A USC sociology, history or dance major may not be attuned to the discipline of quantum computing, but the university's soon to open School of Advanced Computing will open its doors to all -- as well as dramatically expand the number of degrees it confers in technology-related fields, officials announced Thursday. The new University of Southern California school comes at time when jobs for computer and information research scientists are in high demand and fast-growing, projecting to increase 21% from 2021 to 2031, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. A major component of the school will be dedicated to teaching data science and information technology to non-computer majors -- an offering that officials say will allow all students to develop their understanding of elements that shape the digital world, such as coding. "We want to develop a digital backbone across USC that touches every student and every graduate," said Ishwar Puri, senior vice president of research and innovation. "So when they go out into the world, they understand what computing is."

A Ukraine official has accused Iran of responsibility for the "murders of Ukrainians" after Russia attacked cities with what Kyiv called "kamikaze drones" made in the Islamic Republic and allegedly sold to Moscow. Ukraine has reported a barrage of Russian air attacks using Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones in recent weeks. Iran denies supplying the drones to Russia, while the Kremlin has not commented. Last month President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the accreditation of the Iranian ambassador was revoked as a result of Russian forces using Iranian drones to attack Ukraine. "Iran is responsible for the murders of Ukrainians," Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak wrote on Twitter on Monday.

A new wave of deadly Russian air strikes on Ukraine has killed more than 25 people and wounded over 100, according to authorities in Kyiv, in the most extensive attacks since the early days of the war. The current strikes, which began on October 10, have targeted at least 10 regions across the country and have been carried out using Russian missiles as well as Iranian-made drones, Ukrainian authorities have said. Swarms of explosive-laden, unmanned aircraft called "kamikaze" drones targeted Kyiv on Monday, killing at least four people and targeting energy facilities. Among the victims was a young couple expecting a baby in three months, according to the mayor of Kyiv. The Ukrainian Air Force said it destroyed at least 37 drones in one day.

Imagine a world where the decision of whether you will get the mortgage for your first house will be determined according to how often you talk to your mother or what route you take to get to work? It seems a far-fetched idea, but, to some extent, it is already happening. Dr Manju Puri, Professor of Finance at Duke University, acknowledged that banks could use a person's phone usage data to decide whether that person will get a loan. According to Dr Puri, people who call their mother every day or choose the same route to work are less likely to default. "We know what's statistically correct to do and what's morally correct to do are often two different things," Aidan Connolly, CEO of Idiro Analytics, has acknowledged.

AI and machine learning systems have become increasingly competent in recent years, capable of not just understanding the written word but writing it as well. But while these artificial intelligences have nearly mastered the English language, they have yet to become fluent in the language of computers -- that is, until now. IBM announced during its Think 2021 conference on Monday that its researchers have crafted a Rosetta Stone for programming code. Over the past decade, advancements in AI have mainly been "driven by deep neural networks, and even that, it was driven by three major factors: data with the availability of large data sets for training, innovations in new algorithms, and the massive acceleration of faster and faster compute hardware driven by GPUs," Ruchir Puri, IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist at IBM Research, said during his Think 2021 presentation, likening the new data set to the venerated ImageNet, which has spawned the recent computer vision land rush. "Software is eating the world," Marc Andreessen wrote in 2011.

In 2009, her school district introduced an algorithmic method to measure teacher performance, with the plan of terminating the bottom 2% of the district's staff. By 2011, Wysocki had gotten the boot. Because the computer had identified her a bad teacher, despite the raves of parents and administrators. The district's algorithm was based on year-over-year improvements on standardized test scores, and teachers knew this. What became largely apparent was that some teachers, anxious not to be in that bottom 2%, had cheated to inflate scores on their students' behalf.

IBM today announced that it is freeing its Watson-branded AI services -- like the Watson Assistant for building conversational interfaces and Watson OpenScale for managing the AI life cycle -- from its own cloud and allowing enterprises to take its platform and running it in their own data centers. In a way, you can think of this as Watson as a managed service. "Clients are really struggling with infusing AI into their applications because the data is distributed in multiple places," IBM Watson's CTO and chief architects Ruchir Puri told me when I asked him for IBM's reasoning behind this move. "It's in these hybrid environments, they've got multiple cloud implementations, they have data in their private cloud as well. They have been struggling because the providers of AI have been trying to lock them into a particular implementation that is not suitable to this hybrid cloud environment."

Ruchir Puri is an IBM Fellow and the Chief Architect of IBM Watson. Dr. Puri led Deep Learning and Machine Learning Platform Initiative at IBM Research and also led IBM's efforts in software-hardware acceleration for cognitive and analytic workloads and drove strategy for differentiated cognitive computing infrastructure. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, an ACM Distinguished Speaker, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, and was awarded 2014 Asian American Engineer of the Year. Ruchir has been a visiting faculty at Dept. of Computer Science, Stanford Univ...

IBM wants to help companies mitigate the chances that their artificial intelligence technologies unintentionally discriminate against certain groups like women and minorities. The technology giant's tool, announced on Wednesday, can inspect AI-powered software for unintentional bias when it makes decisions, like when a loan might be denied to a particular person, explained Ruchir Puri, the chief technology officer and chief architect of IBM Watson. The technology industry is increasingly combating the problem of bias in machine learning systems, used to power software that can automatically recognize images in pictures or translate languages. A number of companies have suffered a public relations black eye when their technologies failed to work as well for minority groups as for white users. For instance, researchers discovered that Microsoft and IBM's facial-recognition technology could more accurately identify the faces of lighter-skin males than darker-skin females.

Bias is a big problem in facial recognition, with studies showing that commercial systems are more accurate if you're white and male. Part of the reason for this is a lack of diversity in the training data, with people of color appearing less frequently than their peers. IBM is one of the companies trying to combat this problem, and today announced two new public datasets that anyone can use to train facial recognition systems -- one of which has been curated specifically to help remove bias. The first dataset contains 1 million images and will help train systems that can spot specific attributes, like hair color, eye color, and facial hair. Each face is annotated with these characteristics, making it easier for programmers to hone their systems to better distinguish between, say, a goatee and a soul patch.