Swarms of firefighting drones could one day be deployed to tackle hugely destructive megafires that are becoming increasingly frequent in the Mediterranean region because of climate change, arson and poor landscape management. It's one of a number of initiatives looking at how best to fight large fires from the air – a challenge that's becoming more and more common. A 2017 report on forest fires by the EU's Joint Research Centre said that the year would'likely be remembered as one of the most devastating wildfire seasons in Europe since records began', after the destruction of nearly 700,000 hectares of land in the EU by early September. Such fires are dangerous not only for people who live in the area but also for the crews of people whose job it is to put the fires out. But using intelligent robots to scout the area and drop water can allow humans to stand further back from the danger zone, only looking at the drones' data to make decisions from the safety of a command and control centre.

A baseball cap that can fool facial recognition systems into think you're someone else has been developed by scientists. The face-stealing hat projects infrared light - which is invisible to the naked eye - onto your face to trick AI camera systems, which can see the spectrum. Researchers said the technology can not only obscure your identity but also'impersonate a different person to pass facial recognition-based authentication.' A baseball cap that can fool facial recognition systems into think you're someone else has been developed. They added that the face-stealing lights could easily be'hidden in an umbrella and possibly even hair or a wig.' Writing in the pre-publish journal ArXiv, the joint US and Chinese team, led by Dr Zhe Zhou of Fudan University in Shanghai, said: 'We propose a kind of brand new attack against face recognition systems, which is realised by illuminating the subject using infrared. 'Through launching this kind of attack, an attacker not only can dodge surveillance cameras.

LAS VEGAS – IBM's Think 2018 conference, the first-of-its-kind rollup of five older conferences--IBM World of Watson, InterConnect, Edge, Amplify and Connect--has attracted more than 35,000 people representing most of the countries in the world to the Mandalay Bay Conference Center this week. "This is officially the largest event in IBM's history!" Ginny Rometty (pictured, with Dave McKay of Royal Canadian Bank), who holds the gold trifecta titles of CEO, chairman and president of the most venerable IT company on the globe, said March 20 in her opening remarks. While it's true that all the other topics that bring people together at a major show like this include security, networking, servers, processors, cloud services, automation, software development and many more, at the core of it all remains one simple entity: Watson, the IBM stake in the ground of artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning. Make no mistake about it: IBM is into a lot of business use cases, but it's now made Watson its beating heart, impacting virtually all parts of its business. 'Be the Disruptor, Rather than the Disrupted' Rometty captured well the theme of the conference in her first few sentences on stage.

Karim Khan is suing the CIA for the deaths of his son and brother in a drone strike. Pakistani journalist Karim Khan's son Zahinullah Khan and brother Asif Iqbal were killed when a CIA drone attacked Karim's home in December 2009.

Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and JD.com from China are in a global competition with Google/Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Walmart and Amazon from the USA and SoftBank from Japan. All are agressively searching for talent, intellectual property, market share, logistics and supply chain technology, and presence all around the world. These leading tech-savvy companies have many things in common. Foremost, they are all in pursuit of global growth and the funding, technology and talent to propel that growth. And they all are investing in voice assistance and other forms of AI and robotics.

India's homegrown smartphone manufacturer Micromax has invested an undisclosed amount in AI startup One Labs. One Labs operates inOne, a platform that aggregates apps across multiple genres in food, shopping, travel, deals, cabs, news, recharge, games and more. Among the 50 apps that it hosts include Zomato, Ola, Uber, Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal and others. The company plans to use the funds for product development and add more than 200 apps on the platform in the next 1 year. Besides, inOne will be pre-embedded in Micromax devices, the statement added.

The Niti Aayog will soon come out with a national policy on artificial intelligence, outlining the scope of research and for the adoption and commercialisation of the technology to counter China's thrust towards AI. The policy is expected to lay out short-, medium- and long-term goals to be achieved by 2022, 2026 and 2030, as India gears up to meet its commitment towards sustainable development goals, starting 2018. Under the policy, deadlines for commercial rollout of AI may also be proposed in areas like agriculture, health, education, banking, retail and transportation. It may also suggest incentives for startups and venture capital funds that undertake research and adoption of AI. These guidelines would be based on half a dozen pilots the Aayog has undertaken on AI in areas of agriculture, health, education and creation of other social infrastructure.

Bidding farewell to 2017 and just in the third month of 2018, we observe marked differences in the Big Data space. Last year's trends focused on major themes such as: management of Big Data, security and privacy of the data and its access, emergence of cloud as a front runner in data management, tempering of hype and expectation cycles, emergency of internet of things (IoT) as a major data generator, emergence of new tools in the end-to-end data management and data governance space, emergence of self-service analytical tools where they catered to data ingestion, manipulation, wrangling, analytics and reporting, and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) got good traction. Overall, 2017 has turned out to be a year of Technology Strategy rather than a business-focused strategy, with many organisations having ventured into PoC on AI, ML and Data Science. The year gone by also saw emergence of NoSQL databases in a fierce competition to Hadoop Storage. The year that will be Infonomics and data monetisation ideas will take root in 2018, which would try to put a value on the data that has been captured.

If European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi appears slightly more downbeat at his regular news conference than before, it could foreshadow a possible move by the bank to trim its monetary policy stimulus. That's the conclusion of two Japanese researchers who have used artificial intelligence software to analyze split-second changes in Draghi's facial expressions at his news conferences following policy meetings. The findings follow a similar analysis by the same researchers of Draghi's Japanese counterpart, Haruhiko Kuroda, last year, which claimed to have identified a correlation between patterns in his facial expressions and subsequent policy changes. Yoshiyuki Suimon and Daichi Isami, the paper's authors, think that subtle changes in Draghi's facial expressions could reflect a sense of frustration Draghi might have been feeling before making policy adjustments. Their study covered Draghi's news conference from June 2016 to December 2017 and found signs of "sadness" preceding two recent major policy changes -- when the central bank announced a dovish tapering in December 2016 and another quantitative easing cutback in October last year.

NEW YORK – For a dozen students from Futaba Future High School in Fukushima Prefecture, a recent visit to the United Nations was a chance to share their plans to improve the lives of others by drawing from their catastrophic earthquake and tsunami experiences as a source of strength. Despite overcoming enormous hurdles in the aftermath of the March 11, 2011, disaster that took more than 19,000 lives, the surviving students have moved forward with aspirations of choosing future paths to benefit the global community. "Thanks to all my experiences like getting bullied, joining the drama club and studying at my high school, I think I could grow well," Satsuki Sekine told U.N. diplomats, staff and youth representatives who gathered to hear their presentation on the current situation in Fukushima early this month as part of a scheduled visit while in New York. The 17-year-old explained how drama can be used to portray the challenges of discrimination and conflict "not as an abstract concept but with specific and visual examples." Recounting how the tsunami rendered her home unlivable, she explained how her life in Tomioka as a normal 9-year-old was turned upside down.