Bitcoin's mid-December boom has sparked a renewed interest in cryptocurrency investment across the world - and some extremely strange goings-on as entrepreneurs speculate on the best way to capitalise on the digicoin gold rush. The market leader's value stormed to an all-time high of $19,850 (£14,214) in the run-up to Christmas but has since dropped back to its customary $10,000 (£7,190) mark. Competitors like ethereum, litecoin, ripple and bitcoin cash have all quietly prospered out of the limelight - but cryptocurriences remain a volatile proposition. Yesterday saw all but two of CoinMarketCap's top 50 cryptos decline in value, thought to be a reaction to the US Securities and Exchange and Commission declaring that all trading platforms will ultimately need to be registered and regulated to protect consumers. All of this excitement has led to a number of bizarre developments as businesses (and scammers) think outside the box about the best way to enter a market worth a combined $405bn (£292bn).

The US Military is using artificial intelligence software developed by Google in one of its drone programmes, causing internal divisions over how the company should be run. The Department of Defense's Project Maven, commenced last April, utilises the Silicon Valley search giant's TensorFlow AI to analyse the hours of footage shot by unmanned planes. TensorFlow scans the film for objects of interest and flags them for human analysts with a view to further investigation. It has reportedly already been used in the field to survey areas held by Isis in the Middle East but Google stresses the technology is being deployed for "non-offensive uses only." Employees have nevertheless raised concerns about the company's role in defence contracting after it was revealed last week on an internal mailing list, particularly in light of the company's famous founding principle: "Don't be evil."

Amazon's Echo is emitting chilling laughter and refusing to do what is asked of it. The terrifying behaviour is leading people to lose sleep and to unplug their devices, amid fears their smart speakers are after them. But the chilling behaviour doesn't demonstrate that the machines are about to take over. In fact, it shows just how far they've got to go. 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.

Islamabad, Pakistan - At least 20 members of the Pakistani Taliban, including the son of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Mullah Fazlullah, have been killed in a US drone strike in the northeastern Afghan province of Kunar, according to a Taliban statement. The fighters, including Abdullah, were killed in a strike on a TTP camp, the group said in a statement texted to local journalists in Pakistan's Bajaur district, which borders Kunar, on Wednesday. According to the statement, 20 fidayeen, or suicide bombers, were killed, while another six fighters were wounded in the strike. Prominent TTP commander Gul Muhammad and fidayeen trainer Yaseen were also killed in the strike, Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported. Pakistan has often accused US and Afghan forces of not doing enough to target TTP forces resident on the Afghan side of the volatile Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where they fled following a series of military operations by Pakistan.

Data is shaping almost every area of our lives. Agriculture has been slow to embrace new technology but even here it's beginning to have a big impact. There are now hundreds of companies offering everything from farm management and precision tools to bots and drones. Some tractors have computing power that would have turned Nasa's moon-landing mission green with envy. What started in farm equipment is moving into the field – at least in the developed world.

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are increasingly considering leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage their marketing budgets. Marketing spends on digital channels have increased by 20 percent per annum as per industry estimates. Digital marketing itself has incorporated AI by skipping a generation of intermediate system development. Modern marketing automation platforms already include chatbots for customer interaction, voice recognition/translation in their websites and semantic search in their product catalogues. However, the shift from traditional marketing to digital marketing was driven by the very fact that one could drive more personalised and segmented messaging to customers to drive up conversion rates.

As more companies turn to artificial intelligence to discover new talent, a recent survey has shown that a majority of job-seeking university students don't want their abilities judged by the technology. About 67.5 percent of 1,258 university and graduate students slated to graduate in March 2019 said they don't want AI to assess their job qualifications during interviews, according to the online survey published Wednesday by Tokyo-based recruitment consulting firm Disco Inc. The survey, conducted from March 1 to Tuesday, also showed that 50.1 percent of respondents don't want AI to read their resume and decide whether they qualify for the next round. The results reflect students' honest feelings that they don't feel comfortable having their job qualifications judged by algorithms without even meeting a human staffer, Disco spokesman Osamu Yoshida said Thursday. "For professionals, companies see applicants' skills and achievements in work -- which are relatively easy to assess. But for new university graduates they are more likely to value students' potential and willingness to work, which are difficult for AI to evaluate," Yoshida said.

So far we've explored how AI can be applied to improve business outcomes and to increase strategic agility and growth, now let's examine a third feature. A recent Accenture Research report on AI notes a distinctive value of these technologies: Their role in helping propel innovation as companies apply AI and spread it into the economy. In a recent interview, Accenture Chief Technology & Innovation Officer Paul Daugherty described how the research study looked at different countries' "national absorptive capacity," or how well a country is prepared to absorb and spread innovation. Said Daugherty, "The kinds of things you need to look at are--what's the structure of their economy, what kinds of industry do they have, what's their capacity of research and development, what kind of ecosystems do they have around innovation…you look at the underlying economic data, dig a little deeper and say...how can AI technology change productivity and how will that drive underlying economic improvements." Using this approach, we found, for example, that Japan is expected to benefit dramatically from AI in part because of its capacity for innovation.

For a field that was not well known outside of academia a decade ago, artificial intelligence has grown dizzyingly fast. Tech companies from Silicon Valley to Beijing are betting everything on it, venture capitalists are pouring billions into research and development, and start-ups are being created on what seems like a daily basis. If our era is the next Industrial Revolution, as many claim, A.I. is surely one of its driving forces. It is an especially exciting time for a researcher like me. When I was a graduate student in computer science in the early 2000s, computers were barely able to detect sharp edges in photographs, let alone recognize something as loosely defined as a human face. But thanks to the growth of big data, advances in algorithms like neural networks and an abundance of powerful computer hardware, something momentous has occurred: A.I. has gone from an academic niche to the leading differentiator in a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, health care, transportation and retail.

BARCELONA: Blazing fast 5G wireless networks promise to unlock the potential of internet connected devices, or the Internet of Things--making driverless cars and talking fridges a reality. With most European operators targeting 2020 for its rollout, 5G is the term on everyone's lips at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Like the 4G networks currently widely available, 5G is based on radio frequencies, the same used for television broadcasts, walkie-talkies, wi-fi signals or a garage door remote control. It will use a higher radio frequency that are not in use and can move data at a much faster speed. But since higher radio frequencies don't travel as far as lower frequencies, it will rely on denser arrays of small antennas and artificial intelligence to offer data speeds up to 50 or 100 times faster than current 4G networks.