As the planet continues to warm, climate change impacts are worsening. In 2016, there were 772 weather and disaster events, triple the number that occurred in 1980. Twenty percent of species currently face extinction, and that number could rise to 50 percent by 2100. And even if all countries keep their Paris climate pledges, by 2100, it's likely that average global temperatures will be 3 C higher than in pre-industrial times. But we have a new tool to help us better manage the impacts of climate change and protect the planet: artificial intelligence (AI).

This article originally appeared in Vulture. Nothing is ever as it seems when it comes to James Franco. The man makes a lot of baffling "artistic" choices, any of which could conceivably be explained away as one of the performance-art pranks he so enjoys pulling on the public, and in a greater sense, on himself. Is he penning a column of film criticism, or engaging in an Adaptation-style interrogation of a self divorced from the self? Is he challenging the pillars of historical thought, or just putting goo on stuff?

Sexual harassment is a pressing issue that won't go away. A survey published in January 2018 found that 81 percent of women and 43 percent of men experienced sexual harassment. Statistics from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report that an estimated 75 percent of sexual harassment cases are not reported. That fact is due to a variety of factors. Some victims fear retaliation for speaking up or think the people they talk to won't believe them. Also, people in low-wage jobs who experience sexual harassment may feel it's useless to notify superiors about what happened because they lack bargaining power.

According to Grant Gross, independent contributing writer, addressing the affect of Artificial Intelligence and personal data, "AI analytics will be under increasing scrutiny. Experts say companies using AI with personal data must focus on GDPR and HIPAA, but long term, companies can expect governments and people affected to increasingly push for audits and explanations of AI decisions. Business use of cognitive and artificial intelligence is expected to skyrocket in the coming years, with global spending on the technology reaching $19.1 billion in 2018, a 54.2 percent increase over last year, according to IDC, says the report. "But as businesses embrace AI to help with all kinds of tasks, they face a complex set of regulations that limit what personal data they can collect and use. A business using AI to predict when its own factory machinery needs maintenance has little to fear from regulations.

New compliance technology such as AI and intelligent tagging has the power to change compliance. Our webinar which brought together in-house experts and external subject matter specialists has shed light on the latest cutting-edge technologies and how they can help solve the many day-to-day challenges faced by compliance professionals across the globe. In today's rapidly changing regulatory landscape, it is critically important for banks and financial institutions to respond to new regulations with agility, while ensuring that the customer experience does not suffer. These dual demands put pressure on compliance departments. Compliance technology in the form of end-to-end controls capable of mitigating a multitude of financial crime risks can help to alleviate this pressure.

At Mozilla, one way we support a healthy internet is by fueling the people and projects on the front lines -- from grants for community technologists in Detroit, to fellowships for online privacy activists in Rio. Today, we are opening applications for a new round of Mozilla awards. We're awarding $225,000 to technologists and media makers who help the public understand how threats to a healthy internet affect their everyday lives. Specifically, we're seeking projects that explore artificial intelligence and machine learning. In a world where biased algorithms, skewed data sets, and broken recommendation engines can radicalize YouTube users, promote racism, and spread fake news, it's more important than ever to support artwork and advocacy work that educates and engages internet users.

The day I'm scheduled to appear on his show, the television physician and Oprah protege has assembled a cast of victims and villains that includes a college communications major who caught chlamydia from a Tinder date; a 24-year-old woman who was stabbed 21 times by the fiance she met online; and Douglas Hines, a cartoonish engineer donning a white lab coat and outsize bowtie, who claims to have created the world's first sex robot. NSFW Warning: This story may contain links to and descriptions or images of explicit sexual acts. I'm here, presumably, to act as a voice of reason in a segment called "Rise of the sex robots: Why experts are issuing warnings!" My co-panelists, a sex therapist and a psychologist, are well-trained in the art (or is it science?) of near-scripted debate. While one is slightly more optimistic, their arguments are essentially two sides of the same coin: Sex robots either can or will pose a threat to human relationships, or worse. As TV doctors do, they've both developed firmly planted opinions on the subject without any first-hand experience. It's not lost on me that I'm the only one in the room who's actually seen a sex robot IRL. After the doctors deliver their warnings, Oz turns to me, a look of concern written in deep lines across his forehead. He wants to know if people can have real, intimate relationships with robots.

The 18th-century Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley concluded that, since all we know of the universe is what our senses convey to us, things in the world exist only to the extent that we perceive them. They have no material reality, but are phenomena in and of our minds, or the mind of God. Samuel Johnson famously countered this philosophy by kicking a large stone and saying, "I refute it thus!" Two hundred years later, while American campuses roiled with protests against the Vietnam War, the philosopher, historian, and physicist Thomas Kuhn met with a grad student at Princeton's legendary Institute for Advanced Study to discuss the student's paper. The professor and student disagreed on some fundamental ideas, and the conversation grew heated.

Low intensity of research: A lack of data hinders potential research work at homegrown companies or in the academic world. Not only is the volume of data scarce, its quality is also often deemed questionable. Inadequate expertise, manpower, and skilling opportunities: Unlike the US and China which have hundreds of educational programmes in data science and AI, India has next-to-nothing. Though the country churns out over a million engineers every year, a dismal 4% of AI professionals in the country have worked on cutting-edge technologies like deep learning and neural networks. High resource cost and low awareness: Professionals skilled in areas such as AI and data analytics come at a far higher cost than other techies in India.

"Artificial intelligence" technology is on a roll these days, but it's about to hit a major blockage: Europe's new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The privacy law, which came into effect across the EU on Friday, has several elements that will make life very difficult for companies building machine learning systems, according to a leading Internet law academic. "Big data is completely opposed to the basis of data protection," said Lilian Edwards, a law professor at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. "I think people have been very glib about saying we can make the two reconcilable, because it's very difficult." Machine learning--the basis of what we call AI--involves algorithms that progressively improve themselves.