A manager hires a new employee, and offers to pay her $1,000 a day. She replies: "I'll do you one better. Why don't you pay me one penny on my first day, and double my pay every day from there until the month is over?" Sensing a bargain, the manager agrees. Such is the price of failing to respect exponential growth.

Tempus, a technology company advancing precision medicine through the practical application of artificial intelligence in healthcare, today announced that Dr. Scott Gottlieb, MD, has joined its Board of Directors. Dr. Gottlieb will serve as an advisor to Tempus and its leadership team, leveraging his vast experience as a medical policy expert and public health advocate to support Tempus as it harnesses the power and promise of big data and artificial intelligence to personalize patient care. Dr. Gottlieb most recently served as the 23rd Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), where he focused on developing innovative approaches to improving medical outcomes, reshaping healthcare delivery, and expanding patient choice and safety. Previously, he also served as the agency's Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs and as a Senior Advisor to the FDA Commissioner. During his time as a Senior Advisor to the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Dr. Gottlieb worked on the implementation of the Medicare drug benefit, where he supported policy work on quality improvement and the agency's coverage process, particularly as it related to new medical technologies.

Developing and commercializing artificial intelligence has proved an ethical mine field for companies like Google. The company has seen its algorithms accused of perpetuating race and gender bias and fueling efforts to build autonomous weapons. The search giant now hopes that a team of philosophers, engineers, and policy experts will help it navigate the moral hazards presented by artificial intelligence without press scandals, employee protests, or legal trouble. Kent Walker, Google's senior vice president for global affairs and chief legal officer, announced the creation of a new independent body to review the company's AI practices at EmTech Digital, an AI conference in San Francisco organized by MIT Technology Review. Walker said that the group, known as the Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), would review the company's projects and plans and produce reports to help determine if any of them contravene the company's own AI principles.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) helps countries implement the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), an agenda for tackling major societal issues such as poverty, hunger, and environmental degradation by the year 2030. A key service provided by UNDP to countries that seek it is a review of national development plans and sector strategies by policy experts to assess alignment of national targets with one or more of the 169 targets of the 17 SDGs. Known as the Rapid Integrated Assessment (RIA), this process involves manual review of hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of documents and takes weeks to complete. In this work, we develop a natural language processing-based methodology to accelerate the workflow of policy experts. Specifically we use paragraph embedding techniques to find paragraphs in the documents that match the semantic concepts of each of the SDG targets. One novel technical contribution of our work is in our use of historical RIAs from other countries as a form of neighborhood-based supervision for matches in the country under study. We have successfully piloted the algorithm to perform the RIA for Papua New Guinea’s national plan, with the UNDP estimating it will help reduce their completion time from an estimated 3-4 weeks to 3 days.

As cyber threats in the government become more complex and increase in number, it's critical that our defenses advance too. Some of those advances, such as automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning, may also mean a change in the skill sets required of cyber personnel. Although automation may strike fear in the hearts of some cyber professionals, the trend isn't just about replacing federal employees with computers. It's about leveraging software to do certain tasks for humans so they can focus on the tasks that computers can't perform, such as advanced analysis or other more technical cyber tasks. One thing is for certain: The role of the cyber professional is evolving.