What if machine learning models, much like photographs, movies, music, and manuscripts, could be watermarked nearly imperceptibly to denote ownership, stop intellectual property thieves in their tracks, and prevent attackers from compromising their integrity? Thanks to IBM's new patent-pending process, they now can be. In a phone conversation with analysts this week Marc Stoecklin, IBM's manager of Cognitive Cybersecurity Intelligence, detailed the work of several IBM researchers who've been busy trying to find new ways to embed unique identifiers, or watermarks to you and I, into neural networks. Their concept was recently presented at the ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS) 2018 in Korea, and might be deployed within IBM or make its way into a client-facing product in the very near future. "For the first time, we have a [robust] way to prove that someone has stolen an [AI] model," Stoecklin said.

I just got hold of some embarrassing video footage of Texas senator Ted Cruz singing and gyrating to Tina Turner. His political enemies will have great fun showing it during the midterms. Donald Trump will call him "Dancin' Ted." Okay, I'll admit it--I created the video myself. But here's the troubling thing: making it required very little video-editing skill. I downloaded and configured software that uses machine learning to perform a convincing digital face-swap.

For all their differences, big tech companies agree on where we're heading: into a future dominated by smart machines. Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple all say that every aspect of our lives will soon be transformed by artificial intelligence and machine learning, through innovations such as self-driving cars and facial recognition. Yet the people whose work underpins that vision don't much resemble the society their inventions are supposed to transform. WIRED worked with Montreal startup Element AI to estimate the diversity of leading machine learning researchers, and found that only 12 percent were women. That estimate came from tallying the numbers of men and women who had contributed work at three top machine learning conferences in 2017.

More than a thousand Google employees have signed a letter criticising the company's plan to launch a heavily censored version of its search engine in China. In the letter, which is an internal petition, the employees asked for more transparency and oversight of Project Dragonfly, the project's internal title. "We urgently need more transparency, a seat at the table and a commitment to clear and open processes: Google employees need to know what we're building," the letter, seen by the Reuters news agency, reads. The employees are reportedly worried about kowtowing to China by implementing the government's requests for censorship. China restricts internet users massively by blocking websites, censoring words and clamping down on free speech.

The internal dissent over Dragonfly comes on the heels of the employee protests over Google's involvement in the Pentagon project to use artificial intelligence. After Google said it would not renew its contract with the Pentagon, it unveiled a series of ethical principles governing its use of A.I. In those principles, Google publicly committed to use A.I. only in "socially beneficial" ways that would not cause harm and promised to develop its capabilities in accordance with human rights law. Some employees have raised concerns that helping China suppress the free flow of information would violate these new principles. In 2010, Google said it had discovered that Chinese hackers had attacked the company's corporate infrastructure in an attempt to access to the Gmail accounts of human rights activists.

Singularity University just concluded their very first APAC Global Impact Challenge (GIC), and two Taiwanese startups have emerged as winners. The challenge aimed to discover moonshot innovations and startups that positively impact the lives of people living in the Asia Pacific, specifically with an ability to scale and impact a billion of people in a decade. Participants were tasked with developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications to address global issues posing a threat to sustainability. AI solutions could tackle issues ranging from energy, environment, food, water, disaster resilience, governance, and health, among other things. One of its Taiwanese winners is a startup named Vibrasee, which uses deep learning to determine the early onset of Parkinson's disease.

The introduction of new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) is causing ripples in the art market and whilst not everyone in the industry is prepared to embrace it, there is no denying its impact. Artificial intelligence is changing value chains for creative content, helping creators match content with audiences by classifying their interests and enabling them to recommend specifically tailored content. Various art platforms are using this technology, creating a filtering system to help their users. AI is also now being used to create works of art. In 2017 experts in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Rutgers University in New Jersey created CANs (Creative Adversarial Networks) that allow for AI to create physical works that appear to be human-crafted.

The Romantic poets gazed upon the natural world and translated its splendor into poetry. Microsoft's artificial intelligence does something similar, but uses a lot more computing power. Microsoft's conversational chatbot in China, XiaoIce, has generated 12 million poems during conversations with people, company researchers wrote in a paper last week. The trick to good AI poetry, the team writes, is taking inspiration from the real world. Here's the image that the AI used to generate that poem.

Elon Musk repeatedly broke down in an interview in which he attempted to explain some of his recent strange behaviour. The Tesla boss has admitted to taking pills to sleep and that he has had a difficult year, alternating between laughter and crying as he did. And he revealed that the stress of the year appears to be undermining his physical health. "It's not been great, actually. I've had friends come by who are really concerned," he said. 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.

For telcos to get the most out of artificial intelligence (AI), they must not only find the necessary technical skills but also ensure that the entire company understands the value of the technology. My last blog focused on how AI augmentation is the future for telcos because it not only allows them to deliver superior customer experience in an increasingly competitive marketplace, but also helps them cut costs, remain competitive and launch new services across complex ecosystems, from autonomous cars and fleet management to healthcare and beyond. I concluded that the biggest challenge doesn't seem to be the implementation of the technology but the upskilling and retraining of human employees. According to a study from Oracle and Future Workplace, 72% of human resources executives surveyed said their organisations do not provide any AI training programme. Now, that study might not be telco-specific, but it certainly illustrates the challenges that AI brings when implementing it in a business.