A Justice Ministry statement said Wednesday that after an almost yearlong investigation the State Attorney's office summoned top Aeronautics Ltd. officials, including its chief executive, for a hearing pending indictment.

International Business Machines Corp. ( IBM) has filed for a patent with the U.S. Patent Office for "coffee-delivery drones" that are also capable of predicting when an individual will need a drink and how it should be made. The patent titled "Drone delivery of coffee based on a cognitive state of an individual" lists the possibility of harnessing the combination of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) with biometric readings of an individual to deliver the best possible preparation of the necessary beverage.

How will AI, machine learning, and big data affect the legal system as technology improves? For a long time, lawyers believed they couldn't be replaced by machines. It's true: the legal industry over the past decade has amassed a graveyard of failed attempts to innovate and few large exits. It's also true that legal arguments can be highly case-specific and not necessarily conducive to automation. But asking whether individual lawyers can be entirely replaced by machines isn't asking the right question.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies advanced rapidly over the past several years. Governments around the world responded by developing AI strategies. France released its national AI strategy in March 2018, emphasising research funds, ethical issues, and inequality. China stated a goal of being the top AI country by 2030. The EU, Canada, Japan, the Obama administration, the Trump administration, and many others have put forth their own plans (Sutton 2018).

More than a dozen human rights groups have sent a letter to Google urging the company not to offer censored internet search in China, amid reports it is planning to again begin offering the service in the giant Asian market. The joint letter dated Tuesday calls on CEO Sundar Pichai to explain what Google is doing to safeguard users from the Chinese government's censorship and surveillance. It describes the censored search engine app, codenamed "Dragonfly", as representing "an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights. "The Chinese government extensively violates the rights to freedom of expression and privacy; by accommodating the Chinese authorities' repression of dissent, Google would be actively participating in those violations for millions of internet users in China," said the letter That follows a letter earlier this month signed by more than a thousand Google employees protesting the company's secretive plan to build a search engine that would comply with Chinese ...

More than a dozen human rights groups and other advocacy organizations urged Google to abandon any plans to build a censored version of its search engine in China. The project, said to be referred to internally as Dragonfly, 'would represent an alarming capitulation by Google on human rights,' argued a letter signed by 14 groups including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders. The letter is addressed to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and comes after weeks of internal revolt at the company, wherein employees have expressed outrage over the firm's rumored plans to launch a censored search engine in China. While China is home to the world's largest number of internet users, a 2015 report by US think tank Freedom House found that the country had the most restrictive online use policies of 65 nations it studied, ranking below Iran and Syria. But China has maintained that its various forms of web censorship are necessary for protecting its national security.

As the Trump administration continues to advance its hardline stance towards immigration, legal or otherwise, businesses are increasingly turning to automation and robotics to fill jobs previously held by humans. However, these thinking machines are not without drawbacks. AI development has long been beset by issues of intrinsic training bias, if not outright racist and xenophobic behavior. Take Microsoft's aborted social media bots Tay and Zo, for example, or Amazon's questionably-designed facial recognition system. However this relationship is not unidirectional -- AI can impact the expression of xenophobic ideas just as xenophobic practices can impact the rate of AI development.

A full hour before the sun rose in Washington, DC, Tuesday, President Donald Trump fired off a pair of tweets claiming that Google had "rigged" search results against conservatives. Like so many Trump grievances, the argument seems steeped less in fact than a roiling stew of personal animus. But in Google News, the latest subject of his ire, Trump may have found the perfect target. In Trump's tweets--which he later deleted, then tweeted again, with no substantive changes--you can see the outlines of an attack that can't be easily fact-checked or dismissed. Charges of bias against Google will stick, because no algorithm is truly neutral.

President Donald Trump is talking about the Iowa college student that was found slain about a month after she disappeared, despite the victim's family asking that her death not be politicized. President Donald Trump speaks during a rally in Charleston, W.Va. Tuesday. WASHINGTON – White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Tuesday that President Donald Trump is considering new regulations on Google's search engine to address his concern that it turns up too many stories that are critical of him. Pressed by reporters at the White House on Tuesday about a tweet the president wrote criticizing Google's search engine as "rigged," the director of Trump's National Economic Council said the administration is "taking a look" at federal regulations for the company. "We'll let you know," he said.

This post was featured in our Cognilytica Newsletter, with additional details. When people hear about the race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominance, they often think that the main competition is between the US and China. After all, the US and China have most of the largest and most well funded AI companies on the planet, and the pace of funding, company growth, and adoption doesn't seem to be slowing anytime soon. However, if you look closely, you'll see that many other countries have a stake in the AI race, and indeed, some countries have AI efforts, funding, technologies, and intellectual property that make them serious contenders in the jostling for AI dominance. In this newsletter, we'll take a look at how countries are strategically positioned with regards to their AI capabilities and ambitions, and see if AI is truly like that of the space race or simply like any other technology trend we've seen come and go.