BANGKOK (Reuters) - Britain and France should highlight deteriorating human rights in Thailand when its prime minister visits this month and they should make clear there will be no "business as usual" until he holds a fair election, a rights group said on Monday.

I gave a talk at MaRS on this topic. The event was put on by Steve O'Neil and his team, who all did an excellent job. The venue was packed to standing-room only with a fantastic audience of 300-400 people. The goal of the event was to have a discussion around "Rational AI in the Enterprise." I think all of the speakers did a wonderful job of honoring the topic.

Last week's White House summit on artificial intelligence (AI) is an encouraging sign of American government and industry working collaboratively to advance this transformative technology. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis recently told a congressional committee that the Department of Defense (DoD) is "not going to have more papers, we're going to move on [AI]." DoD is broadly pursuing AI, not just as another set of programs, but also as a powerful enabler for nearly every defense mission and function. Strategic competitors are not standing idly by, either, as they reshape their economies to more service-based industries bolstered by technology. The U.S. commercial sector has a sense of urgency in adopting AI in the face of increasing international competition.

The problem with all new hotel technology, unfortunately, is that innovation gets turned into buzzwords quickly, usually in order to sell more products and services. Even worse, all these buzzwords are thrown into the same marketing pot, creating a vast confusion that only "experts" can understand. With this article and accompanying infographic, we will demystify this subject of artificial intelligence (AI) and explain, in plain terms, what it is and what it means for hotels. This guide was created with the intention of clarifying the most important terms and concepts related to artificial intelligence and shedding some light on what AI really means for hotels, without technicalities and by providing easy-to-understand industry examples. Note: This article is also available as a PDF to download here. "What is a lobby boy? A lobby boy is completely invisible, yet always in sight. A lobby boy remembers what people hate. A lobby boy anticipates the client's needs before the needs are needed".

Explaining the behavior of a black box machine learning model at the instance level is useful for building trust. However, it is also important to understand how the model behaves globally. Such an understanding provides insight into both the data on which the model was trained and the patterns that it learned. We present here an approach that learns if-then rules to globally explain the behavior of black box machine learning models that have been used to solve classification problems. The approach works by first extracting conditions that were important at the instance level and then evolving rules through a genetic algorithm with an appropriate fitness function. Collectively, these rules represent the patterns followed by the model for decisioning and are useful for understanding its behavior. We demonstrate the validity and usefulness of the approach by interpreting black box models created using publicly available data sets as well as a private digital marketing data set.

Nations sell goods and services to each other because this exchange is generally mutually beneficial. It's easy to understand that Iceland should not be growing its own oranges, given its climate. Instead, Iceland should buy oranges from Spain, which can grow them more cheaply, and sell Spaniards fish, which are abundant in its waters. That's why the explosion in free trade since the first bilateral deal was penned between Britain and France in the mid-1800s has generated unprecedented wealth and prosperity for the vast majority of the world's population. Hundreds of trade agreements later, the United States and several other countries established an international rules-based trading system after World War II. But now the U.S., which has played an integral role in bolstering this system, is actively trying to subvert it.

All the G7 nations have agreed at their summit in Canada on the importance of a "rules-based trading system", despite tensions with the US. The joint statement signed by US President Donald Trump and his counterparts comes amid a row over high US tariffs imposed this month on steel and aluminium imports. The EU and Canada have taken steps to retaliate. Mr Trump says tariffs are needed to reverse America's trade deficit. Soon after the joint statement was announced, the US president tweeted defiantly about not allowing "other countries to impose massive tariffs and trade barriers on its on farmers, workers and companies".

In a bid to ease tensions over trade, in particular U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum that infuriated other G7 members, officials were working on language about the international rules-based system that would lead the way to reforming the World Trade Organization, the official said.

According to the official, May would tell the summit that "it is worth stepping back to recall that the West, led by the U.S., devised the global rules-based system to enable our citizens to benefit from globalization while providing reassurance that we would all play by a common set of rules."

When it comes to cybersecurity, there are no rules. You can't write rules that will differentiate good guys from bad guys on the Internet. That's because the bad guys keep changing tactics, learning from their mistakes, and getting smart. You can't write rules that will filter out all the malicious or phishing emails. You can't write rules that will filter out malware in email attachments, or block fake websites, or say, "This is a safe packet payload, and this is a dangerous packet payload."