Ahead of its first AI developers conference in Beijing, Intel has announced it's making the process of imparting intelligence into smart home gadgets and other network edge devices faster and easier thanks to the company's latest invention: the Neural Compute Stick 2. Edge devices are generally defined as any piece of hardware that controls the flow of data between the boundaries of two networks. These include not just routers, switches and gateways but also a range IoT gadgets like Ring doorbell cameras, industrial robots, smart medical devices or self-guided camera drones. Intel's NCS2 is essentially a self-contained neural network on a thumbdrive and should make developing those sorts of devices faster and easier by offloading much of the processing power required to train them to its onboard Movidius Myriad X vision processing unit (VPU). "We can do some incredible things with artificial intelligence, and one of the fastest growing data types, as we all know, is video data," Steen Graham, General Manager of Channels and Ecosystem in Intel's Internet of Things group, told reporters during a press call on Friday. "The camera is the ultimate sensor."

This 2018 handout image provided by the Ali family, shows a photo of Ammer Ali, in Yemen. A drone struck a car carrying Ali who was returning to Marib with a relative after dropping his family at a house of relatives. Nearly 70 kilometers from Marib, at 3:00 p.m. the drone struck the car and killed the Ali the other driver survived. This 2018 handout image provided by the Sarima family, shows a photo of Mohammed Abu Sarima, who was killed in a drone strike, in Yemen. The Pentagon confirmed a drone strike on the same day in the province of Bayda, saying they were targeting al-Qaida.

This July 11, 2018, photo, shows a fragment of a US-made missile fired from a drone that struck a vehicle, killing all seven men inside on Jan. 26, 2018, instantly ending their lives, shredding their bodies into pieces, in Shabwa, Yemen. ATAQ, Yemen – Al-Qaida was giving away motorcycles up in the mountains -- that's what the kids in town were saying the day Abdullah disappeared. Early that morning, Mohsanaa Salem woke her 14-year-old son to go buy vegetables. The sun had just risen above the mountain ridge, and winter light filled the ravine where their mud brick house sat at the foot of a slope. "Let me sleep," Abdullah groaned from a mattress on the floor, surrounded by his brothers and sisters. One word from his father, though, and the boy was up and dressed, trudging out of the house to the market in a neighboring village. Three hours later, when he still hadn't returned, Mohsanaa and her husband began to worry.

According to Global Market Insights, Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Banking, Financial and Insurance (BFSI) Market is estimated to be worth over USD 2.5 billion in 2017 and is anticipated to grow at a Global CAGR of more than 30% from now through 2024. Not surprisingly, the Asia Pacific region driven by China is leading the way with an estimated CAGR of over 40%. AI has applications that vary widely in finance - from cost savings to improving customer experience and fraud detection - and right now there are already 2.5 million U.S. financial services workers whose jobs are directly impacted by AI. Finance was one of the first sectors to embrace AI. Sydney Swaine-Simon and Abhishek Gupta write: "The financial sector is one of the first domains to drive interest in using artificial intelligence, even before high computing machines were available. In the 1960s, a lot of research focused on Bayesian statistics, a method used heavily in machine learning. Some of its use cases included stock market prediction and auditing. It wasn't until the 1980s until the majority of commercialization opportunities were explored with expert systems. During that time, over two thirds of Fortune 1000 companies had at least one AI project being developed."

We live in the world of AI currently, and there is plenty of talk about what the future holds. With doubts over the future everywhere, one can predict that AI is soon going to be an imperative part of our lives. Considering the likely future impact of AI, there is a need to ensure that the right AI talent comes up and gets to the top to lead this wave of change. According to several key leaders from Huawei, this can only be achieved by changing certain approaches. As a Huawei partner and a member of Huawei's Key Opinion Leader Program, I joined three other experts conducting several keynotes at Huawei Connect in Shanghai all related to the question of how to develop talent in the AI era; Dr. Hao Lu, who is the Chief Innovation Officer at Yitu, Huang Weiwei, who is the Senior Management Consultant for Huawei, and Qian Wang, who is the Co-Founder of Mai Mai.

The UK government is actively funding the development of flying "killer robots" despite publicly stating it has no plans to develop them, a study claims. Research into fully autonomous drone weapons by the campaign group Drone Wars UK revealed the UK's Defence and Security Accelerator (Dasa) is funding research for developing weapons able to kill without direct human input. The report, titled Off the Leash: The Development of Autonomous Military Drones in the UK, highlighted the Taranis drone, which is capable of autonomously flying, plotting routes and locating targets. Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS – The global chemical weapons watchdog will in February begin to assign blame for attacks with banned munitions in Syria's war, using new powers approved by member states but opposed by Damascus and its key allies Russia and Iran. The agency was handed the new task in response to an upsurge in the use of chemical weapons in recent years, notably in the Syrian conflict, where scores of attacks with sarin and chlorine have been carried out by Syrian forces and rebel groups, according to a joint United Nations-OPCW investigation. A core team of 10 experts charged with apportioning blame for poison gas attacks in Syria will be hired soon, Fernando Arias, the new head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), told the Foreign Press Association of the Netherlands on Tuesday. The Syria team will be able to look into all attacks previously investigated by the OPCW, dating back to 2014. The OPCW was granted additional powers to identify individuals and institutions responsible for attacks by its 193 member states at a special session in June.

As an international relations scholar who studies space law and policy, I have come to realize what most people do not fully appreciate: Dealing with space debris is as much a national security issue as it is a technical one. Considering the debris circling the Earth as just an obstacle in the path of human missions is naive. As outer space activities are deeply rooted in the geopolitics down on Earth, the hidden challenge posed by the debris is the militarization of space technologies meant to clean it up. To be clear, space debris poses considerable risks; however, to understand those risks, I should explain what it is and how it is formed. As outer space activities are deeply rooted in the geopolitics down on Earth, the hidden challenge posed by the debris is the militarization of space technologies meant to clean it up.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. While robots have prepared entire breakfasts since 1961, general manipulation in the real world is arguably an even more complex problem than autonomous driving. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why, though. Closely watching the 1961 video suggests that a two-finger parallel gripper is good enough for a variety of tasks, and that it is only perception and encoded common sense that prevents a robot from performing such feats in the real world.

Just a few years ago, Li Mengqi could not have imagined shopping on her own. Someone needed to always keep her company to say aloud what was in front of her, who's been blind since birth. When smartphones with text-to-speech machines for the visually impaired arrived, she immediately bought an iPhone. "Though it was expensive," Li, a 23-year-old who grew up in a rural village in eastern China's Zhejiang province, told me. Cheaper smartphone options in China often don't have good accessibility features.