesis that there exists a statistical relation between the semantic content of political speeches and UN voting behavior, falsifying it and suggesting that political speeches contain information of different nature then the one behind voting outcomes. The paper concludes with a discussion of the practical use of its results and consequences for foreign policy analysis, public accountability, and transparency.

Several years ago, there were reports that an IBM artificial intelligence (AI) project had mimicked the brain of a cat. Being the smartass that I am, I responded on Twitter with, "You mean it spends 18 hours a day in sleep mode?" That report was later debunked, but the effort to simulate the brain continues, using new types of processors far faster and more brain-like than your standard x86 processor. IBM and the U.S. Air Force have announced one such project, while Google has its own. Researchers from Google and the University of Toronto last month released an academic paper titled "One Model To Learn Them All," and they were pretty quiet about it.

The US military has revealed $65 of funding for a programme to develop a'brain chip' allowing humans to simply plug into a computer. The goal is'developing an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world,' DARPA officials said. The goal is'developing an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world,' DARPA officials said. Four of the teams will focus on vision and two will focus on aspects of hearing and speech. It has selected its five grant recipients for the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program, which it began at the start of this year.

Most of us regard self-driving cars, voice assistants, and other artificially intelligent technologies as revolutionary. For the next generation, however, these wonders will have always existed. AI for them will be more than a tool; in many cases, AI will be their co-worker and a ubiquitous part of their lives. If the next generation is to use AI and big data effectively – if they're to understand their inherent limitations, and build even better platforms and intelligent systems -- we need to prepare them now. That will mean some adjustments in elementary education and some major, long-overdue upgrades in computer science instruction at the secondary level.

One company in the US state of Colorado has a new lesson for artificial intelligence. And it could help us end the drudgery of sorting our trash. It's challenging and repetitive work performed in a noisy environment. These sorters help keep the lines at Alpine Waste & Recycling moving. "The people we have are great at what they do," said Brent Hildebrand, Vice President of Alpine Waste & Recycling.

AI is seen as a key to unlocking big data and the Internet of Things. It allows us to make better decisions faster and will soon enable smarter cities, self-driving cars, personalized medicines, and other new commercial applications that could potentially help solve various global problems. The field of AI is going through a period of rapid progress, with improvements in processor design and advances in machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing. China has invested massively in AI research since 2013, and these efforts are yielding incredible results. China's AI pioneers are already making great strides in core AI fields.

Last August, Masahide Sasaki and his team instructed a satellite to shoot laser beams at a suburb of Tokyo. The laser beam, made of infrared light, was invisible to the human eye. By the time it had traveled through hundreds of miles of outer space and atmosphere, the light was harmless: It had spread out like a spotlight, about as wide as 10 soccer fields. Some of that light made its way into the end of a telescope, where it bounced off mirrors and flew through lenses and filters onto a photon-measuring detector. Someday, Sasaki hopes, that light could be more than invisible wavelengths hitting a telescope--it could be encoded with information.

An international partnership on cybersecurity can mean many things--it can mean mutual assistance with enforcement and criminal investigations, or sharing threat information and intelligence, or jointly developing software that can be used to target adversaries' computer systems, or even jointly developing tools and techniques that can be used to detect and mitigate threats. An "impenetrable" unit hints most closely at the last of these functions--a defensive joint effort in which the two countries share not just intelligence but also technical expertise and controls to protect their systems against intruders. But people who help design and implement your defenses then know an awful lot about the way your systems work and how, precisely, they are protected. Possibly, they're even writing code and giving it to you to download on your computers to help make them more impenetrable. And if that code also created backdoors on every computer it was installed on so that Russia had easy access to control those systems, who would be surprised?

DARPA announced on Monday that it has selected its five grant recipients for the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program, which it began at the start of this year. Brown University, Columbia University, The Seeing and Hearing Foundation, the John B. Pierce Laboratory, Paradromics Inc and the University of California, Berkeley will all receive multi-million dollar grants to help develop various aspects of the emerging technology. The goal of the NESD program is to develop "an implantable system able to provide precision communication between the brain and the digital world," according to a DARPA release. Also known as "wetware", these brain-computer interfaces would effectively convert the chemical and electrical signals from the brain into machine readable data, and vice versa. Ultimately, the program's operators hope that neural interfaces will be able to communicate with up to 100 million neurons in parallel (though still a far cry from the 86 billion that our brains use in total).

For decades, textbooks were seen as the foundation for instruction in American schools. These discipline-specific tomes were a fundamental part of the educational infrastructure, assigned to students for each subject and carried in heavy backpacks every day – from home to school and back again. The experience of students is much different today. As a scholar of learning technologies and a director for outreach and engagement at Ohio State's College of Education and Human Ecology, we've seen how technological advances and an increase in digital curriculum materials have hastened the move away from textbooks. Does all of this technology spell the end of traditional textbooks?