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Legal frameworks, regulations and standards under the topic Defending the Core.


2017 will focus on the fundamental aspects of cyber security with a theme of Defending the Core. The 9th International Conference on Cyber Conflict will be held in Tallinn from May 30 through June 2, 2017.

CyCon is organised by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. Every year, over 500 decision-makers and experts from government, military and industry from all over the world approach the conference’s key theme from legal, technology and strategy perspectives, often in an interdisciplinary manner.

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27.03.2017CyCon U.S. Call for Papers is Now Open.

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The innovation office has a particular focus on technology and data, and it is working with such titans as Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff, and Tesla founder and chief executive Elon Musk. The group has already hosted sessions with more than 100 such leaders and government officials.


The Office of American Innovation aims to overhaul government functions using ideas from the business sector. The president’s son-in-law will lead the Office of American Innovation, which wants to overhaul government by using ideas from the business sector.

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If you think augmented reality is only fun and games, consider that we’ve already witnessed the first known police action taken against hologram technology. During the summer of 2015, a performance by controversial gangster-rapper, Keith Cozart, was shut down when local police discovered the musician was broadcast as a hologram into a benefit concert in Indiana—close to the border of his home state of Illinois.

Cozart, who goes by the stage name “Chief Keef,” is from a rough neighborhood in Chicago, and has ties to local gangs as well as a criminal record including felony gun charges. His music, which glamorizes a gang lifestyle and violence, has prompted public officials—including Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel—to pressure music festivals to avoid inviting Cozart because they say it poses a “significant public safety risk.”

Due to outstanding warrants for his arrest, Cozart can’t even return to Chicago, and so unable to perform in the area, he took the innovative approach of performing from California, but as a hologram beamed into the Indiana music festival. But even that was too much for police, and the performance was immediately stopped.

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The workplace is going to look drastically different ten years from now. The coming of the Second Machine Age is quickly bringing massive changes along with it. Manual jobs, such as lorry driving or house building are being replaced by robotic automation, and accountants, lawyers, doctors and financial advisers are being supplemented and replaced by high level artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

So what do we need to learn today about the jobs of tomorrow? Two things are clear. The robots and computers of the future will be based on a degree of complexity that will be impossible to teach to the general population in a few short years of compulsory education. And some of the most important skills people will need to work with robots will not be the things they learn in computing class.

There is little doubt that the workforce of tomorrow will need a different set of skills in order to know how to navigate a new world of work. Current approaches for preparing young people for the digital economy are based on teaching programming and computational thinking. However, it looks like human workers will not be replaced by automation, but rather workers will work alongside robots. If this is the case, it will be essential that human/robot teams draw on each other’s strengths.

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A team of engineers at the University of California San Diego and La Jolla-based startup Nanovision Biosciences Inc. have developed the nanotechnology and wireless electronics for a new type of retinal prosthesis that brings research a step closer to restoring the ability of neurons in the retina to respond to light. The researchers demonstrated this response to light in a rat retina interfacing with a prototype of the device in vitro.

They detail their work in a recent issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering. The technology could help tens of millions of people worldwide suffering from neurodegenerative diseases that affect eyesight, including macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa and loss of vision due to diabetes.

Despite tremendous advances in the development of over the past two decades, the performance of devices currently on the market to help the blind regain functional vision is still severely limited—well under the acuity threshold of 20/200 that defines legal blindness.

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Transhumanism appearing in the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) magazine: Science…


Modern technology and modern medical practice have evolved over the past decades, enabling us to enhance and extend human life to an unprecedented degree. The two books under review examine this phenomenon from remarkably different perspectives.

Mark O’Connell’s To Be a Machine is an examination of transhumanism, a movement characterized by technologies that seek to transform the human condition and extend life spans indefinitely. O’Connell, a journalist, makes his own prejudices clear: “I am not now, nor have I ever been, a transhumanist,” he writes. However, this does not stop him from thoughtfully surveying the movement.

The book mostly comprises O’Connell’s encounters with transhumanist thought leaders in an assortment of locales ranging from lecture halls to Silicon Valley start-ups to transhumanist conferences and even the campaign trail, where O’Connell interviews Zoltan Istvan, a transhumanist and 2016 U.S. presidential candidate whose goal is “to promote investment in longevity science.”

O’Connell’s interaction with Max More, the president and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s largest commercial cryopreservation facility, is particularly timely, because the legal, social, and ethical issues related to cryopreservation are far from settled. Likewise, as O’Connell notes, the promise of cryonics relies on the improbable notion that science will someday enable reanimation.

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Na JPMorgan Chase & Co., uma máquina de aprendizagem está analisando os acordos financeiros que antes mantinham equipes jurídicas ocupadas por milhares de horas.

O programa, chamado COIN, para o Contrato de Inteligência, faz a tarefa de interpretar acordos de empréstimo comercial que, até que o projeto foi lançado em junho, consumiu 360 mil horas de trabalho por ano por advogados e agentes de crédito. O software revê os documentos em segundos, é menos propenso a erros e nunca pede férias.

No que diz respeito à COIN, o programa ajudou a JPMorgan a reduzir os erros de manutenção de empréstimos, a maioria resultante de erro humano na interpretação de 12.000 novos contratos por ano, de acordo com os seus criadores.

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He also said there are a lot of opportunities for India but it is China which is seizing them. “India must rise to the role it should be playing for its benefit, for the benefit of science and rest of the world,” he added. India and China have been growing rapidly in the last few decades and both have doubled their GDP. But China, he said, in this period doubled its investment in science and technology while India’s funding reminded at the same level. South Korea, a much smaller country, is also investing a lot in science and the results are showing, he said.


Funding delays and legal challenges preventing the country from achieving greatness, says Nobel Laureate David Gross.

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Last week, the US Patent and Trademarks Office ruled on the most-watched patent proceeding of the 21st century: the fight for Crispr-Cas9. The decision was supposed to declare ownership of the rights to the revolutionary gene editing technique. But instead, the patent judge granted sorta-victories to each of the rival parties—a team from UC Berkeley and another with members from both MIT and Harvard University’s Broad Institute. That’s great for those groups (and their spin-off, for-profit gene editing companies with exclusive licenses). But it leaves things a bit murkier for anyone else who wants to turn a buck with gene editing.

The Crispr discoverers now have some authority over who gets to use Crispr, and for what. And while exclusive licenses aren’t rare in biotech, the scope of these do stand out: They cover all the 20,000-plus genes in the human genome. So this week, legal experts are sending a formal request to the Department of Health and Human Services. They want the federal government to step in and bring Crispr back to the people.

Crispr is new, but patent laws governing genetic engineering date back decades. In 1980, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that genetically engineered microbes were patentable, Congress passed something called the Bayh-Doyle Act. The law gives permission for universities to patent—and license—anything their researchers invented with public funds, making it easier to put those inventions back in the hands of citizens.

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A new and extensive interview I did at New Atlas, including ideas about my #libertarian California Governor run. Libertarianism has many good ideas, but two core concepts are the non-aggression principle (NAP) and protection of private property rights—both of which I believe can be philosophically applied to the human body (and the body’s inevitable transhuman destiny of overcoming disease and decay with science and technology):


Zoltan Istvan is a transhumanist, journalist, politician, writer and libertarian. He is also running for Governor of California for the Libertarian Party on a platform pushing science and technology to the forefront of political discourse. In recent years, the movement of transhumanism has moved from a niche collection of philosophical ideals and anarcho-punk gestures into a mainstream political movement. Istvan has become the popular face of this movement after running for president in 2016 on a dedicated transhumanist platform.

We caught up with Istvan to chat about how transhumanist ideals can translate into politics, how technology is going to change us as humans and the dangers in not keeping up with new innovations, such as genetic editing.

New Atlas: How does transhumanism intersect with politics?

Istvan: For me you can never make any headway in the universe, or on planet Earth, if you don’t involve politics because so much money for innovation or research and development comes from the government and so many laws about what you can do. Genetic editing, chip implants, can you get a brain implant that makes you smarter than other people? These things are often directed by the government determining whether it’s illegal or not. You can either be thrown in jail or not thrown in jail – so you must have a political footprint, you must have attorneys on the ground, you must have that kind of legal position that can explain things in terms that a government will understand.

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