Please understand the truth about Falun Gong. Please understand the truth about Falun Gong and the brutal persecution of Falun Gong in China. Please do not believe the Chinese Communist Party's lies. Falun Gong (Falun Dafa) teaches'Truthfulness, Compassion, Tolerance', it teaches us to be a GOOD person, and makes us HEALTHY! And it is embraced in 114 nations!

Since she was a kid, Assia Boundaoui knew that she, her family and her neighbors were being watched. It was an open secret in her hometown of Bridgeview, a Chicago suburb home to a large Muslim and Arab population where for decades residents experienced government surveillance, including home visits by FBI agents. Using her training as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, Boudaoui sought out proof beginning in 2014 by interviewing community members and filing Freedom of Information requests for records on Operation Vulgar Betrayal, one of the largest pre-9/11 counterrorism probes conducted domestically in the United States and included the Bridgeview community. She also submitted hundreds of privacy waivers on behalf of people who were surveilled to the Department of Justice, requesting files on individuals who had experienced surveillance. When the FBI responded, ultimately saying it would take years to process 33,000 pages of records on the investigation, Boundaoui sued. In 2017, a federal judge ruled that she was entitled to expedited processing, ordering the FBI to release 3,500 pages from the Vulgar Betrayal file each month and to give priority to the sub files of individuals for whom privacy waivers were filed.

Some US airlines are now even using it instead of boarding passes, claiming it's more convenient. There has also been wider use of affect recognition, a subset of facial recognition, which claims to'read' our inner emotions by interpreting the micro-expressions on our face. As psychologist Lisa Feldman Barret showed in an extensive survey paper, this type of AI phrenology has no reliable scientific foundation. But it's already being used in classrooms and job interviews -- often without people's knowledge. For example, documents obtained by the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology revealed that the FBI and ICE have been quietly accessing drivers license databases, conducting facial-recognition searches on millions of photos without the consent of individuals or authorization from state or federal lawmakers.

What's happening: Elected officials, experts and the press have been warning about the potential fallout for business or elections from deepfakes. But apart from a few high-profile examples, the tech so far has been used almost exclusively for porn, according to a landmark new report from Deeptrace Labs. "This is dangerous in the courtroom context because the ultimate goal of the courts is to seek out truth," says Pfefferkorn, who recently wrote an article about deepfakes in the courtroom for the Washington State Bar magazine. Already, people accused of possessing child porn often claim that it's computer-generated, says Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert at UC Berkeley. "I expect that in this and other realms, the rise of AI-synthesized content will increase the likelihood and efficacy of those claiming that real content is fake."

House Democrats leading the Trump impeachment inquiry are "cherry-picking what to leak," House Foreign Affairs committee member Congressman Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., claimed Saturday. Appearing on "Fox & Friends: Weekend" with host Ed Henry, Zeldin said Democrats aren't being upfront with the American public. They're lying about other claims and the American public gets completely deceived as a result of it," he said. At a fiery rally in Louisiana on Friday, the president hit back at Democrats' "witch hunt." This is one of the great con jobs ever. We must never let it happen to another president. This should never be allowed to happen again," he told his crowd of supporters.

More than half the world's population now lives in cities And many of these cities have a problem: poor air quality. Harmful substances such as nitrogen oxides and fine dust regularly exceed legal limits, and residents – especially children and older people – suffer the health consequences, such as asthma and heart disease. This problem affects already disadvantaged groups in particular, since the air quality in poorer neighborhoods is often the worst. Reducing pollution is therefore not just an ecological issue but also a matter of social justice. Many large cities have identified the problem and developed plans for improving air quality.

Canada's Chief Information Officers (CIO) Strategy Council has published a new set of national standards for the use of artificial intelligence. The standards are meant to aid organizations on how to use developing technologies. The council acknowledges that artificial intelligence is misunderstood, but that companies are attempting to implement it within their organizations. The main focus of the standards is to specify the "minimum requirements in protecting human values and incorporating ethics in the design and use of automated decision systems." According to the standards, AI should drive inclusive growth and benefit people and the planet.

Last week I saw two articles about "smarter guns": an op-ed titled "Use AI to stop carnage", and a comment to that op-ed asking "Can smarter guns end the gun control debate? The author of the op-ed is S. Bringsjord, professor in a departments of Cognitive Science and Computer Science and an expert in logic and philosophy, specializing in AI and reasoning. The comment to his proposal says he is "comfortable speaking with media and available to speak about the concept of ethical guns". I look forward to reading his answers to my perplexities here. Those smart weapons would use ethical artificial intelligence to know, in any circumstance, that they have "no business being used anytime soon".

An algorithmic decision-maker incentivizes people to act in certain ways to receive better decisions. These incentives can dramatically influence subjects' behaviors and lives, and it is important that both decision-makers and decision-recipients have clarity on which actions are incentivized by the chosen model. While for linear functions, the changes a subject is incentivized to make may be clear, we prove that for many non-linear functions (e.g. neural networks, random forests), classical methods for interpreting the behavior of models (e.g. input gradients) provide poor advice to individuals on which actions they should take. In this work, we propose a mathematical framework for understanding algorithmic incentives as the challenge of solving a Markov Decision Process, where the state includes the set of input features, and the reward is a function of the model's output. We can then leverage the many toolkits for solving MDPs (e.g. tree-based planning, reinforcement learning) to identify the optimal actions each individual is incentivized to take to improve their decision under a given model. We demonstrate the utility of our method by estimating the maximally-incentivized actions in two real-world settings: a recidivism risk predictor we train using ProPublica's COMPAS dataset, and an online credit scoring tool published by the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO).

Editor's note: This is the latest in an exclusive UpTech series about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and much more as part of a partnership between YourLocalStudio.com and WRAL TechWire. Previous posts can be found by searching "Uptech" at WRAL TechWire.com. Interviews are conducted by Alexander Ferguson, CEO of YourLocalStudio.com. In this deep dive video, we hear from Dr. Chris Hazard, a unique figure in the world of artificial intelligence who draws from experience in software development, psychology, physics, economics, hypnosis, robotics, and privacy law. He has worked in and been published in a variety of fields from wireless network infrastructure as a software architect at Motorola, to psychology as part of a post-doc at NCSU, to hypnosis with the National Guild of Hypnotists, to robotics at Kiva Systems, to privacy law working with the Future of Privacy Forum.]