Government
The Math Behind Trump's Deportation Plan Makes No Sense
President Trump claims his administration's new and expansive executive order on undocumented immigrants is "getting really bad dudes out of this country." But aggressive enforcement of immigration laws is also sweeping up vulnerable, far-from-bad people seeking help and care. Still, even setting aside the humanitarian issue, Trump's anti-immigrant plan suffers from a fundamental flaw: bad math. The new immigration guidelines released by Department of Homeland Security chief General John Kelly this week broaden the categories of people prioritized for deportation. Instead of focusing on violent criminals, the department will now go after anyone who's ever committed fraud or misrepresented themselves to the US government--a description that essentially includes anyone who's ever lived in the country illegally.
US probe of drone collisions with aircraft points to birds
Investigations into reported collisions by drones with civil aircraft found that they were caused instead by birds, wires and posts, or structural failures unrelated to unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), a U.S. regulator said. There has been widespread concern about the risks that the flying of drones close to aircraft can pose, and the Federal Aviation Administration said Thursday that reports of "possible" drone sightings to FAA air traffic facilities continued to increase in fiscal year 2016. There were 1,274 such reports of drone sightings from February through September last year, compared with 874 for the same period in 2015, the FAA said in a statement. Some of these sightings could have also been of birds mistaken for drones, according to analysts. The agency added that although the data contained several reports of pilots claiming drone strikes on their aircraft, the FAA has not verified any collision between a civil aircraft and a civil drone to date.
Military Robotics Makers See a Future for Armed Police Robots
Robot-maker Sean Bielat says he's fine with the Dallas Police Department's apparently unprecedented use of a police bomb-disposal robot to kill a gunman on Thursday. "A robot was used to keep people out of harm's way in an extreme situation," said Bielat, the CEO of Endeavor Robotics, a spinoff of iRobot's military division. "That's how robots are intended to be used." Joergen Pedersen, the CEO of RE2 robotics and the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association's robotics division concurred. "If these robots are used in manners for which they were unintended, we would expect that the officers who are there to keep citizens and themselves safe would use good judgment where the application of lethal force is a last resort," he said.
Google Accuses Uber of Stealing Its Self-Driving Car Tech
Until today, the race to build a self-driving car seemed to hinge on who had the best technology. Now it's become a case of full-blown corporate intrigue. Alphabet's self-driving startup, Waymo, is suing Uber, accusing the ridesharing giant of stealing critical autonomous driving technology. If the suit goes to trial, Apple's legal battle with Samsung could wind up looking tame by comparison. Waymo alleges that Anthony Levandovski, a former Google employee now at Uber, secretly downloaded 14,000 files from its hardware systems, resigned a month later, and then used the information to launch a self-driving truck startup called Otto.
Want to chat with Shakespeare? AI bots will soon allow us to talk to the dead
Imagine debating the interpretation of a Shakespearean sonnet and being able to clarify its meaning with the bard himself. Or sitting in history class and being able to ask George Washington questions about the Constitution, no soul-conjuring witchcraft required. In the next decade, advancing AI technology will allow us to learn from the dead first-hand. New chatbot programs are being developed to keep our knowledge active after our physical being passes away. Early research in this topic already allows us to simulate dialogues with the dead.
The Atlantic Daily: Borders and Bots
Immigrant Issues: Mexico's government is not pleased with new memos from the Trump administration requiring people who arrive in the U.S. illegally over the Mexican border to be deported back to Mexico even if they're not Mexican nationals. The country may refuse to cooperate--and it has a lot of leverage. Meanwhile, former DHS secretary Janet Napolitano has emerged as a champion of Obama-era programs protecting undocumented students. But the next big policy fight might be over legal immigration, if lawmakers embrace nationalist sentiments that seek to keep everyone out. Such sentiments were a major reason why Rumana Ahmed, a Muslim woman who served on the National Security Council under Obama, chose to leave the White House eight days into Trump's presidency.
SpaceX freighter docks with ISS a little late but with load, including wounded mice, intact
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA โ SpaceX made good on a 250-mile-high delivery at the International Space Station on Thursday, after fixing a navigation problem that held up the shipment a day. Everything went smoothly the second time around as the station astronauts captured the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship as the two craft sailed over Australia. On Wednesday, a GPS system error prevented the capsule from getting close enough to be grabbed by the station's big robot arm. The Dragon -- loaded with 5,500 pounds of supplies -- rocketed away Sunday from NASA's historic moon pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Now leased by the SpaceX, the pad had been idle since the close of the shuttle program almost six years ago.
U.S.-aided Iraqis retake Mosul airport, face Islamic State drone attacks
SOUTH OF MOSUL, IRAQ โ Closely supported by the U.S.-led international coalition, Iraqi forces secured a series of cautious advances on Thursday, pushing into a sprawling military base outside of Mosul and onto the grounds of the city's airport, where they took control of the runway. The three-pronged attack began just after sunrise, with three convoys of Iraqi forces snaking north across Nineveh's hilly desert on Mosul's southern approach. Iraq's special forces joined federal police and rapid response units in the push -- part of a major assault that started earlier this week to drive IS from the western half of Iraq's second-largest city. By afternoon they had entered the Ghazlani military base south of the city, as well as the airport. Iraqi helicopters circled above Mosul firing down onto the city's southwestern edge. Coalition and Iraqi airstrikes that hit targets inside Mosul sent plumes of white smoke into the air on the horizon.
Consistent Alignment of Word Embedding Models
Sahin, Cem Safak, Caceres, Rajmonda S., Oselio, Brandon, Campbell, William M.
Word embedding models offer continuous vector representations that can capture rich contextual semantics based on their word co-occurrence patterns. While these word vectors can provide very effective features used in many NLP tasks such as clustering similar words and inferring learning relationships, many challenges and open research questions remain. In this paper, we propose a solution that aligns variations of the same model (or different models) in a joint low-dimensional latent space leveraging carefully generated synthetic data points. This generative process is inspired by the observation that a variety of linguistic relationships is captured by simple linear operations in embedded space. We demonstrate that our approach can lead to substantial improvements in recovering embeddings of local neighborhoods.
Robot Lawyers helps unrepresented people tell their story
We've previously seen in RealKM Magazine how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are developing at a rapid rate. One emerging application for AI is legal proceedings, with ABC News reporting that Australian law firm Doogue O'Brien George is launching its Robot Lawyers service this week. The official launch will be by Ben Carroll MLA, Parliamentary Secretary for Justice. The free online service is designed to help unrepresented people state their case to the court. Bill Doogue, a partner at Doogue O'Brien George, said that up to 30% of people go through the court system unrepresented, with many ending up very distressed because they are unable to tell their story.