Assad regime planned US journalist's kidnap for weeks, BBC finds US journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared in Syria in 2012, was kidnapped in a calculated operation which was more than a month in the planning, the BBC can reveal. A member of the group which detained Tice has also claimed the abduction was sanctioned by Syria's leader at the time, President Bashar al-Assad. Tice was seen getting into a car with a driver he knew and trusted. For years, many assumed they had stumbled upon a government checkpoint, and that the abduction of the journalist had been opportunistic. But we have uncovered evidence that, in fact, his disappearance was anything but chance.

On Thursday morning, NASA is scheduled to launch its new Mars rover, Perseverance, on a six-month journey to the Red Planet. The car-sized rover will be boosted into space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket departing from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It's the third and final Mars mission to depart Earth this summer; earlier in July, China and the United Arab Emirates also launched their first Martian explorers. Perseverance is essentially an alien-hunting self-driving car. It's primary mission is to find possible signs of ancient life hidden in the Martian soil and bottle them up so they can be returned to Earth by another robotic mission later this decade.

Chinese tech giant Tencent has published content produced by automated software called Dreamwriter for the past five years, with an emphasis on business and financial stories. An online platform run by a company called Shanghai Yingxun Technology Company reproduced Tencent's AI-generated financial report on its own website in 2018. While the defendant had already deleted the report from its own website, a fine of 1,500 yuan ($217) was still payable. Over recent years, AI has more and more invaded most sectors and the creative arts are no different. For example, Google has created an AI-powered tool called AutoDraw that identifies what someone is trying to draw, and then digitally recreates it.

For tasks such as medical diagnosis and knowledge base completion, a classifier may only have access to positive and unlabeled examples, where the unlabeled data consists of both positive and negative examples. One way that enables learning from this type of data is knowing the true class prior. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method for estimating the class prior, by estimating the probability that a positive example is selected to be labeled. Our key insight is that subdomains of the data give a lower bound on this probability. This lower bound gets closer to the real probability as the ratio of labeled examples increases. Finding such subsets can naturally be done via top-down decision tree induction. Experiments show that our method makes estimates which are equivalently accurate as those of the state of the art methods, and is an order of magnitude faster.

The rise of the machines continues this week with news that the Associated Press (AP) is expanding its baseball coverage through automated stories generated by algorithms. The New York-based nonprofit news agency has ramped up its partnership with Automated Insights, a Durham, Carolina-based company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze big data and transform it into stories. The AP has worked with Automated Insights for a number of years already. Indeed, more than 3,000 computer-generated corporate earnings reports have been created over the past couple of years based on data supplied by Zacks Investment Research, and the AP has used automation in sports reports too. The organization also participated in a 5.5 million funding round into Automated Insights back in 2014.

The rise of the machines continues this week with news that the Associated Press (AP) is expanding its baseball coverage through automated stories generated by algorithms. The New York-based nonprofit news agency has ramped up its partnership with Automated Insights, a Durham, Carolina-based company that uses artificial intelligence to analyze and transform big data into stories. The AP has worked with Automated Insights for a number of years already, with more than 3,000 computer-generated corporate earnings reports created over the past couple of years based on data supplied by Zacks Investment Research, and it has used automation in sports reports too. The AP also participated in a 5.5 million funding round into Automated Insights back in 2014. Automated Insights offers its Wordsmith A.I. platform to a number of big-name media companies, including Yahoo, and to the casual observer it may be difficult to know that a report wasn't written by a human.