To some Chinese, it seems their movements, habits and thoughts can be tracked by a government with unchecked power. So is a digital dictatorship all powerful? That's a question that author Wang Lixiong set out to answer in his dystopian novel "Ceremony." Released by Taiwan's Locus Publishing in December, "Ceremony" describes a China in 2021 that isn't far off from how the nation is today. The leader wants to stay in office beyond mandated term limits and uses an anticorruption campaign to vanquish rivals.

Can you guess what I'm looking at? A new system developed in Japan can describe a picture someone is viewing, using brain scans alone. Algorithms have recently become pretty good at generating image captions, however they normally get to see the images they are captioning. Now it seems the same techniques can be used to generate captions via scans of a person's brain. "I consider it a form of mind reading, or perhaps at this point …

No stranger to controversy, a Tony Stark reincarnate -- Elon Musk -- came out with an ominous prediction recently. "Forget North Korea, AI will start World War III" read the CNN headline. Elon Musk is not alone in fearing unintended consequences of the race to develop algorithms that we may or may not be able to control. Once a new technology is introduced it can't be uninvented -- Sam Harris points out in his viral TED talk. He argues that it'll be impossible to halt the pace of progress, even if humankind could collectively make such a decision.

CHENNAI: Indian Institute of Technology, Madras has signed a joint development agreement with Applied Materials India to conduct research in Data Sciences, Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence. "We look forward to collaborating with Applied Materials in the fast-expanding field of AI. IIT Madras is already a leader in this area and bringing the expertise from academics and industry gives us unique opportunities..," IIT Madras, Director, Bhaskar Ramamurthi said in a statement here. IIT Madras strives to stay ahead of developments in technology and welcomes this opportunity to add momentum in research into AI, he said. Some of the works that would be taken up as part of the agreement include research on using representational neural networks, machine learning methods, images for technology enabled software solutions and advanced image analysis.

Alexa already can translate words and short phrases from and into a variety of languages, but Yahoo's sources say that Amazon is pushing for a true multilingual assistant that can perform more complex translations. Such a system would need to be aware of cultural as well as linguistic details, as well, as most language is dependent on contextual and situational cues. Yahoo's sources also note that eventually, Alexa will be able to translate conversations with multiple people speaking different languages at once, perhaps as an outgrowth of it's recognition systems for multiple users now. Obviously, this is all future-focused; you won't be able to use Alexa to go to that wedding in Japan just yet.

Researchers have broken speed records for the building blocks of quantum computing, getting them ready to actually build the computers that could revolutionise the world. Quantum computers could come to dwarf the processing power of today's conventional computers, by harnessing the strange effects of quantum physics. They could eventually allow for new techniques in everything from healthcare to physics, allowing work to be done at a speed almost inconceivable today. But scientists are still working at the most foundational level of such technology, attempting to put together the building blocks. The new research drastically improves those building blocks: making the "logic gates" that will be used in those computers faster than they've ever been before.

A new artificial intelligence that is learning to understand the'thoughts' of others has been built by Google-owned research firm DeepMind. The software is capable of predicting what other AIs will do, and can even understand whether they hold'false beliefs' about the world around them. DeepMind reports its bot can now pass a key psychological test that most children only develop the skills for at around age four. Its proficiency in this'theory of mind' test may lead to robots that can think more like humans. DeepMind reports its bot can now pass a key psychological test that most children only develop the skills for around age four.

In a U.S. regulatory filing, Baidu said it would list iQiyi on the Nasdaq exchange and is seeking to raise around $1.5 billion. Analysts at Jefferies have valued iQiyi at $17 billion. The move comes as Baidu looks to raise money for the loss-making unit to stay ahead in the fiercely competitive video-streaming sector where tech titans Tencent Holdings Ltd. TCEHY 2.24% and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. BABA -1.00% also have strong plays. Baidu told investors in its most recent earnings call that it would remain iQiyi's controlling shareholder. IQiyi, which was founded in 2010 and will list under the ticker IQ, said it is China's largest video-streaming service by amount of time spent watching, with more than 50 million paid subscribers.

Today we can collect lots and lots of performance data. We build beautiful dashboards and even have fancy query languages to access and transform the data. Still performance data is a secret language only a couple of people understand. The more business becomes digital the more stakeholders are interested in this data including how it relates to business. Some of these people have never used a monitoring tool before.

North Korea poses a more considerable cyber-attack threat to the international community than Russia, according to cyber-security firm CrowdStrike. Kim Jong-un's regime has been connected to a number of major hacks in recent years, with its attention primarily focused on neighbour and rival South Korea. Most famously, a hacker collective known as the "Lazarus Group", allegedly backed by Pyongyang, was blamed for the WannaCry ransomware attack last summer, which locked out IT systems across the world, hitting the NHS in the UK and such major international businesses as Russia's Sberbank and carmakers Honda and Renault. Speaking ahead of the launch of the 2018 edition of CrowdStrike's annual threat report, co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch warned that cyber-attacks had grown in intensity and sophistication over the last year. "In 2018, my biggest worry is actually about North Korea. I worry a great deal that they may do a destructive attack, perhaps against our financial sector, in an attempt to deter a potential US strike against either their nuclear facilities or even the regime itself," he told The Guardian.