Online disinformation is only going to get more sophisticated, the chair of the committee investigating disinformation and fake news, Damian Collins, has warned. In a report released on Monday, the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) select committee said Facebook had in effect put democracy at risk by allowing voters to be targeted with disinformation and personalised "dark adverts" from anonymous actors. It called for the company to be regulated. "Where we can see lies being spread, particularly in election periods, we should have the ability to say to the tech companies: we want you to act against that content," Collins told the BBC Radio 4's Today programme. It's being spread maliciously and you should stop it." After an 18-month investigation, the DCMS found that British election laws were not fit for purpose and were vulnerable to interference by hostile foreign actors. Although he stopped short of saying that companies such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were breaking the law, Collins said the legislation was not robust enough and needed to be made clearer. Citing evidence of agencies working from Russia, as well as an unidentifiable organisation called the Mainstream Network that urged voters to lobby their MP to support a no-deal Brexit, Collins criticised the fact that the law did not require such actors to identify themselves. "No one knows who this organisation is, and I think in a democracy, citizens need to be informed … and the law doesn't require that." He predicted false information would become more convincing, saying that "deepfake films" featuring politicians giving inflammatory speeches they never gave could circulate social media in the near future. The interviewer, John Humphrys, interjected: "So it looks like you're saying, 'sack Theresa May', but in fact it's somebody else with your face superimposed?" Collins said: "In a situation like that we are going to want to be able to go to companies like Facebook and say this is clearly fake, its being released maliciously to try to influence people's opinion to spread anger and hate and it should be taken down because its not true.

A spy movie with its paraphernalia of cool gadgets and technologies has always enticed audiences. In these movies, we have seen the use of a polygraph to detect if somebody is being truthful or not. Needless to say, polygraph is a multi-billion dollar industry and plays a crucial role in crime adjudication. Polygraphs do not have any "intelligence" built into them. They are simple machines that do what they were designed to do: measure vital statistics like blood pressure and pulse to reach a conclusion.

The government plans to use a facial recognition system at a ceremony later this month to mark the 30th anniversary of Emperor Akihito's accession to the throne, officials said. The use of facial recognition technology, a first for a government-sponsored event in Japan, is designed to reduce the time required for participant identification and help prevent terrorism. Using images of the faces of participants registered in advance, the system authenticates recognized faces in some 10 seconds per person with an accuracy rate of more than 99 percent, the officials said. More than 1,000 people are expected to attend the ceremony set to take place at Tokyo's National Theatre on Feb. 24. The facial recognition system will be used for hundreds of people including government officials and journalists.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for about 75 years now.

Artificial intelligence has, irrefutably, revolutionized our lifestyle as well as business processes, including digital marketing, in ways once impossible to imagine. Artificial Intelligence… This long, wordy term may sound perplexing to you, but what's more perplexing is the fact that we are using AI technology every day and most of us didn't even realize it till now. Let's just take a reality check. Think of all those times when Gmail suggested you smart replies for an email or Spotify recommended new releases and old favorites as per your music taste. Artificial Intelligence lies behind all this; it capitalizes on the algorithms that determine our online activities and thereby makes suggestions relevant to how we behave online.

Alita: Battle Angel is an interesting and wild ride, jam-packed full of concepts around cybernetics, dystopian futures and cyberpunk themes. The film – in cinemas now – revolves around Alita (Rosa Salazar), a female cyborg (with original human brain) that is recovered by cybernetic doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) and brought into the world of the future (the film is set in 2563). Hundreds of years after a catastrophic war, called "The Fall", the population of Earth now resides in a wealthy sky city called Zalem and a sprawling junkyard called Iron City where the detritus from Zalem is dumped. We follow Alita's story as she makes friends and enemies, and discovers more about her past. Her character is great – she has many of the mannerisms of a teenage girl combined with a determination and overarching sense of what is right – "I do not stand by in the presence of evil."

SAN FRANCISCO: Visualise this: A debate competition in which your most formidable opponent is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system machine that argues! If you are dismissing it as a scene from a sci-fi movie, hold on: The first public debate competition between a human and a machine unfolded on Monday at the Yerba Buena Centre for Arts in San Francisco when IBM's Project Debater - an AI technology-based computer that resembled a tall speaker -- faced off with 2016 World Debating Championship grand finalist Harish Natarajan on the topic "We should subsidise preschools". Project Debater, which has been developed over the last eight years by IBM researchers across the globe, including India, has been designed to participate in live debates with human debaters. The AI technology, which sources information from different sources including newspaper reports, is expected to lead to unbiased debates that are backed by data and studies. While IBM's Project Debater argued for the topic, Natarajan countered it.

OpenAI, a company backed by Elon Musk, has decided not to release an AI system that can generate news stories and fiction on the grounds that it could be dangerous in the wrong hands. OpenAI is a non-profit company that aims to finding a way to safely bring about artificial general intelligence. Normally it releases its research to the public, but its latest AI model, known as GPT-2, is reportedly so convincing that it has too much potential for misuse, generating huge volumes of misleading news stories. GPT-2 takes a sample of text (a few words of several paragraphs) and predicts the following sentences in a similar style, with surprisingly plausible results. The system was trained using a dataset of roughly 10 million news articles sourced by trawling Reddit – several times the size of those used by previous state-of-the-art systems. The sheer volume of data gave the system a much better understanding of written language, and means it's more general purpose than other systems.