http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/471913/Game-changing-Insect-drone-spy-ISIS-90-days-straight

ISIS beware: Game changer 'insect' drone allows MoD to spy on ISIS - for 90 days straightA DRONE that looks like a giant daddy longlegs could transform the war against Isis.

By Andy Gardner, Exclusive / Published 26th October 2015

NC

GAME CHANGER: The new drone will be able to spy on ISIS for 90 days

The Zephyr UAV will eventually stay airborne for 90 days.

It has been described as a potential “game changer” in the battle against extremists in Iraq and Syria.

Makers of The Zephyr, Airbus, claim it “endures like a satellite, focuses like an aircraft and is cheaper than both of them”.

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http://www.technologyreview.com/news/542741/inhabit-this-teddy-bears-body-using-virtual-reality/

Inhabit This Teddy Bear’s Body Using Virtual RealityJapanese startup Adawarp thinks teleporting inside the body of a robotic stuffed animal could be a good way to keep in touch with loved ones.

By Signe Brewster on October 26, 2015

Why It MattersNew ways of communicating via computers are frequently widely adopted.

You take control of this bear by donning a virtual reality headset to see through its eyes and control its head.

Companies inventing things to do with virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift, which launches next year, mostly use them to transport you into imaginary worlds. Tatsuki Adaniya has a different idea—teleporting you into the body of a robotic teddy bear.

Adaniya has built software that lets you strap on an Oculus Rift headset and peer out through the bear’s eyes. You can talk to people near the bear through its speaker and hear them through its microphone, allowing for a two-way conversation with you in the role of a stuffed animal.

When you turn your head, so does the bear, thanks to a movement-recording sensor attached to the headset’s strap. An Xbox controller can be used to move the bear’s arms. “We’re broadcasting human body language,” Adaniya says.

Adaniya thinks children and some adults will be interested in taking on the persona of a stuffed animal—such as a bear, cat, or dog—for fun, or as an unusual way to stay in touch with distant friends or relatives. His company, Adawarp , just went through a startup incubator focused on virtual reality companies called

River, which invests at least $200,000 in each company in its program. Adaniya’s project began after he broke up with a long-distance girlfriend and thought about what could have helped them communicate.

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http://www.technologyreview.com/fromtheeditor/542291/the-flip-side-of-the-arab-spring/

The Flip Side of the Arab Spring

By Jason Pontin on October 20, 2015

Jason Pontin

Here are some English-language tweets from jihadis fighting for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS: “I just noticed our martyred brother r.a. had a tumblr (I know, how could I have missed it). Make sure to check it out.” And: “This Syrian guy next 2 me (AbuUbayadah) is so stoked for our op he almost shot his foot off. Come on bro—safety 1st. :p” And: “Put the chicken wings down n come to jihad bro.”

In “Fighting ISIS Online,” MIT Technology Review’s senior writer, David Talbot, describes what a Google policy director has called the “viral moment on social media” that ISIS is enjoying. Talbot reviews the early and small-scale counter-efforts designed to “make one-on-one contact online with the people absorbing content from ISIS and other extremist groups and becoming radicalized.”

He writes of a “decentralized” social-media campaign by ISIS, supported by sympathizers in the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere, who repost ISIS’s gruesome videos or produce videos in their own languages that inflame local tribal and national grievances in an effort to join their regions to the self-declared caliphate. The reason we care about ISIS’s social-media campaign is that it has been an animating force in recruiting about 25,000 people to fight in Syria and Iraq, at least 4,500 of them from Europe and North America. Social media helped create an army that established a new state.

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http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2015/10/192386-rise-of-concerns-about-ai/fulltext#R3

Rise of Concerns about AI: Reflections and Directions

By Thomas G. Dietterich, Eric J. Horvitz Communications of the ACM, Vol. 58 No. 10, Pages 38-4010.1145/2770869

Discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) have jumped into the public eye over the past year, with several luminaries speaking about the threat of AI to the future of humanity. Over the last several decades, AI—automated perception, learning, reasoning, and decision making—has become commonplace in our lives. We plan trips using GPS systems that rely on the A* algorithm to optimize the route. Our smartphones understand our speech, and Siri, Cortana, and Google Now are getting better at understanding our intentions. Machine vision detects faces as we take pictures with our phones and recognizes the faces of individual people when we post those pictures to Facebook Internet search engines rely on a fabric of AI subsystems. On any day, AI provides hundreds of millions of people with search results, traffic predictions, and recommendations about books and movies. AI translates among languages in real time and speeds up the operation of our laptops by guessing what we will do next. Several companies are working on cars that can drive themselves—either with partial human oversight or entirely autonomously. Beyond the influences in our daily lives, AI techniques are playing roles in science and medicine. AI is already at work in some hospitals helping physicians understand which patients are at highest risk for complications, and AI algorithms are finding important needles in massive data haystacks, such as identifying rare but devastating side effects of medications.

The AI in our lives today provides a small glimpse of more profound contributions to come. For example, the fielding of currently available technologies could save many thousands of lives, including those lost to accidents on our roadways and to errors made in medicine. Over the

longer-term, advances in machine intelligence will have deeply beneficial influences on healthcare, education, transportation, commerce, and the overall march of science. Beyond the creation of new applications and services, the pursuit of insights about the computational foundations of intelligence promises to reveal new principles about cognition that can help provide answers to longstanding questions in neurobiology, psychology, and philosophy.

On the research front, we have been making slow, yet steady progress on "wedges" of intelligence, including work in machine learning, speech recognition, language understanding, computer vision, search, optimization, and planning. However, we have made surprisingly little progress to date on building the kinds of general intelligence that experts and the lay public envision when they think about "Artificial Intelligence." Nonetheless, advances in AI—and the prospect of new AI-based autonomous systems—have stimulated thinking about the potential risks associated with AI.

A number of prominent people, mostly from outside of computer science, have shared their concerns that AI systems could threaten the survival of humanity.1 Some have raised concerns that machines will become superintelligent and thus be difficult to control. Several of these speculations envision an "intelligence chain reaction," in which an AI system is charged with the task of recursively designing progressively more intelligent versions of itself and this produces an "intelligence explosion."4 While formal work has not been undertaken to deeply explore this possibility, such a process runs counter to our current understandings of the limitations that computational complexity places on algorithms for learning and reasoning. However, processes of self-design and optimization might still lead to significant jumps in competencies.

Other scenarios can be imagined in which an autonomous computer system is given access to potentially dangerous resources (for example, devices capable of synthesizing billons of biologically active molecules, major portions of world financial markets, large weapons systems, or generalized task markets9). The reliance on any computing systems for control in these areas is fraught with risk, but an autonomous system operating without careful human oversight and failsafe mechanisms could be especially dangerous. Such a system would not need to be particularly intelligent to pose risks.

The AI in our lives today provides a small glimpse of more profound contributions to come.

We believe computer scientists must continue to investigate and address concerns about the possibilities of the loss of control of machine intelligence via any pathway, even if we judge the risks to be very small and far in the future. More importantly, we urge the computer science research community to focus intensively on a second class of near-term challenges for AI. These risks are becoming salient as our society comes to rely on autonomous or semiautonomous computer systems to make high-stakes decisions. In particular, we call out five classes of risk: bugs, cybersecurity, the "Sorcerer's Apprentice," shared autonomy, and socioeconomic impacts.

The first set of risks stems from programming errors in AI software. We are all familiar with errors in ordinary software; bugs frequently arise in the development and fielding of software applications and services. Some software errors have been linked to extremely costly outcomes and deaths. The verification of software systems is challenging and critical, and much progress has been made—some relying on AI advances in theorem proving. Many non-AI software systems have been developed and validated to achieve high degrees of quality assurance. For example, the software in autopilot and spacecraft systems is carefully tested and validated. Similar practices must be applied to AI systems. One technical challenge is to guarantee that systems built via machine learning methods behave properly. Another challenge is to ensure good behavior when an AI system encounters unforeseen situations. ** unexpected query ** Our automated vehicles, home robots, and intelligent cloud services must perform well even when they receive surprising or confusing inputs. Achieving such robustness may require self-monitoring architectures in which a meta-level process continually observes the actions of the system, checks that its behavior is consistent with the core intentions of the designer, and intervenes or alerts if problems are identified. Research on real-time verification and monitoring of systems is already exploring such layers of reflection, and these methods could be employed to ensure the safe operation of autonomous systems.3,6

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The Cloud Is Here, Separating Disrupters From DisruptedBy QUENTIN HARDY

Tech historians will look at Oct. 22, as a watershed. Cloud computing is no longer on the way, just a contender, or even a competitor to traditional enterprise technology companies. Instead, it is here, full force, and all the signs are that it is about to get a lot bigger, fast.

A few data points: When the stock market closed on Thursday, Amazon,Google and Microsoft— arguably the three largest cloud businesses — declared their quarterly earnings. One hour later, their collective market capitalization had grown by more than $100 billion because of their robust results, fueled partly by cloud growth. That $100 billion is 50 percent higher than the $67 billionDell plans to spend buying EMC/VMware, the biggest tech merger ever.

Digging in, Amazon had more operating income from Amazon Web Services, its business renting computing and software applications, than it did from combined sales of goods in the United States and internationally. At Microsoft, operating income from cloud and applications businesses were far better, as a percentage of sales, than the sector that includes the Windows operating system, long Microsoft’s crown jewel.

A year ago, Amazon Web Services sales grew 87 percent faster than Amazon’s North American retail business. AWS is still smaller than retail, but now it is growing 179 percent faster than sales of goods. Microsoft’s Office 365, a cloud-centric software application, started in June 2011 and has 18.2 million users; 16

percent of them, 3 million new users, showed up in the last three months. Google still makes most of its billions from advertising, but talked up its cloud prospects during its earnings call.

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GETTY

SPY: The 'insect' drone will be solar-powered

An early version has already stayed airborne for a record 14 days.

“An MoD funded research programme was recently completed with Airbus to demonstrate the technology underpinning the Zephyr programme”

A spokesman for the MoDOne Army source told us: “Currently, a C130 Hercules does some of the jobs that need doing.

"Others – like communications – may even need a satellite.

“Employing a satellite costs a huge amount and takes time to put into place.”

The current model has a wingspan of 28 meters and is covered in solar panels.

GETTY

DRONE: The Zephyr UAV will eventually stay airborne for 90 days

GETTY

NEW: The drone could change the war against ISIS

At night, stored energy powers its propellers.

The larger 90-day drone is due in 2017 but orders are on hold while the Government reviews defence spending.

A spokesman for the MoD said: “An MoD funded research programme was recently completed with Airbus to demonstrate the technology underpinning the Zephyr programme but no decisions have yet been made on which solution, or combination of solutions, the MoD may develop to meet its requirements.

“Discussions are ongoing with a number of companies to understand the options that may be available.”