The Justice Department will soon start trying to jam cellphones smuggled into federal prisons and used for criminal activity, part of a broader safety initiative that is also focused on preventing drones from airdropping contraband to inmates. Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein told the American Correctional Association's conference in Orlando on Monday that, while the law prohibits cellphone use by federal inmates, the Bureau of Prisons confiscated 5,116 such phones in 2016, and preliminary numbers for 2017 indicate a 28 percent increase. "That is a major safety issue," he said in his speech. "Cellphones are used to run criminal enterprises, facilitate the commission of violent crimes and thwart law enforcement." When he was the U.S. attorney in Maryland, Rosenstein prosecuted an inmate who used a smuggled cellphone to order the murder of a witness.

From an AI perspective, finding effective treatments for cancer is a high-dimensional search problem characterized by many molecularly distinct cancer subtypes, many potential targets and drug combinations, and a dearth of highquality data to connect molecular subtypes and treatments to responses. The broadening availability of molecular diagnostics and electronic medical records presents both opportunities and challenges to apply AI techniques to personalize and improve cancer treatment. We discuss these in the context of Cancer Commons, a "rapid learning" community where patients, physicians, and researchers collect and analyze the molecular and clinical data from every cancer patient and use these results to individualize therapies. Research opportunities include adaptively planning and executing individual treatment experiments across the whole patient population, inferring the causal mechanisms of tumors, predicting drug response in individuals, and generalizing these findings to new cases. The goal is to treat each patient in accord with the best available knowledge and to continually update that knowledge to benefit subsequent patients.

Currently in the United States, it is estimated to infect 3 to 5 million persons, is the leading cause of death in adults from 14 to 35, and is the nation's leading cause of productive years of life lost aggregated over all age groups. HIV is estimated to infect 40 to 50 million persons worldwide (CDC 1997). The high rate of HIV viral mutation both makes development of a vaccine difficult and results in rapid positive selection for drug-resistant mutant strains. Recent multidrug combination therapies are encouraging but in most cases ultimately fail because of the development of drug resistance (O'Brian et al. 1996). A general theory of HIV drug resistance still is not in hand, but a number of specific sequence mutations in the HIV genome have been described in the scientific literature and associated with increased resistance to certain drugs.