Apple is undergoing a rare shake-up of its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles, according to people familiar with the situation. CEO Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giannandrea to execute on product development, so he's moving over another top executive to help: Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. In a new role, Rockwell will be in charge of the Siri virtual assistant, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the moves haven't been announced. Rockwell will report to software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giannandrea's command. Apple is poised to announce the changes to employees this week.

Midjourney's founder, David Holz, says it's banning these words as a stopgap measure to prevent people from generating shocking or gory content while the company "improves things on the AI side." Holz says moderators watch how words are being used and what kinds of images are being generated, and adjust the bans periodically. The firm has a community guidelines page that lists the type of content it blocks in this way, including sexual imagery, gore, and even the emoji, which is often used as a symbol for the buttocks. AI models such as Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Stable Diffusion are trained on billions of images that have been scraped from the internet. Research by a team at the University of Washington has found that such models learn biases that sexually objectify women, which are then reflected in the images they produce.

Rockwell Automation, the world's largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CUBIC, a company that specializes in modular systems for the construction of electrical panels. CUBIC, founded in 1973, serves fast-growing industries, such as renewable energy, data centers, and infrastructure, and is headquartered in Bronderslev, Denmark. CUBIC's efficient and flexible modular systems combined with Rockwell's intelligent devices and industry expertise will benefit customers by offering faster time to market, enabling broader plant-wide applications for intelligent motor control, and generating smart data to increase sustainability and productivity. CUBIC's established partner model will allow Rockwell to build an expanded Partner Network for intelligent motor control offerings in Asia, Europe, and Latin America. The company will bring new customers and partners in hybrid and process industries.

If America has stood for anything, it's surely forward-looking optimism. In New York, Chicago, Detroit and other shining cities, its soaring skyscrapers pointed to the future. But has the bubble burst in the 21st century? "We don't see ourselves striding toward a better tomorrow," columnist Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times last month, citing research that found 71% of Americans believe that this country is on the wrong track. "We see ourselves tiptoeing around catastrophe. That was true even before Covid. That was true even before Trump."

All the sessions from Transform 2021 are available on-demand now. Thanks to AI advancements and applications, edge computing is already seeing widespread interest from industries ranging from manufacturing to healthcare and retail. Leveraging the growing power and ubiquity of CPUs and neural processing units, edge AI can process growing haystacks of data right where they're being created, finding their needles quickly for local or remote processing. Edge AI is an enabler for early networked autonomous cars -- instantly recognizing and sharing details on accidents, weather conditions, and traffic from vehicle sensors and smart infrastructures in real-time. Similarly, edge AI has empowered wearables to actively monitor seniors for chronic health conditions, alerting remote caregivers within seconds of detecting abnormalities in their biometric data. It's clear that edge AI has the ability to open up a whole new world of insights and opportunities across multiple industries, but connecting the distributed data processors to usefully aggregate their discoveries is a higher-level task.

In the remote work environment spawned by the COVID-19 pandemic, more flexible, quicker methods of getting systems the authority to securely operate is more critical than ever, said a top IT advisor at the Department of Health and Human Services. "Machine learning is critical in terms of fighting fire with fire. You're going to lose that battle" with hackers, said Oki Mek, senior advisor to the agency's CIO and its ReImagine project. HHS is one of the agencies at the center of the federal government's response to the COVID pandemic. The agency is "getting hit hard" by hackers attempting to penetrate its networks, said Mek.

New research at the University of Michigan can train neural network models to identify a person's position in videos where only a portion of their body is visible in the shot. This breakthrough opens up a huge library of video content to a new use--teaching machines the meaning behind people's poses, as well as the different ways they interact with their environment. When we see a picture of a pair of hands typing at a desk, we can infer there's a person attached to those somewhere out of sight. Depending on the angle of their wrists and how tall the desk is, we might even be able to tell whether they're sitting or standing. These are the kinds of inferences neural network models haven't been great at to this point.

Federal data analytics and automation efforts are still getting organized around a larger new paradigm, Gil Alterovitz, director of artificial intelligence at the Department of Veterans Affairs, said at ATARC's Oct. 24 Federal Artificial Intelligence And Data Analytics Summit. The VA is testing a number of artificial intelligence-driven projects to help patients, including programs to reduce waiting times at its facilities, predict potential suicides and monitor customer service. Todd Myers, automation lead at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said the government should look to companies like Uber and Amazon for models of how to use data to advance their missions. "These companies are successful, and the government will be successful when we break down the organizational silos" of units that may working on their own data analytics and data sets, he said. "The days of separate business units and organizations going off and doing their own thing, I think are long gone. I think the federal government is leaning hard and fast in changing that approach," Myers said.

Cybersecurity is increasingly supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, but humans are still required to interpret the data, federal agency data officers said at a recent AFCEA Bethesda panel. The amount of data generated by AI and machine learning cybersecurity tools is staggering, panelists said. Those automated tools that are tackling repetitive monitoring work are producing bytes by the trillion. Even at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, "we're bringing in terabytes of log data per day, and we're not a particularly large agency," said Adrian Monza, USCIS deputy chief information security officer and chief security architect. "You have to have data scientists" to make sense of it, he added.

If you had to program a self-driving car, which option would you choose if only two were available: hit a pedestrian who suddenly appears in front of the vehicle or veer off into a baby carriage on the sidewalk? It's the kind of ethical conundrum that could shape artificial intelligence in years to come, and one of many the University of Alberta's Geoffrey Rockwell has been pondering lately. Earlier this month, the professor of philosophy and digital humanities joined a national brainstorming forum on the ethics of AI in Montreal, along with industry leaders, federal government officials and other academics, including philosophers. They gathered to grapple with an industry currently worth US$7.4 billion, according to figures circulated at the forum, and expected to reach almost US$16 trillion by 2065--amounting to a seismic shift in how we live and work. The forum followed the signing last June of the Canada-France Statement on Artificial Intelligence, meant to jump-start an international coalition charged with exploring the societal implications of a technology that promises to soon be as ubiquitous as the internet, only with the power to potentially make life-and-death decisions on our behalf.