Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who was ousted from the company after making a $100,000 donation to an anti-Hillary Clinton organization last year, seems to have a new project under his wings. Luckey, who sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, is working on a surveillance technology which can be used for monitoring borders and military posts, the New York Times reported Sunday. He is reported to have set up a company for the same purpose, details of which are currently confidential. The company is being funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who works as a technology advisor to President Donald Trump. It is based in South California and employs just a "handful of people" including Christopher Dycus, one of Oculus' first employees.

When Chinese Go master Ke Jie was comprehensively defeated by Google's artificial intelligence (AI) program AlphaGo on May 27 in the ancient canal town of Wuzhen, technology watchers around the world had to redraw the timeline in which AI rules the world. The artificial mind had swept all three matches against the world's top player, a feat once thought impossible, given Go's deep complexity compared with previous AI wins, such as in chess or checkers. The event also underscored continued Western dominance in the field of AI. AlphaGo was developed by the American search juggernaut's Deepmind unit, a British firm it acquired in 2014. But China is today nipping at the heels of the United States, long the undisputed leader in AI technology, and may soon be poised to edge ahead as it brings products to market at a quicker pace.

In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne published a report titled "The Future of Employment: How susceptible are jobs to computerisation?". The authors examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation, by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. According to their estimates, about 47 percent of total US employment is at risk. Although the report is specific to the US job market, it is easy to see how this might apply all over the world. We extracted the jobs and the probability of automation from the report and have made it easy to search for your job.

This piece was originally published at Scout.ai. "This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) believes in incorporating artificial intelligence in its decision-making process, a senior official told CNBC. The 68 year-old military alliance is committed to exploring technological advancements, with the effective mobilization of data and human capital among the key areas of focus, said General Denis Mercier, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Transformation. Speaking on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue over the weekend, an annual gathering of defense ministers, Mercier said NATO "needs to develop a better big data approach, cloud-like architectures and make an extensive use of AI."

Large-scale Hierarchical Classification (HC) involves datasets consisting of thousands of classes and millions of training instances with high-dimensional features posing several big data challenges. Feature selection that aims to select the subset of discriminant features is an effective strategy to deal with large-scale HC problem. It speeds up the training process, reduces the prediction time and minimizes the memory requirements by compressing the total size of learned model weight vectors. Majority of the studies have also shown feature selection to be competent and successful in improving the classification accuracy by removing irrelevant features. In this work, we investigate various filter-based feature selection methods for dimensionality reduction to solve the large-scale HC problem. Our experimental evaluation on text and image datasets with varying distribution of features, classes and instances shows upto 3x order of speed-up on massive datasets and upto 45% less memory requirements for storing the weight vectors of learned model without any significant loss (improvement for some datasets) in the classification accuracy. Source Code: https://cs.gmu.edu/~mlbio/featureselection.

Minority report: An exchange Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press underscores why one option that had been batted around--staying in the deal while explicitly softening the U.S. commitment--was rejected in the internal administration debate. Pruitt argued the wording of the deal only allows nations to make their emissions targets more aggressive, not scale them back. However, this view is not widely held among experts. For instance, E&E News noted Friday that "the vast majority of international legal experts say they can be rescinded and lowered at will." Finessing Trump: Pruitt, joining several other administration officials, declined to say whether President Trump still believes human-induced global warming is a "hoax." Pruitt noted only that Trump has "indicated the climate changes," but declined to address the scientific consensus that human activities are the main driver of the warming trend.

It has not been a proud week for America, what with the current administration randomly deciding to remove us as signatories to the Paris Climate Agreement and all. Luckily, the United States is still a nation of self-starters and problem-solvers who are willing to stand up, as 100 cities and six states across the country did on Thursday, and pledge to tackle climate change themselves -- with or without help from the Feds. They're not the only ones, researchers from Keio University have developed a pair of robotic arms to help their user out when nobody else is around while a team from Harvard University showed off robotic shorts that make you run faster. Numbers, because how else would you know which is the loneliest one? Andrew has lived in San Francisco since 1982 and has been writing clever things about technology since 2011.

We're only a few months into 2017 and cyber attacks seem to be hitting the headlines even more regularly than last year. In the same week, it was announced that cyber breaches have cost UK companies £42m since 2013. The week before that, it was revealed that Chinese hackers had been carrying out sustained cyber attacks for three years across the globe. As a result of this boom in cyber crime, startups and companies across the world are harnessing new ways to handle the sophisticated attacks and spending is thought to be around $106.1bn in 2017, according to research by IDC. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are just two types of technology that are fighting cyber breaches on the front line.

That's the question many have about recent reports that robots could replace millions of jobs currently held by human workers. On one hand, there's the research by global accounting and consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that projects 38% of American jobs could be at risk of replacement by automation within the next 15 or so years. On the other hand, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin thinks that we're so far away from seeing artificial intelligence take American jobs that "it's not even on [his] radar screen." Is your job safe from the rise of the robots? The best answer right now: It depends.