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Energy Department and the IRS Draft AI Into Government Service
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Welcome back. Today we look at two arms of the federal government that are making deeper use of AI. The sprawling Energy Department, with a portfolio that spans energy efficiency, electric-grid resilience, cybersecurity, health care and more, has named the first head of its AI and technology office. Meanwhile, the IRS and other government agencies are using machine-learning to enforce the law.
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Cheryl Ingstad, right, was sworn in earlier this month as director of the Energy Department’s Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office by Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar. CREDIT: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
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Energy Department names new AI leader. The U.S. Energy Department has named the first director of its Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office, a sign of how AI plays a growing role throughout the DOE's sprawling portfolio. Former 3M Co. artificial-intelligence leader Cheryl Ingstad was named to the role earlier this month, John McCormick reports for WSJ Pro. Highlights:
A new government acronym is born. The mission of the AITO, which was formed in September 2019, is to coordinate the department’s artificial-intelligence activities, which includes scaling AI projects across the DOE, sharing best practices and reducing duplicate projects. The office also is charged with facilitating partnerships with other government agencies, academia and industry.
600 projects and counting. The DOE has more than 600 AI projects and is looking to use the technology to improve energy efficiency, electric-grid resilience, cybersecurity, water resource management, health care and other areas.
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About a dozen people on staff. The office also leverages the resources of the entire department and its 17 national labs.
Work in progress. The DOE worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs, using AI to spot predictors of prostate cancer, cardiovascular disease and suicide. “Because AI can ingest so much information and data from the records and make correlations where there has been suicide, it can look back and determine what are those predictive factors,” Ms. Ingstad said. “And then we can look into the future and say which people may be at risk and where we can take some proactive measures.”
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IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig spoke at an agency event in Washington, D.C., in July. CREDIT: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS
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AI comes to the tax code. Tax cheats, beware: The machines are watching, Rick Rubin reports for The Wall Street Journal. Governments are increasingly relying on machine learning and data analytics to analyze troves of data as they seek to detect tax evasion, respond to taxpayers’ questions and make themselves more efficient. Highlights:
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In Brazil, the customs agency’s system for detecting anomalies now prompts more than 30% of inspections.
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Canada next month will launch Charlie the Chatbot, an automated system that will respond to inquiries about tax filing.
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The Internal Revenue Service is designing machine-built graphs to plot the relationships among participants in business deals, giving auditors a new tool to analyze transactions and detect tax avoidance.
How do you think we found these people?” said IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig at a conference on artificial intelligence and taxes this week at the University of California, Irvine law school. “It wasn’t on filed returns. These are non-filers. There is a heat map that says where there are concentrations of these people. We have sufficient data on these people.”
The IRS criminal investigations unit uses Palantir Technologies, the data-mining firm, to identify potential fraud cases for further inquiry.
“If I get a first name and a cellphone number, you’d be shocked how much information Palantir can provide,” Mr. Rettig said.
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Governments, industry rely on technology to speed up movement of air travelers. The number of air travelers is expected to hit more than 7 billion globally by 2035, nearly doubling from 2016, according to The New York Times. Airports are expanding, and governments and the travel industry are making greater use of technology to speed up trips, the Times reports. Highlights from the story by Julie Weed:
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Airports in Osaka, Japan, and Abu Dhabi have tested autonomous check-in kiosks "that move themselves to help manage peaks of passenger flow."
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Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and Miami International Airport "use visual sensors" to monitor lines and the pace of travelers through checkpoints. The data can be used to deploy workers more effectively.
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For international flights, more airlines are installing "self-boarding gates" that take "and compare a photo of the traveler with the picture in the person’s passport and other photos in Customs and Border Protection files."
Privacy concerns. "So even though we consciously give up our privacy, we still worry that these kinds of digital records can be used against us in unanticipated ways by the government, our employer, or criminals," Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, tells the Times.
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A Tesla SUV crashed into a barrier in Mountain View, Calif., in March 2018. PHOTO: KTVU/ASSOCIATED PRESS
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Tesla’s driver-assistance autopilot draws safety scrutiny. Tesla’s Autopilot played a role in a crash that killed the driver of the auto maker’s Model X sport-utility vehicle in March 2018 in Mountain View, Calif., the National Transportation Safety Board said. The agency, better known for its investigations into airplane crashes, has been increasingly scrutinizing the emergence of automated-driving technologies and pushing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to do more to ensure the safety of advanced driver-assistance systems, according to the Journal.
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Federal health authorities said they now expect a wider spread of the new coronavirus in the U.S. and are preparing for a potential pandemic, though they still are unsure about how severe the health threat could be. (WSJ)
The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell to an all-time low, the latest milestone in a decadeslong bond rally driven by persistently low inflation and turbocharged by worries the coronavirus could disrupt an already-sluggish global economy. (WSJ)
Bob Chapek, who has led Disney Parks, has been named Walt Disney CEO, succeeding Bob Iger, who will stay on as executive chairman. (WSJ)
Salesforce.com said Co-Chief Executive Keith Block is stepping down, leaving co-founder Marc Benioff in charge of the business-software provider. (WSJ)
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