Police seized ketamine hidden inside life-size Transformer robots in Thailand. A woman who was previously caught trying to ship meth hidden in a food processing machine was trying to send the robots to Taiwan. Thai prosecutors said Wednesday former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra will be indicted for defaming the monarchy, three months after he was freed on parole on other charges. Thaksin will not yet be indicted because he had filed a request to postpone his original appointment on Wednesday with proof that he has COVID-19, Prayuth Bejraguna, a spokesperson for the Office of the Attorney General, said at a news conference. The attorney general's office scheduled a new appointment for Thaksin's indictment on June 18, Prayuth said, adding that Thaksin will also be indicted for violating the Computer Crime Act.

This paper presents the proof-of-concept of the first automatic voice assistant ever built in Wolof language, the main vehicular language spoken in Senegal. This voicebot is the result of a collaborative research project between Orange Innovation in France, Orange Senegal (aka Sonatel) and ADNCorp, a small IT company based in Dakar, Senegal. The purpose of the voicebot is to provide information to Orange customers about the Sargal loyalty program of Orange Senegal by using the most natural mean to communicate: speech. The voicebot receives in input the customer's oral request that is then processed by a SLU system to reply to the customer's request using audio recordings. The first results of this proof-of-concept are encouraging as we achieved 22\% of WER for the ASR task and 78\% of F1-score on the NLU task.

Personality is considered one of the most influential research topics in psychology, as it predicts many consequential outcomes such as mental and physical health and explains human behaviour. With the widespread use of social networks as a means of communication, it is becoming increasingly important to develop models that can automatically and accurately read the essence of individuals based solely on their writing. In particular, the convergence of social and computer sciences has led researchers to develop automatic approaches for extracting and studying "hidden" information in textual data on the internet. The nature of this thesis project is highly experimental, and the motivation behind this work is to present detailed analyses on the topic, as currently there are no significant investigations of this kind. The objective is to identify an adequate semantic space that allows for defining the personality of the object to which a certain text refers. The starting point is a dictionary of adjectives that psychological literature defines as markers of the five major personality traits, or Big Five. In this work, we started with the implementation of fully-connected neural networks as a basis for understanding how simple deep learning models can provide information on hidden personality characteristics. Finally, we use a class of distributional algorithms invented in 2013 by Tomas Mikolov, which consists of using a convolutional neural network that learns the contexts of words in an unsupervised way. In this way, we construct an embedding that contains the semantic information on the text, obtaining a kind of "geometry of meaning" in which concepts are translated into linear relationships. With this last experiment, we hypothesize that an individual writing style is largely coupled with their personality traits.

It may sound like the plot of the 2002 movie Minority Report, but artificial intelligence can predict any arrest within three years of a prisoner being released on parole. The machine learning was designed to determine the risk of releasing a prisoner early by analyzing 91 variables, including age, race and previous arrests. Scientists from The University of California, Davis (UC Davis) used the data of more than 19,000 inmates scheduled with the New York State Parole Board from 2012 to 2015. Court documents show 4,168 individuals were released, but that AI determined the board could have released double the inmates without increasing the subsequent arrest rate. The film, set in 2054, is about a specialized police department that apprehends criminals using foreknowledge provided by three psychics called'precogs.'

In a car outside a convenience store in Flint, Michigan, in late 2016, Kemo Parks handed his cousin Dequavion Harris a gun. Things happened quickly after that: Witnesses saw Harris "with his arm up and extended" toward a red truck. The wounded driver sped off but crashed into a tree. EMTs rushed him to the hospital. He was dead on arrival.

Artificial intelligence thinkers seem to emerge from two communities. One is what I call blue-sky visionaries who speculate about the future possibilities of the technology, invoking utopian fantasies to generate excitement. Blue-sky ideas are compelling but are often clouded over by unrealistic visions and the ethical challenges of what can and should be built. In contrast, what I call muddy-boots pragmatists are problem- and solution-focused. They want to reduce the harms that widely used AI-infused systems can create.

One of the things that really annoys AI researchers is how supposedly "intelligent" machines are judged by much higher standards than are humans. Take self-driving cars, they say. So far they've driven millions of miles with very few accidents, a tiny number of them fatal. Yet whenever an autonomous vehicle kills someone there's a huge hoo-ha, while every year in the US nearly 40,000 people die in crashes involving conventional vehicles. Likewise, the AI evangelists complain, everybody and his dog (this columnist included) is up in arms about algorithmic bias: the way in which automated decision-making systems embody the racial, gender and other prejudices implicit in the data sets on which they were trained.

The Los Angeles Police Department embraced predictive policing in 2015, but it has taken until now for the department's assortment of once-shadowy data-based operations to be thoroughly vetted in public. In the end, that's the essential problem to be solved -- the lack of transparency and public accountability in deploying crime-targeting tools that could so easily be misused to oppress rather than protect neighborhoods already struggling with both crime and heavy-handed policing. It took years of work by activists to bring programs like LASER (a data-crunching operation that identifies crime hot spots) and PredPol (a software program that predicts property crimes) into the light of day, and they are to be commended; but they are off base in their demands that police scrap the tools entirely. Data, used properly, can enhance public safety. Police should be encouraged to use it, as long as they are open about what they are doing, and as long as they heed legitimate criticism and adjust their programs accordingly.

WASHINGTON – Twice rejected for U.S. visas, an all-girls robotics team from Afghanistan arrived in Washington early Saturday after an extraordinary, last-minute intervention by President Donald Trump. The six-girl team and their chaperone completed their journey just after midnight from their hometown of Herat, Afghanistan, to enter their ball-sorting robot in the three-day high school competition starting Sunday in the U.S. capital. Awaiting them at the gate at Washington Dulles International Airport were a U.S. special envoy and Afghan Ambassador Hamdullah Mohib, who described it as a rare moment of celebration for his beleaguered nation. "Seventeen years ago, this would not have been possible at all," Mohib said in an interview. "They represent our aspirations and resilience despite having been brought up in a perpetual conflict. These girls will be proving to the world and the nation that nothing will prevent us from being an equal and active member of the international community."

Members of a female robotics team from Herat province, leave Kabul to the U.S. from Kabul Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Friday, Jun 14, 2017. The third time's the charm for Afghanistan's all girl robotics team, who will be allowed entry into the U.S. to compete in a competition after President Donald Trump personally intervened to reverse a decision twice denying them enter into the country. Members of a female robotics team from Herat province, leave Kabul to the U.S. from Kabul Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Friday, Jun 14, 2017. The third time's the charm for Afghanistan's all girl robotics team, who will be allowed entry into the U.S. to compete in a competition after President Donald Trump personally intervened to reverse a decision twice denying them enter into the country. A members of a female robotics team from Herat province, shows her U.S. Visa as she leaves Kabul to the U.S. from Kabul Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Friday, Jun 14, 2017.