Some of the world's leading robotics and artificial intelligence pioneers are calling on the United Nations to ban the development and use of killer robots. Tesla's Elon Musk and Google's Mustafa Suleyman are leading a group of 116 specialists from across 26 countries who are calling for the ban on autonomous weapons. The UN recently voted to begin formal discussions on such weapons which include drones, tanks and automated machine guns. Ahead of this, the group of founders of AI and robotics companies have sent an open letter to the UN calling for it to prevent the arms race that is currently under way for killer robots. In their letter, the founders warn the review conference of the convention on conventional weapons that this arms race threatens to usher in the "third revolution in warfare" after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Back in 2013, Daniel DiRocco felt stuck in a career rut. After four years working in sales for a major tobacco company, he was determined to explore new career opportunities, develop himself, and make an impact. He started spending his nights studying for the GMAT and researching business schools. For Daniel, a full-time MBA seemed like the best way to make a career switch. Just one month into a two-year MBA program at the George Washington University School of Business (GWSB), he had eight interviews and two internship offers for jobs in brand management.

President Trump has been out of the White House for over two weeks at his golf course and his message about his return says that during his time away he witnessed the worst "Fake News" he's seen. He will address the nation Monday night about Afghanistan and South Asia.

When Vishal Sikka, the then CEO of Infosys and the now the vice-chairman, arrived in a driverless golf cart at the firm's Bengaluru Campus recently, it showed the world how artificial intelligence or AI may become the new world order in the years to come. The software, 'driving' the cart, had been developed by Infosys together with IIT-Delhi. The vehicle can be used on a pre-determined route. "This is an example of the kind of things we are using to teach our employees," said Mr. Sikka. "We built the autonomous systems in the cart to teach our employees to build autonomous driving technology."

We have already established the importance of APIs in today's digital world (read about it here). With APIs playing such an important role in keeping us connected, it's necessary to maintain the API's performance as well as availability. There are multiple aspects to consider when monitoring APIs, from integration to performance issues, therefore a general monitoring strategy that only accounts for up-time is not ideal. APIs power complex integrations and allow disparate applications to work together to build a more interactive and connected digital environment. It allows data exchange between services but such connections and integrations can create multiple points of vulnerability in the network.

Two years ago, a Chinese chip-design expert named Micree Zhan was reading China's seminal science-fiction novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, while wrestling with how to create a new processor. He had already designed custom chips for the company he co-founded, Bitmain, that had made it into the world's leading bitcoin miner, allowing it to dominate the new, hyper-competitive industry of unearthing bitcoins. Now he needed a chip that could launch Bitmain onto a new trajectory, one that would help it master a world-altering technology called deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. While performing his nightly meditation, a practice he has kept up for nearly a decade, it suddenly came to Zhan. "It was late at night, and something inspired me--Sophon!" he recalls. A sophon is a fictional proton-sized supercomputer from The Three-Body Problem that is sent by an alien civilization to halt scientific progress on Earth. The aliens use it to take over Earth when their own planet is destroyed by the chaotic gravitational forces of its three suns.

SINGAPORE - Plans are underway to turn every lamp post into a smart lamp post that can carry and transmit information gathered from surveillance cameras and sensors around the country. The network of interconnected lamp posts could form the spine of the Smart Nation Sensor Platform (SNSP), which aims to use artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to analyse, for instance, video footage collected by government agencies. These could be used to detect anomalies and predict situations such as potentially unruly crowds and traffic congestion. "We are making every lamp post a smart lamp post to mount different types of sensors," Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in his National Day Rally speech on Sunday (Aug 20) when he spoke about making Singapore a Smart Nation. The AI-based video analytics system is slated for a trial in Orchard Road and selected housing estates from October (2017).

This episode of Fast Forward was recorded in the IBM Watson Experience Center here in New York City. My guest was Rob High, the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of IBM Watson. High works across multiple teams within IBM, including engineering, development, and strategy. He is one of the most lucid thinkers in the space of artificial intelligence, and our conversation covered many of the way that technology is reshaping our jobs, our society and our lives. Read and watch our conversation below. Dan Costa: What is the dominant misconception that people have about artificial intelligence? Rob High: I think the most common problem that we're running into with people talking about AI is they still live in the world where I think Hollywood has amplified this idea that cognitive computing, AI, is about replicating the human mind, and it's really not. Things like the Turing test tend to reinforce that what we're measuring is the idea of AI being able to compete with fooling people into believing that what you're dealing with is another human being, but that's really not been where we have found the greatest utility. This even goes back to, if you look at almost every other tool that has ever been created, our tools tend to be most valuable when they're amplifying us, when they're extending our reach, when they're increasing our strength, when they're allowing us to do things that we can't do by ourselves as human beings. That's really the way that we need to be thinking about AI as well, and to the extent that we actually call it augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence.

A next revolution in warfare where killer robots, or autonomous weapons systems, are common in battlefields is about to start. Both scientists and industry are worried. The world's top artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics companies have used a conference in Melbourne to collectively urge the United Nations to ban killer robots or lethal autonomous weapons. An open letter by 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries was launched at the world's biggest artificial intelligence conference, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), as the UN delays meeting until later this year to discuss the robot arms race. Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales, released the letter at the opening of the opening of the conference, the world's pre-eminent gathering of experts in artificial intelligence and robotics.

Neither love nor money could get reporters in to the Honor press conference at CES 2017 in Las Vegas January – unless they had preregistered. Keynote addresses at the world's biggest consumer electronics show routinely attract a full house, but in the country that gave the world Apple, the international press corps seemed fixated on the touted "epic" capabilities of the Honor Magic, the latest model in the budget smartphone brand by Chinese manufacturer Huawei. There are almost as many mobile phone subscribers in the world as there are people – 5 billion devices, for a population of 7.5 billion, according to the 2017 global edition of the GSMA's Mobile Economy report. But the fact that a new launch can elicit so much hype is evidence that we still can't get enough. Huawei's Honor Magic might be the first, but surely by no means the last, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled smartphone.