Royal Mail has launched the United Kingdom's first-ever drone delivery service. The service was launched on Scotland's Orkney Islands -- operating for three months with the intent to extend in the future. A man in the U.K. who claimed to be friends with former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a pilot with a multimillion-dollar trust fund, and a cruise ship captain was exposed as a decades-long conman who swindled millions of dollars from people, according to a report. Jody Francis Oliver, 45, is currently behind bars on fraud and theft charges after leading seven different lives and allegedly swindling roughly $5.6 million from people, The Times of London reported. For decades, the man reportedly took on different high-powered identities, despite being an unemployed married dad of three.

It's the fast-growing technology that continues to fool millions of social media users around the world - but how adept are YOU at spotting a fake AI photo? From the Pope posing in a puffer coat to Donald Trump being arrested on the streets of New York, images created by artificial intelligence are becoming increasingly convincing. While some of the snaps are clearly fake and designed to amuse or make a political statement, there are experts who fear the technology's potential as a weapon of mass disinformation. It comes as a German artist who won the Sony World Photography Award this week refused to accept his prize after revealing his black and white portrait of two women was in fact created by AI. Boris Eldagsen tricked competition organisers with his entry, Pseudomnesia: The Electrician - a haunting close-up of two women in a grainy sepia which won the creative open category.

In this paper, we present a manually annotated corpus of 10,000 tweets containing public reports of five COVID-19 events, including positive and negative tests, deaths, denied access to testing, claimed cures and preventions. We designed slot-filling questions for each event type and annotated a total of 31 fine-grained slots, such as the location of events, recent travel, and close contacts. We show that our corpus can support fine-tuning BERT-based classifiers to automatically extract publicly reported events and help track the spread of a new disease. We also demonstrate that, by aggregating events extracted from millions of tweets, we achieve surprisingly high precision when answering complex queries, such as "Which organizations have employees that tested positive in Philadelphia?" We will release our corpus (with user-information removed), automatic extraction models, and the corresponding knowledge base to the research community.

Is it going to take over the world? All questions a novice like myself is thinking whenever someone far more clued-up on the ever changing advancement of technology turns the conversation onto the dreaded topic of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Usually I let them dribble on and myself stay silent in the hope that our chat comes to an end, however, you illustrators and writers out there may want to be paying close attention to the recent craze sweeping through twitter boards and reddit threads. Open AI (based in San Francisco) has been growing in popularity recently on account of its new Playground and Dall-E 2 systems. The Playground system is a new predictive language tool in which you input a question or a command and in a matter of seconds an AI responds with cohesive and calculated language.

A new artificial intelligence sleep app has been developed that might be able to replace sleeping pills for insomnia sufferers. Sleepio uses an AI algorithm to provide individuals with tailored cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) said it would save the NHS money as well as reduce prescriptions of medicines such as zolpidem and zopiclone, which can be dependency forming. Its economic analysis found healthcare costs were lower after one year of using Sleepio, mostly because of fewer GP appointments and sleeping pills prescribed. The app provides a digital six-week self-help programme involving a sleep test, weekly interactive CBT-I sessions and keeping a diary about sleeping patterns.

The summer recess is over and MPs are returning to Westminster with very full inboxes. As Parliament throws its doors open for the new term, what challenges lie ahead for the government in the coming months? The challenges of posed by the coronavirus pandemic will be forefront of ministers' minds: how to encourage a return to something approaching normal while keeping the virus under control. As the holiday season winds up, many in the Conservative party want to see more done to encourage people back to offices in England - and ministers are urging people working from home to speak to their employers about returning to workplaces where it's safe to do so. Health Committee chair Jeremy Hunt has warned that the situation coming into winter is "potentially very perilous".

Covid-19 patients in the UK are being treated with dexamethasone today after a UK trial of the drug found it could save lives. "The treatment is immediately available and already in use on the NHS," said health minister Matt Hancock. "It is not by any means a cure but it is the best news we have had," Hancock told parliament today. The UK's chief medical officers say it should be used immediately, according to the BBC. A preliminary study found that the steroid, which is already widely prescribed for treating allergies and asthma, reduces the risk of dying from covid-19 by a third for patients on ventilators, and by a fifth for those receiving oxygen. Dexamethasone should only be taken if prescribed by a doctor. Officials in Beijing, China confirmed 31 new coronavirus cases today, bringing the total to 137 in the last six days. The city is again restricting all non-essential travel. Schools, swimming pools and gyms are all closed from today.

A Polish website called PimEyes uses facial recognition to search the internet for pictures of a person based on a single image. That photo can be taken from a news site, social media, or an uploaded selfie, and the computer algorithm then shows matches on the web. The free part of service shows photos it believes to be the same person, and rates the'match' out of five stars. It provides a generic name of the site where the picture is found (i.e. For that added insight, it offers a premium service for £9.79 a day where customers can see exactly where the photo comes from.

If you ever have some moments of spare time, in which you really don't know what to do…, well: then what about chatting some minutes with a bot? And I believe, actually it is! But… there is also a reasonable motivation for doing it. I think that we human beings should talk from time to time with these programs, just to verify if it is really true that they are becoming more "intelligent" as time goes by. One of the world's best chatbots (or maybe even the best at all) is Mitsuku. Its creators present this conversational AI as 18-year girl on their website https://www.pandorabots.com/mitsuku/, The last time I chatted with her was about one year ago.

Two eerily realistic videos featuring Boris Johnson and rival Jeremy Corbyn endorsing each other for the role of prime minister have been released by a thinktank to highlight the spread of deepfake technology. Future Advocacy released the bizarre videos in a stunt to raise awareness on the dangers surrounding online disinformation. This is the first time deepfakes of political candidates have been released during a live election in the UK. In the election-style address a character resembling Boris Johnson says: 'Hi folks, I am here with a very special message. 'Since that momentous day in 2016, division has coursed through our country as we argue with fantastic passion, vim and vigour about Brexit.