He Wrote a Book About Antifa. Rutgers historian Mark Bray is trying to flee to Spain after an online campaign from far-right influencers was followed by death threats. He was turned back at the airport on his first attempt. A professor at Rutgers University who wrote a book about " antifa " almost a decade ago is trying--and struggling--to flee the US for Europe after a weeks-long online campaign against him by far-right influencers was followed by death threats. Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers who specializes in Spanish history and radicalism, has been a far-right target ever since he published in 2017.

Courtesy Photo As part of a DAFIA initiative, AFWERX awardee Versionista will analyze surveys and...... read more read more Courtesy Photo As part of a DAFIA initiative, AFWERX awardee Versionista will analyze surveys and other data and use AI to generate topics, extract key themes, understand sentiment, and track changes over time. This will help DAFIA better detect and remediate issues affecting Airmen and their families. The Department of the Air Force Inspection Agency at Kirtland AFB, N.M., is using artificial intelligence, in the form of machine learning, to identify emerging issues of concern to Airmen and enable the Air Force to isolate, respond to, and resolve them as early as possible. Based on lessons learned from previous inspections, DAFIA's Enterprise Support Division petitioned AFWERX, a program office at the Air Force Research Laboratory that connects innovators across government, industry and academia, to solicit vendors who could tackle this problem. Lt. Col. Kent Moore, enterprise data manager at DAFIA's Analysis & Assessments Division, explained the initial driver propelling the growing effort and outlined the process so far.

For the last year, Anna (not her real name) has been working as an Amazon "associate", in the kind of vast warehouse the company calls a fulfilment centre. For £10.50 an hour, she works four days a week, though, during busy periods, this sometimes goes up to five. Her shift begins at 7.15am and ends at 5.45pm. "When I get home," she says, "it's about 6.30. And I just go in, take a shower and go to bed. Anna is a picker in one of the company's most technologically advanced workplaces, in the south of England. This means she works in a metal enclosure in front of a screen that flashes up images of the products she has to put in the "totes" destined for the part of the warehouse where customer orders are made ready for posting out. Everything from DVDs to gardening equipment is brought to her by robot "drives": squat, droid-like devices that endlessly lift "pods" – tall fabric towers full of pockets that contain everything from DVDs to toys – and then speed them to the pickers. Everything has to happen quickly. According to the all-important metric by which a picker's performance is measured, Anna says she has to average 360 items an hour, or around 3,800 a day. In March, the Covid-19 lockdown meant that customer orders suddenly rocketed. Anna says that lots of her colleagues started putting in overtime, and new recruits arrived en masse. "They hired a lot of people," she says. "I thought there should have been fewer people in the warehouse, to have distancing." "They took out some of the tables because of 2-metre distancing, but it was impossible to find a free table or chair.

In many separate arenas of the world of technology, COVID-19 has been the great accelerator. Cloud computing is perhaps the most obvious example, with the pandemic inducing heavy reliance on remote collaboration and communication tech; a surging interest in cybersecurity solutions is another; mandates for social distancing has also rendered traditional forms of commerce impractical and given rise to the ubiquity of eCommerce. B2B commerce has gone truly digital in the wake of the pandemic, and it's changed processes and behaviours for those on both sides of transaction – perhaps for good. "All of a sudden, you don't have the ability to have field reps out there, interacting with customers face to face," says PROS A/NZ managing director David Bray. "For a lot of organisations, it's limited their ability to be able to do things through call centres easily because their workforce had to move to work from home. "[There's been] a huge shift towards looking at how to use the eCommerce as part of a broader B2B engagement." Such a large shift requires an overhaul in the ways in which B2B organisations and their salespeople approach their role. It's no longer adequate to rely on in-person meetings with customers, lunches with clients or other physical events – salespeople must virtualise their role, and that requires the right tools. Buyers have taken full control of the buying process in this new virtual model of commerce, and this means the B2B seller has to step their game to earn customer loyalty by engaging with those customers where, when and how the customer wants. The key to this is AI. "B2B organisations that are selling typically have a large number of products and a large number of customers," says Bray. "With that comes a massive amount of data, and the challenge is to effectively use this data in real-time to provide a relevant experience to buyers.

Health departments around the U.S. that are using contact tracers to contain coronavirus outbreaks are scrambling to bolster their ranks amid a surge of cases and resistance to cooperation from those infected or exposed. With too few trained contact tracers to handle soaring caseloads, one hard-hit Arizona county is relying on National Guard members to pitch in. In Louisiana, people who have tested positive typically wait more than two days to respond to health officials -- giving the disease crucial time to spread. Many tracers are finding it hard to break through suspicion and apathy to convince people that compliance is crucial. Contact tracing -- tracking people who test positive and anyone they've come in contact with -- was challenging even when stay-at-home orders were in place.

To me, the San Francisco streets seemed deserted. To my self-driving car, they were full of hazards. In mid-March, just as the coronavirus outbreak started to change the world as we knew it, I took a ride in an autonomous vehicle through the narrow and winding, topsy-turvy streets of downtown San Francisco -- from the hairpin turns of Lombard Street to the steep hills surrounding Coit Tower and the famed Embarcadero waterfront. Even with tens of thousands of workers staying put as the first work-from-home orders hit, in the back of a Toyota Highlander piloted by autonomous vehicle start-up Zoox, I started to become hyper-aware of the circus of hazards robocars encounter on a daily basis. There was a cyclist or skateboarder in the blind spot.

Perhaps "artificial" is too artificial of a word for the AI equation. Augmented intelligence describes the essence of the technology in a more elegant and accurate way. AI has been around for some time, and Dr. David Bray, executive director of the People-Centered Internet, sees the current "third wave" of AI as a convergence of neural networks, deep learning, pattern matching, Internet of Things, and scaling tasks beyond human limitations. AI's power and potential arises from pairing humans and machines, so that "the human is learning from the machine and, at the same time, the machine is learning from the human. Bray explored the possibilities of augmented intelligence in with a recent CXOTalk interview, where he was joined by Fred Laluyaux, CEO and President of Aera Technology. The discussion was hosted by Michael Krigsman, founder of CXOTalk and well-known industry commentator. Are organizations ready to embrace the power of augmented intelligence? Business leaders or C-level executives "intuitively know that the way they organize and the way decisions are being made in their organization is not sufficient anymore," he explains. "The way decisions are made has not really fundamentally evolved.

Of the dizzying number of technology options for bankers to consider, robotic process automation should be simpler than, say, artificial intelligence to implement and easier to prove return on investment. Banks are dealing with compartmentalized systems and too many software applications -- a reality that will not change anytime soon -- and RPA can put time-consuming manual tasks on autopilot. The technology is especially useful in merger integrations and in streamlining internal operations.

Secure is a weekly column that dives into the rapidly escalating topic of cybersecurity. Regardless of how much money is poured into increasing cybersecurity, the situation doesn't seem to improve. Could machine learning that adapts to new methods be the solution? For some companies, such machine learning techniques go hand in hand with more traditional signature based detection and others employ behavioral learning to watch out for other, unspecified threats. For threat prevention company Cylance, however, machine learning is all it needs to offer what it claims is the most effective anti-malware solution available today.

"Today, AI augments what we do, but in the future you'll see decisions made by (AI) entities," said Bernt Wahl, executive director of the Brain Machine Consortium. Wahl argues a logical progression of technological advances will result in smarter, more proactive AI systems. "With the web we created all these search engines and collected all this information," said Wahl, adding that systems like IBM's Watson now help determine whether all that information being collected is accurate. "In the future we'll have a'wisdom engine' that can take the knowledge we know is accurate and make decisions based on that,' he said. Jack Berkowitz, vice president of products and data science for Oracle's Adaptive Intelligence effort said AI has proven useful in helping companies filter the massive amounts of new data they're accumulating. "We call our program adaptive intelligence because it's about learning and adaptation and keeping pace," said Berkowitz. "Companies that try to keep up using the kind of rules-based systems we've had for years won't be able to.