Each morning when she wakes up, Kristy Milland powers up her home computer in Toronto, logs into Amazon Mechanical Turk, and waits for her computer to ding. Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), which has been around for over a decade, is an online platform where people can perform small tasks for pay. Milland is looking for job postings, or "HITs"--and the alerts tell her when a listing matches her criteria. "The alerts go off once a minute," Milland said. "I break from what I'm doing to see if it's a good HIT before I accept the job." Sometimes, a group of HITs is posted. "If a batch comes up and it's lunchtime, or I have a doctor's appointment, or my dog needs to go out," said Milland, "I drop everything and do it. If this is how you feed your children, you don't leave." Milland is one of more than 500,000 "Turkers"--contract workers who perform small tasks on Amazon's digital platform, which they refer to as "mTurk." The number of active workers, who live across the globe, is estimated to run between 15,000 and 20,000 per month, according to Panos Ipeirotis, a computer scientist and professor at New York University's business school. According to Ipeirotis, in October 2016, American Turkers are mostly women.

Taiwan will shoot down any drones that are found flying into its airports' territory, the country's defense minister said Saturday. The comments came after a drone was found at Taipei Songshan Airport resulting in closure of the airport for nearly an hour Monday. Defense Minister Feng Shih-kuan said that officers can shoot down any drones that fly into the airports' territory without prior approval. He also noted that a rise in drone use has posed security concerns to airports. "If the threat is imminent, there is no need to ask for the approval of the superior," Feng said, according to Taiwan's Central News Agency.

Security technology company Radware (NASDAQ:RDWR) has acquired machine learning security company Seculert for an undisclosed amount. The team and technology acquisition provides Radware with important new threat analytics capabilities that combine its big data platform with Seculert's cloud-based machine learning and behavioral analysis. Although the deal will have a negligible impact on short-term EPS, I view it as a necessary longer term investment in next-generation technologies that will reap rewards to Radware as it sells its enhanced offerings to enterprises and data centers. Israel-based Seculert was founded in 2010 by Alex Milstein, Aviv Raff and Dudi Matot to utilize machine learning to improve perimeter cyber security defenses for enterprises. The company uses a combination of data analytics, machine learning and behavioral analysis to create visibility without requiring hardware.

Will A.I. make our government smarter and more responsive – or is that the last step towards the end of privacy? As chief scientist of U.S. Government Accountability Office, Tim Persons conceives its vision for advanced data analytics. Learn about the promise and challenges around government A.I. and what those portend for private sector companies. Dr. David A. Bray began work in public service at age 15, later serving in the private sector before returning as IT Chief for the CDC's Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program during 9/11; volunteering to deploy to Afghanistan to "think differently" on military and humanitarian issues; and serving as a Senior Executive advocating for increased information interoperability, cybersecurity, and civil liberty protections. He completed a PhD in from Emory University's business school and two post-docs at MIT and Harvard. He serves as a Visiting Executive In-Residence at Harvard University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a Visiting Associate at the University of Oxford. He has received both the Arthur S, Flemming Award and Roger W. Jones Award for Executive Leadership. In 2016, Business Insider named him one of the top "24 Americans Who Are Changing the World". Dr. Timothy M. Persons is a member of the Senior Executive Service of the U.S. federal government and was appointed the Chief Scientist of the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2008. In addition to establishing the vision for advanced data analytic activities at GAO, he also serves to direct GAO's Center for Science, Technology, and Engineering (CSTE), a group of highly specialized scientists, engineers, and operations research staff. In these roles he directs science and technology (S&T) studies and is an expert advisor and chief consultant to the GAO, Congress, and other federal agencies and government programs on cutting-edge S&T, key highly-specialized complex systems, engineering policies and best practices, and original research studies in the fields of engineering, computer, and the physical and biological sciences to ensure strategic and effective use of S&T in the federal sector. Michael Krigsman: Welcome to Episode #216 of CxOTalk. I'm Michael Krigsman, I'm an industry analyst and the host of CxOTalk, where we bring truly amazing people together to talk about issues like the one we're talking about today, which is the role of AI and the impact on public policy; or maybe I should say, the impact of public policy on AI. Our guest today, we have two guests actually, are Tim Persons, who is the Chief Scientist of the General Accountability Office of the United States Government, and David Bray, who has been on CxOTalk many times, the Chief Information Officer of the Federal Communications Commission. And David, let's start with you. Maybe, just introduce yourself briefly.

This was the title of a very popular book published in 2012, featuring several job interview questions (brain teasers) asked by Google's hiring managers to candidates. They apparently dropped all these questions, as they found out that they were not good indicators of career success. Do you think you are smart enough to work for Google? I had one phone interview with Google long ago, and was rejected right away. The interviewer was just focused on very technical details, and spent all her time arguing about Lasso regression, and was clearly looking for a specialist, dismissing people with a broad range of skills and non-standard approach to solving tech problems.

MIAMI – Small drones coated with horsehair and a sticky gel could one day help pollinate crops and offset the costly loss of bee populations worldwide, researchers in Japan say. The miniature robots, described in the journal Chem, are a long way from being deployed in the field, but researchers say they may offer a partial solution to the loss of bees due to disease and climate change. "The findings, which will have applications for agriculture and robotics, among others, could lead to the development of artificial pollinators and help counter the problems caused by declining honeybee populations," said lead author Eijiro Miyako, a chemist at the Nanomaterials Research Institute in the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). In 2007, Miyako began experimenting with liquids that could be used as electrical conductors. One failed attempt produced a sticky gel like hair wax that he relegated to a storage cabinet for almost a decade. The gel was rediscovered during a lab cleanup, and its unchanged nature gave Miyako an idea.

Joab Rosenberg is the former deputy head analyst for the Israeli government and CEO of Epistema. Nature magazine announced in late January that a computer designed by Google's DeepMind defeated a human master in the ancient Chinese board game, "Go." This impressive achievement once again raised the expectations for a predicted future in which computers will have artificial intelligence, with major media outlets worldwide touting this anticipated future. One of the major questions raised in response to DeepMind's achievement is what are the outer limits, if any, of intelligent machines? In November of last year, Dr. Kira Radinsky, a computer scientist and "machine learning" expert, argued in the Israeli newspaper "Ha'aretz" that computers will be able to accurately predict the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The U.S. military has provided at least ¥880 million ($7.75 million) in funds to researchers at universities and public institutions in Japan since 2007, U.S. Defense Department materials showed Friday. According to information released by the U.S. government, funding was given to more than 100 projects in a variety of fields including artificial intelligence, robots, laser technology and carbon fiber materials. The Defense Department records suggest Japanese researchers have long relied on such U.S. funding amid declining subsidies from their own government. The United States has been collecting information on advanced research and is building relations with researchers to help maintain the military's technological advantage. Recipients of large amounts of funds include Osaka University, which got ¥243 million, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which got ¥90 million, the data showed.

Major smartphone makers are following Apple and Google into the smartphone trend of 2017: artificial intelligence. LG's G6 could feature Google Assistant, Samsung said its Galaxy S8 will feature its own AI assistant, and Huawei's Mate 9 is the first phone with Amazon's Alexa. The Chinese conglomerate has been especially vocal about AI in their smartphones--unusual for top smartphone makers, who are normally secretive about their latest devices. Huawei said they will have an AI-focused "Superphone" in 2020--just a year before their goal to be the world's top smartphone maker. The Chinese tech giant has been sitting at No. 3 since last year, behind Samsung and Apple.

Billions of workers around the world are paid to perform easy-to-automate or repetitive tasks. Whether it's administrative work, scheduling, decision making, inventory or most, a robot could usually do it better... and faster. Artificial intelligence develops more and more each given year, promising to redefine the way we live, move and work. The AI analytics research industry funding has rising from an $8.2 billion investment in 2013 to a predicted $70 billion by 2020, according to a Bank of America report citing IDC research. A recent Harvard Business Review study found that managers currently spend about 54% of their time handling administrative coordination and control when they could be making higher judgement calls.