China-based researcher Wish Wu was scheduled to present a talk entitled "Bypass Strong Face ID: Everyone Can Deceive Depth and IR Camera and Algorithms" at the Black Hat Asia hacking conference in Singapore in March. Wu told Reuters that his employer, Ant Financial, asked him to withdraw the talk from Black Hat, one of the largest and most prestigious organizers of hacking conferences.

Hackers have targeted Google Chromecast devices in an effort to promote popular YouTube star PewDiePie. Using the pseudonyms HackerGiraffe and J3ws3r, the pair claim to have taken over more than 65,000 of the smart TV gadgets. The pair claimed the cyber attack was was to warn of security issues with Chromecasts, while also encouraging people to subscribe to PewDiePie's channel. A video message posted by the pair on YouTube stated: "Your Chromecast/ Smart TV is exposed to the public internet and is exposing sensitive information about you!" The hackers included a web link to find out more information about account security and concluded the message: "You should also subscribe to PewDiePie."

The World Economic Forum (WEF) publishes its report entitled, "Business Life and Gender Differences," every year. The report got a new name for the first time this year; as you can imagine, this title relates to artificial intelligence (AI). The WEF researched the rates of female AI experts in the workforce in 146 countries. Some important points in the report include caring for children at home, robots taking the place of workers at factories and offices being the most significant factors in women losing their jobs. The WEF Center for the New Economy and Society President Saadia Zahidi says that robotic and artificial intelligence technologies take place in fields where women traditionally work, such as management, customer relations and telemarketing.

It's been another year of relentless artificial-intelligence hype and incremental AI achievement. Machines still beat humans only in carefully constructed environments or at narrow tasks. The good news is that, as the technology progresses, the race for leadership is still wide open, and even Europe, where politicians fret that the continent is lagging behind China and the U.S., is still quite competitive. According to the Artificial Intelligence Index 2018 annual report, whose steering committee includes leading AI scholars such as Yoav Shoham of Stanford University and Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AI has progressed on all the measures tracked. Some of the metrics, from the number of published papers and conference attendance, to mentions on corporate earnings calls and in parliamentary hearings, measure the hype.

The call for speakers for our 2019 Artificial Intelligence Conference in Beijing, China, closes at midnight (China time) on January 8, 2019. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data, data science, and AI. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the Data Show, I spoke with Haoyuan Li, CEO and founder of Alluxio, a startup commercializing the open source project with the same name (full disclosure: I'm an advisor to Alluxio). Our discussion focuses on the state of Alluxio (the open source project that has roots in UC Berkeley's AMPLab), specifically emerging use cases here and in China.

Money matters to people and businesses alike and banks are the institutions which help them sense, comprehend and act in terms of making monetary decisions wisely. Banks have been there for us in times of need and have evolved themselves from time to time, transforming from a traditional paper-ledger based to computerized core banking. Today, this industry has ushered in the facilities of the internet and mobile banking for the consumer. There is no other sector that is more focused on adopting innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), as much as banks. Literally, every consultancy has derived their own research citing how AI would be the next big thing in banking and they're all bullish on its prospects.

A common belief among tech industry insiders is that Silicon Valley has dominated the internet because much of the worldwide network was designed and built by Americans. Now a growing number of those insiders are worried that proposed export restrictions could short-circuit the pre-eminence of US companies in the next big thing to hit their industry: artificial intelligence. In November, the Commerce Department released a list of technologies, including artificial intelligence, that are under consideration for new export rules because of their importance to national security. Technology experts worry that blocking the export of AI to other countries, or tying it up in red tape, will help AI industries flourish in those nations -- China, in particular -- and compete with US companies. "The number of cases where exports can be sufficiently controlled are very, very, very small, and the chance of making an error is quite large," said Jack Clark, head of policy at OpenAI, an artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco.

For those unaware, artificial or machine intelligence is the ability of computer systems to learn skills and perform tasks requiring human intelligence and decision making. It is being employed in a range of fields and is already beating biological intelligence of mankind in many ways. Put simply, from speech recognition and automobiles to simple gaming, AI is driving the future of almost every industry.

Robots in general, and social robots in particular, tend to be very focused on functionality. When we see one, we want to know what it does, how well it does it, and whether it does those things better or worse than other robots or systems. The necessity for robots to be "useful" drives their design, but what happens when you instead design a robot that only has to do one very simple thing? The Greeting Machine is an abstract robot developed at the Media Innovation Lab (miLAB) at the IDC Herzliya, in Israel, with collaborators from Cornell University. It was conceptualized to greet people with a gesture, and do nothing else--a challenge that's more complicated than it sounds.

As we look back to 2018, we can trace some technologies which impacted the lives of an ordinary man both in the personal and professional terms. Artificial intelligence which was thought to be a simple assistant for making a person's life easier has now become an integral part of many people's lives in certain spheres. Did you ever imagine in your wildest dreams that in future you will be conversing with an artificial assistant? We always used to think it as a scene straight out from the Hollywood science fiction movie, but as we usher into the brave new world of incredible inventions, fictions are turning into reality making us question the very existence of the statement "This is not possible." This was highly questioned as consumers were in a dilemma how trustworthy would it be, but as in case of every new invention people are skeptical in the beginning but get used to it with each passing year.