DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced Charles Wall as ICE's new deputy director, replacing Madison Sheahan who stepped down to pursue a congressional run in Ohio.

When OpenAI released its AI video-generation app, Sora, in September, it promised that "you are in control of your likeness end-to-end." The app allows users to include themselves and their friends in videos through a feature called "cameos"--the app scans a user's face and performs a liveness check, providing data to generate a video of the user and to authenticate their consent for friends to use their likeness on the app. But Reality Defender, a company specializing in identifying deepfakes, says it was able to bypass Sora's anti-impersonation safeguards within 24 hours. Platforms such as Sora give a "plausible sense of security," says Reality Defender CEO Ben Colman, despite the fact that "anybody can use completely off-the-shelf tools" to pass authentication as someone else. Reality Defender's researchers used publicly available footage of notable individuals, including CEOs and entertainers, from earnings calls and media interviews.

Last year, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced that the US needed a bill of rights for the age of algorithms. Harms from artificial intelligence disproportionately impact marginalized communities, the office's director and deputy director wrote in a WIRED op-ed, and so government guidance was needed to protect people against discriminatory or ineffective AI. Today, the OSTP released the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, after gathering input from companies like Microsoft and Palantir as well as AI auditing startups, human rights groups, and the general public. Its five principles state that people have a right to control how their data is used, to opt out of automated decision-making, to live free from ineffective or unsafe algorithms, to know when AI is making a decision about them, and to not be discriminated against by unfair algorithms. "Technologies will come and go, but foundational liberties, rights, opportunities, and access need to be held open, and it's the government's job to help ensure that's the case," Alondra Nelson, OSTP deputy director for science and society, told WIRED.

The Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) launched the akaBot platform – corporate process automation – in Hanoi, earlier this week. A press release said that the technology, akaBot is the FPT's third make-in-Vietnam platform. It is among 33 other platforms selected by MIC to introduce and sponsor media in the "Friday of Technology" programme, to serve the National Digital Transformation Programme to 2025, with the vision to 2030, which was approved by the Prime Minister in June. According to the development team, akaBot is a robotic process automation (RPA) solution for businesses with "virtual assistants" capable of simulating human manipulation, helping perform repetitive tasks in large numbers. With the core technology of RPA, akaBot is capable of integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition (OCR) technology to build comprehensive, non-invasive intelligent automation solutions, which can interact with all business software such as Word and Excel.

Did you know Mariarosaria Taddeo, the Deputy Director of the Oxford Internet Institute's Digital Ethics Lab, is speaking at TNW2020 this year? Check out her session on'Shaping the future of AI: International policy outlook' here. Artificial intelligence is increasingly affecting our everyday lives. The field has the potential to make the world a healthier, wealthier, and more efficient place. But it also poses vast safety and security risks.

In February, the outreach director for an organization called Communities Against Rider Surveillance wrote to Evan Greer. CARS wanted to know if Fight for the Future, a nonprofit digital-rights advocacy group where Greer is the deputy director, would join, and allow itself to be listed as a member of the newly formed coalition. "CARS is a new coalition working to raise awareness of a dangerous technology called Mobility Data Specification," the email from outreach director Rich Dunn read. "In the wrong hands, the information collected by MDS poses grave privacy and safety risks." MDS is a technical specification created by Los Angeles' Department of Transportation, now managed by a third-party foundation.

The Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) Predictive Maintenance mission initiative (PMx) is partnering with the military services to help improve the availability of military aircraft, specifically the UH/HH-60 "Black Hawk" helicopter, using artificial intelligence (AI) to minimize downtime due to unscheduled maintenance. The goal of the initiative is to develop AI-enabled solutions that increase operational readiness, create more efficient maintenance practices, and minimize costs. Together with the help of maintenance stakeholders across the Department of Defense (DoD), the PMx team is examining AI-driven diagnostics, training opportunities, process improvements, demand forecasting, and supply chain optimization solutions that can help the department accelerate AI-enabled predictive maintenance at-scale. As the Deputy Director for the JAIC's PMx mission initiative, Major Robinson plans, coordinates, and synchronizes projects and the development of predictive maintenance AI models. As part of this work, the JAIC is currently engaged in partnerships with the U.S. Army Aviation and Missle Command (AMCOM), U.S. Special Operations Command – 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), the Army H-60 Utility Program Offices, the Army AI Task Force, the Army Future Vertical Lift Cross-Functional Team, and aircraft maintenance offices from the U.S. Air Force.

For government to earn the trust of the American people, it needs to do a better job of meeting their needs. As such, it is essential that agencies empower the civil servants responsible for improving program performance. However, a new Bipartisan Policy Center report finds that the individuals charged with that task are also the same people responsible for overseeing compliance with laws, rules, and regulations. This "double duty" limits the time staff have for work essential to improving mission performance. To address this, the BPC task force report, "Oversight Matters: Balancing Mission, Risk, and Compliance," recommends devoting more resources to better target oversight efforts by employing a risk-based framework aimed at improving performance.

British Airways has been self-boarding passengers at Heathrow for some time. Facial recognition is said to speed up the airport experience. Airlines and airports say they take customer privacy seriously. Airlines insist it's easy to opt out of biometric boarding. Some groups are concerned about the privacy implications.

An unsupervised machine learning study presented at the 2019 meeting of Association for Computational Linguistics--which examined 3.5M books published between 1900 and 2008--indicates that men are described based on their behavior, where women are described based on appearance. In specific, words like "beautiful" and "sexy" are two of the adjectives most frequently used to describe women, while common descriptors for men were "brave," "rational," and "righteous." The books, which amounted to approximately 11B words in sum, included a mix of fiction and non-fiction. "We are clearly able to see that the words used for women refer much more to their appearances than the words used to describe men," said University of Copenhagen computer scientist and assistant professor Isabelle Augenstein in a statement. "Thus, we have been able to confirm a widespread perception, only now at a statistical level."