NAYPYITAW - A court in Myanmar on Wednesday sentenced a French tourist to one month in prison with hard labor, but he is expected to be released in about a week because of time he served while awaiting trial. Arthur Desclaux was arrested on Feb. 7 for flying a drone close to the capital's parliament complex, and for bringing the device into the country. He was convicted under the Illegal Export-Import Act, which has a maximum penalty of three years' imprisonment. French consular official Frederic Inza, who attended the trial, said Desclaux, 27, admitted his guilt but said he was unaware of the restriction. "We're satisfied that his good faith and the fact that he imported this drone without having the intention of breaking the law was taken into account by the court," Inza said.

This is an age of artificial intelligence (AI) driven automation and autonomous machines. The increasing ubiquity and rapidly expanding potential of self-improving, self-replicating, autonomous intelligent machines has spurred a massive automation driven transformation of human ecosystems in cyberspace, geospace and space (CGS). As seen across nations, there is already a growing trend towards increasingly entrusting complex decision processes to these rapidly evolving AI systems. From granting parole to diagnosing diseases, college admissions to job interviews, managing trades to granting credits, autonomous vehicles to autonomous weapons, the rapidly evolving AI systems are increasingly being adopted by individuals and entities across nations: its government, industries, organizations and academia (NGIOA). Individually and collectively, the promise and perils of these evolving AI systems are raising serious concerns for the accuracy, fairness, transparency, trust, ethics, privacy and security of the future of humanity -- prompting calls for regulation of artificial intelligence design, development and deployment.

In 2017, two foreign journalists for Turkish state TV station TRT World and their interpreter spent two months in a Myanmar jail for attempting to fly a drone near the legislature. The three pleaded guilty to breaching the colonial-era Aircraft Act.

Genealogy research is the study of family history using available resources such as historical records. Ancestry provides its customers with one of the world's largest online genealogical index with billions of records from a wide range of sources, including vital records such as birth and death certificates, census records, court and probate records among many others. Search at Ancestry aims to return relevant records from various record types, allowing our subscribers to build their family trees, research their family history, and make meaningful discoveries about their ancestors from diverse perspectives. In a modern search engine designed for genealogical study, the appropriate ranking of search results to provide highly relevant information represents a daunting challenge. In particular, the disparity in historical records makes it inherently difficult to score records in an equitable fashion. Herein, we provide an overview of our solutions to overcome such record disparity problems in the Ancestry search engine. Specifically, we introduce customized coordinate ascent (customized CA) to speed up ranking within a specific record type. We then propose stochastic search (SS) that linearly combines ranked results federated across contents from various record types. Furthermore, we propose a novel information retrieval metric, normalized cumulative entropy (NCE), to measure the diversity of results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these two algorithms in terms of relevance (by NDCG) and diversity (by NCE) if applicable in the offline experiments using real customer data at Ancestry.

Sci-Fi movies have long played on our fear of artificially intelligent robot armies taking over the world, but hidden and often secret algorithms are already busy at work in society, delivering sometimes life-changing consequences. Humanoid robots, capable of thinking, moving and talking, is the most common imagery when it comes to Artificial Intelligence, but incredibly powerful computer algorithms, which silently churn through oceans of data, also fall under the AI umbrella. Computers are already making important decisions and influential judgements in the key societal pillars of justice, policing, employment and finance. NSW Police are known to be using a controversial algorithm which claims to predict youth crime before it happens. But critics of NSW Police's Suspect Target Management Plan (STMP) system argue the software is racist, and unfairly blacklists and targets Aboriginal youths.

This is not to say that people have lost interest in politics and policy-making. On the contrary, there is evidence of growing engagement in non-traditional politics, suggesting people remain politically engaged but have lost faith in traditional party politics. More specifically, voters increasingly feel the established political parties are too similar and that politicians are preoccupied with point-scoring and politicking. Disgruntled voters typically feel the big parties are beholden to powerful vested interests, are in cahoots with big business or trade unions, and hence their vote will not make any difference. Another symptom of changing political engagement (rather than disengagement) is the rise of populist parties with a radical anti-establishment agenda and growing interest in conspiracy theories, theories which confirm people's hunch that the system is rigged.

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Sam Haberern, 20, was playing Call of Duty on Xbox at his family's house in Connecticut, and he was on a roll. After several dozen high-scoring rounds, other gamers started to take notice. He began receiving invites from players asking him to play with them. He accepted one and joined in the group's online conversation through his headset. "It was great," said Haberern in an interview with The Washington Post.

This is an age of artificial intelligence (AI) driven automation and autonomous machines. The increasing ubiquity and rapidly expanding potential of self-improving, self-replicating, autonomous intelligent machines has spurred a massive automation driven transformation of human ecosystems in cyberspace, geospace and space (CGS). As seen across nations, there is already a growing trend towards increasingly entrusting complex decision processes to these rapidly evolving AI systems. From granting parole to diagnosing diseases, college admissions to job interviews, managing trades to granting credits, autonomous vehicles to autonomous weapons, the rapidly evolving AI systems are increasingly being adopted by individuals and entities across nations: its government, industries, organizations and academia (NGIOA). Individually and collectively, the promise and perils of these evolving AI systems are raising serious concerns for the accuracy, fairness, transparency, trust, ethics, privacy and security of the future of humanity -- prompting calls for regulation of artificial intelligence design, development and deployment.

In this episode of the McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Global Institute partner Michael Chui and MGI chairman and director James Manyika speak with McKinsey Publishing's David Schwartz about the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. Today, we're going to be journeying to the frontiers of artificial intelligence. We'll touch on what AI's impact could be across multiple industries and functions. We'll also explore limitations that, at least for now, stand in the way. I'm joined by two McKinsey leaders who are at the point of the spear, Michael Chui, based in San Francisco and a partner with the McKinsey Global Institute, and James Manyika, the chairman of the McKinsey Global Institute and a senior partner in our San Francisco office. Michael Chui: Great to be here. David Schwartz: Michael, where do we see the most potential from AI? Michael Chui: The number-one thing that we know is just the widespread potential applicability. That said, we're quite early in terms of the adoption of these technologies, so there's a lot of runway to go. One of the other things that we've discovered is that one way to think about where the potential for AI is, is just follow the money. If you're a company where marketing and sales is what drives the value, that's actually where AI can create the most value. If you're a company where operational excellence matters the most to you, that's where you can create the most value with AI.