Long-time reader, but first-time poster: If this post should go into r/cscareerquestions, or be deleted, just let me know. I have the opportunity to start a PhD in Computer Vision/ML with a potential focus on SLAM. I am looking for topics related to society that can guide and especially motivate the research. A counterexample would be face-recognition which is technically fascinating, but IMHO has significant negative potential from a political perspective. A possible example would be "helping the blind" where computer vision should generally be beneficial; however, I currently assume that most challenges in this area are more user-interface- and product-design-related.

Anything you do online can come back to bite you. It's been a decade full of lessons: who to trust, when to speak out and how to stream big events online after you've broken up with your cable company. In 2010, the first iPhone was only three years old. Uber and Lyft didn't exist, and neither did Google Assistant and Siri, Instagram or streaming video. We've come a long way since then, but the next 10 years won't be easy.

For parents looking to prise their children away from a life online, there are plenty of tangible, inventive, educational and/or entertaining physical products out there for the tech-savvy children of 2015. Whether you're a parent, carer, relative or family friend – and whatever your price range – you're spoiled for choice when it comes to tech-related presents this year. Here are some of the best examples. If your children are constantly trying to get their hands on your tablet, it may make sense to buy them their own – with suitable rules about how much they use it, of course. Amazon's child-focused tablet is well worth a look.

The Amazon reviews of course don't count, at least 10 out of 11 are clearly written by neophytes. I heard the book is quite critical of current trends in AI research, which might be good if the critique is well-articulated. But I also heard the book criticizes the ImageNet dataset, which was fundamental for ML progress in Computer Vision and beyond, so I'm skeptical. I don't know much about the author's research: doesn't seem to have published much in conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc. so I'm not sure about her qualifications as an expert on the subfield of AI she decides to talk about. On the other hand, apparently both Anima Anandkumar and Thomas Dietterich had good words for the book, and they're definitely experts in the field.

A.I. is already better than human doctors at diagnosing skin and breast cancer. A.I. is beginning to revolutionize medicine, and allowing us to see into the future of our bodies...but can we ever know too much about ourselves? What will happen when machine learning lets us open our own black boxes?

Facebook took down more than 600 accounts tied to the pro-Trump conspiracy website The Epoch Times for using identities created by artificial intelligence to push stories about a variety of topics including impeachment and elections. The network was called "The BL" and was run by Vietnamese users posing as Americans, using fake photos generated by algorithms to simulate real identities. The Epoch Media group, which pushes a variety of pro-Trump conspiracy theories, spent $9.5 million on ads to spread content through the now-suspended pages and groups. "What's new here is that this is purportedly a U.S.-based media company leveraging foreign actors posing as Americans to push political content. We've seen it a lot with state actors in the past," Facebook's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleiche, said in an interview.

AI is set out to kill most of the remaining newsroom jobs. But it can never replace how Errol Morris, Bob Woodward, or Michael Barbaro construct long-form affective narratives -- which is the future of journalism.