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The Pentagon’s plan to bring A.I. to the military is taking shape as Chinese researchers assert themselves in the nascent technology field. And that shift is reflected in surprising commercial advances in artificial intelligence among Chinese companies.


Robert O. Work, the veteran defense official retained as deputy secretary by President Trump, calls them his “A.I. dudes.” The breezy moniker belies their serious task: The dudes have been a kitchen cabinet of sorts, and have advised Mr. Work as he has sought to reshape warfare by bringing artificial intelligence to the battlefield.

Last spring, he asked, “O.K., you guys are the smartest guys in A.I., right?”

No, the dudes told him, “the smartest guys are at Facebook and Google,” Mr. Work recalled in an interview.

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Nice new algorithm for humanoid systems.


A person dissipates various kind of emotion during the daily conversation. The expression actually depends on the statement of the narrator but, sometimes it is very difficult to perceive someone’s sentiment behind the speech. To unveil the emotion behind someone’s speech, scientists created an artificial intelligence algorithm.

A research team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s(MIT) from Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) built a wearable app that is programmed with the algorithm. It could be a perfect alternative of polygraph because polygraphs are not really reliable because it has a lot of errors. Their invention was first officially introduced in the official press release of MIT News.

Ph.D. candidate Mohammad Ghassemi, lead researcher of this program said in a statement, “Our work is a step in this direction, suggesting that we may not be that far away from the world where people can have an AI social coach right in their pocket”. Ghassemi and his team equipped a fitness tracker with the app that collects physical and speech data to examine the tonal characteristics.

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AI that is too sensitive by a person’s tone; hmmm.


As a participant tells a story, the system can analyse audio, text transcriptions and physiological signals to determine the overall tone of the story with 83 per cent accuracy.

Using deep-learning techniques, the system can also provide a “sentiment score” for specific five-second intervals within a conversation.

“As far as we know, this is the first experiment that collects both physical data and speech data in a passive but robust way, even while subjects are having natural, unstructured interactions,” said Mohammad Ghassemi, PhD candidate at MIT.

Since the past 4–5 years, we have seen a change in the shopping behavior of users, both online as well as offline. It has resulted from user’s reviews and recommendations about the products ranging from fashion to home to technology, all thanks to social websites like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and many other global as well as regional social sites. Social commerce is a term, coined by Yahoo in 2005, as a set of online shopping tools that take into account the user liking patterns, sharing reviews, information and advices on products, as per their usages, thus affecting the sales of those products.

There are two types of social commerce strategies — one is offsite where the e-retailer brings in the social angle from external social platforms, separate from their own websites, thus enhancing the sales and second is onsite social commerce platform where the website/platform uses its own channel to enhance sales based on content, context, and reviews etc. AI and ML Tech comes into play after these reviews and recommendations have been provided by the users and then placing the same in front of potential buyers for better decision making.

Artificial and machine learning technologies have been used by giants like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple for more than a decade to enhance their platforms for better user experience which can now be seen to be mandatory adaptation for most of the internet based businesses, not only as it shows better ROI, but also open countless doors for future digital opportunities.

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Glad I wasn’t on TOR for a while.


Visitors to more than 10,000 Tor-based websites were met with an alarming announcement this morning: “Hello, Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked.” A group affiliating itself with Anonymous had compromised servers at Freedom Hosting II, a popular service for hosting websites accessible only through Tor. Roughly six hours after the initial announcement, all the sites hosted by the service are still offline.

In the message, the group offers to sell the compromised data back to Freedom Hosting II in exchange for 0.1 bitcoin, or just over $100, although it is unclear whether the offer is in earnest.

The hackers also claim child pornography made up more than half the data stored on the servers. It’s impossible to verify that claim without seeing the data itself, but it’s consistent with what we know about previous dark-web hosting companies. The original Freedom Hosting was compromised by law enforcement in 2013, resulting in a number of child pornography prosecutions. At the time, the service hosted as many as half of the websites accessible only through Tor, commonly referred to as the Dark Web.

More mind reading technology and this time they can tell us if the person scanned is thinking about murder.


Brain scans could soon read minds and single out potential criminals before they commit any crimes, researchers claim.

Other uses of functional magnetic resonance imaging could include lie detectors in courtrooms, and anti-terrorist screening.

Scientists say the advancing technology could even be used for so-called neuro-marketing, to determine how much a consumer wanted a product.