A prestigious portrait competition has defended allowing entrants to submit artwork generated by artificial intelligence, arguing art is not stagnant and should reflect societal change. The Brisbane Portrait Prize – with a top prize worth 50,0000 – has been described as Queensland's answer to the Archibalds with selected entries displayed at the Brisbane Powerhouse later in the year. In the terms and conditions of entry, the Brisbane Portrait Prize notes this year that it will accept entries "completed in whole or in part by generative artificial intelligence" so long as the artwork is original and "entirely completed and owned outright" by the entrant. A spokesperson for the prize told Guardian Australia that allowing AI entries acknowledged the definition of art was not stagnant and would always grow. "BPP prides itself on being a contemporary prize and we are always interested in what'contemporary' portraiture is while fostering both the ongoing evolution of art and engaging in the surrounding conversation," they said.

Phase transitions, characterized by abrupt shifts between macroscopic patterns of organization, are ubiquitous in complex systems. Despite considerable research in the physical and natural sciences, the empirical study of this phenomenon in societal systems is relatively underdeveloped. The goal of this study is to explore whether the dynamics of collective civil unrest can be plausibly characterized as a sequence of recurrent phase shifts, with each phase having measurable and identifiable latent characteristics. Building on previous efforts to characterize civil unrest as a self-organized critical system, we introduce a macro-level statistical model of civil unrest and evaluate its plausibility using a comprehensive dataset of civil unrest events in 170 countries from 1946 to 2017. Our findings demonstrate that the macro-level phase model effectively captures the characteristics of civil unrest data from diverse countries globally and that universal mechanisms may underlie certain aspects of the dynamics of civil unrest. We also introduce a scale to quantify a country's long-term unrest per unit of time and show that civil unrest events tend to cluster geographically, with the magnitude of civil unrest concentrated in specific regions. Our approach has the potential to identify and measure phase transitions in various collective human phenomena beyond civil unrest, contributing to a better understanding of complex social systems.

FOX News contributor Dr. Rebecca Grant tells'FOX News Live' that she believes tensions in the Middle East can be contained to just Israel. The State Department on Sunday updated its travel advisory for Iraq to include the ordered departure of all non-emergency U.S. government personnel and eligible family members. Americans are warned "do not travel to Iraq due to terrorism, kidnapping, armed conflict, civil unrest, and Mission Iraq's limited capacity to provide support to U.S. citizens." On Oct. 20, the State Department already ordered the departure of eligible family members and non-emergency U.S. government personnel from U.S. Embassy Baghdad and U.S. Consulate General Erbil "due to increased security threats against U.S. government personnel and interests." In recent days, Iran-backed militias attacked United States military bases in Iraq.

According to Peter K. Manning, in Anglo-American societies, the purpose of the police is to "sustain politically defined order and ordering via tracking, surveillance, coercion and arrest" (2014: p.6). Consisting of several authoritatively coordinated and legitimate organizations (ibid.), the policing sector serves governments in protecting their communities, preventing crime and disorder, and ensuring justice (The Policy Circle, 2022). The police's position as acting in the communities' interest suggests that their functions are heavily dependent on public trust and societal consensus concerning social justice and fairness (Manning, 2014). While there are large numbers of police officers employed in Australia (67,200 in 2021), a number which is expected to increase in the future (Australian Industry and Skills Committee, 2022), Ransley & Mazerolle (2009) have argued that trends in public governance and regulation have caused the increased pluralization and privatisation of policing efforts. Nowadays, the policing sector thus constitutes a large network of private, public and welfare organizations geared at controlling and preventing crimes (ibid.). In this essay, I will thus focus on data science opportunities for a variety of stakeholders involved in ensuring public security and order.

There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. I can think of no better phrase to describe the current state of the field of artificial Intelligence. Like the Gutenberg Press, electricity, the motor car and computing itself, artificial intelligence is an idea whose time has come. Academia, industry and government have already glimpsed its potential, and they are hungry for more. It might seem like I'm stating the obvious, but there are still those who think or hope that we can put the genie back in the bottle -- that we can legislate our way out of this conundrum -- so I wish to make clear my position right from the start: It's not a question of if, it's a question of when.

Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese In this episode, Byron and David discuss AI, jobs, and human productivity. Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, I'm Byron Reese. Today our guest is David Barrett. He is both the founder and the CEO of Expensify. He started programming when he was 6 and has been at it as his primary activity ever since, except for a brief hiatus for world travel, some technical writing, a little project management, and then founding and running Expensify. Welcome to the show, David. David Barrett: It's great of you to have me, thank you. Let's talk about artificial intelligence, what do you think it is? How would you define it? I guess I would say that AI is best defined as a feature, not as a technology. It's the experience that the user has and sort of the experience of viewing of something as being intelligent, and how it's actually implemented behind the scenes. I think people spend way too much time and energy on [it], and forget sort of about the experience that the person actually has with it. So you're saying, if you interact with something and it seems intelligent, then that's artificial intelligence? That's sort of the whole basis of the Turing test, I think, is not based upon what is behind the curtain but rather what's experienced in front of the curtain. Okay, let me ask a different question then– and I'm not going to drag you through a bunch of semantics. But what is intelligence, then? I'll start out by saying it's a term that does not have a consensus definition, so it's kind of like you can't be wrong, no matter what you say. Yeah, I think the best one I've heard is something that sort of surprises you.

Civil unrest events (protests, strikes, and “occupy” events) are common occurrences in both democracies and authoritarian regimes. The study of civil unrest is a key topic for political scientists as it helps capture an important mechanism by which citizenry express themselves. In countries where civil unrest is lawful, qualitative analysis has revealed that more than 75 percent of the protests are planned, organized, or announced in advance; therefore detecting references to future planned events in relevant news and social media is a direct way to develop a protest forecasting system. We report on a system for doing that in this article. It uses a combination of keyphrase learning to identify what to look for, probabilistic soft logic to reason about location occurrences in extracted results, and time normalization to resolve future time mentions. We illustrate the application of our system to 10 countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Results demonstrate our successes in capturing significant societal unrest in these countries with an average lead time of 4.08 days. We also study the selective superiorities of news media versus social media (Twitter, Facebook) to identify relevant trade-offs.