Do you know what is common between San Bernardino's shooting spree and the terrorist attacks in Paris last month? Jillennials, Jihadis who are Millennials. We mine data worldwide, a lot of it, a ton of it, every day and every night, and we do this for a living at PredictifyMe. We have partnership with the United Nations to protect school-goers in Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan and Lebanon using our proprietary software SecureSim and Soothsayer . When the Paris attacks unfolded, we asked ourselves (and our database), how can we use data sciences to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Can we find out what factors influence an otherwise ordinary citizen to become radicalized?

Internet platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk let companies break jobs into smaller tasks and offer them to people across the globe. But, do they democratize work or exploit the disempowered? 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.

As the global population ages, the number of cancer cases is going up. New cancer diagnoses are expected to rise by 70% in the next 2 decades, from 14 million to around 22 million, according to an estimate by the World Health Organization. Corporate giants like Google and IBM are already focusing on making breakthroughs in oncology, using advanced AI algorithms for early detection and personalized treatment of cancer. Google DeepMind announced a research partnership with the University College London Hospitals' radiotherapy department. DeepMind will test the use of machine learning to reduce the time it takes to plan radiotherapy treatment for hard-to-treat cancers of the head and neck.

Russian hackers have been implicated by the CIA and FBI in an audacious effort to sway voters in the recent U.S. presidential election in the direction of Donald Trump. Like other key events in U.S. history, such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11, the revelation of the Russian cyber intrusion is a wake-up call. It signals that a new "code war" is underway through the weaponization of information. The irony can't be missed, of course, that the CIA, which itself sought to influence democratic elections around the world from the earliest days of the Cold War, is calling out the Russians. Former CIA director Bill Colby once regaled me with tales of his years as a young operative in Italy, paying off journalists and channeling laundered funds to the Christian Democrats in elections during the 1950s to (successfully) defeat the Communists at the polls.

Most of us already know that adopting new cloud applications can boost a business's productivity by enabling organizations to be more agile and ready to change course in our fast-moving and connected digital world. But the rapid adoption of cloud apps and services also brings with it profound security threats, including visibility and control challenges that aren't present in traditional on-premises environments. At the same time, the cloud - because of its interconnected, flexible and adaptable nature - can also provide new possibilities for addressing cloud security problems. By leveraging the power of the cloud with a data science and machine learning cloud-based solution, security and risk professionals can solve many of the traditional security challenges found in popular apps like Office 365, Google Drive, Salesforce and Box. In her session at 19th Cloud Expo, Deena Thomchick, Senior Director of Cloud Security at Symantec, detailed how cloud-based data science, machine learning, computational analysis and intelligent algorithms can work together to help to deliver truly intelligent and responsive security and compliance for the cloud.

Episode Summary: Accenture is a leading global professional services company in the tech space, providing services to many of the Fortune 500 and their global equivalents. The company recently conducted a study, combined with expertise from economists and AI researchers, about the longer-term economic impact of artificial intelligence around the world. In this episode, I spoke with Chief Technology Officer Paul Daugherty, who has been with Accenture since 1986, and who was joined by Global Technology R&D Lead Marc Carrel-Billiard. We met up at a coffee shop after an AI Summit in San Francisco, and I asked Paul and Marc about what they had learned from this newly-published study and what they consider to be the significant impacts of *AI and automation on the future job market. Brief Recognition: Paul Daugherty is Accenture's CTO and leads the company's Technology Innovation & Ecosystem group.

No longer simply the subject of science-fiction movies, artificial intelligence is making its way into the insurance enterprise. According to Accenture, four in five insurers are planning to or have deployed some sort of artificial intelligence technology in their enterprises. Allstate Business Insurance deployed ABie -- the Allstate Business Insurance Expert -- virtual assistant to help walk agents through the quoting process for complex products. The context-aware technology understands agents inputs and is able to direct them through the process without using the call center. AIG has partnered with Human Condition Safety to deploy devices that "couples wearable technology with artificial intelligence (AI) and building information modeling."

Alexander Hitzinger is latest auto specialist to be recruited by technology giant He helped engineer the car company's return to the Le Mans endurance race He helped engineer the car company's return to the Le Mans endurance race Apple poached the technical director of Porsche's race car programme earlier this year, a company source said on Friday. Hitzinger helped Porsche, owned by Volkswagen, return to endurance racing and to develop the 919 hybrid sports car from scratch, much in the same way Apple is now looking into building its own vehicle. Apple's latest patent describes technology for a collision avoidance system that is designed for robots, or self-driving cars. And it uses what it has learned from previous encounters for new ones. Facebook copies Snapchat AGAIN with new'photo frame'... Meet Fyodor: Russia's spacebot put through its paces on... Will Apple's next iPhone FOLD?

Many current fears around AI and automation center around the idea that superintelligence could somehow "take over," turning streets around the globe into scenes from The Terminator. While there is much to be gained from discussing the safe development of AI, there's another more imminent danger: Autonomous weapons. On Friday, after three years of negotiations, the UN unanimously agreed to take action. At the Fifth Review Conference of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, countries around the world agreed to begin formal discussions--which will take place for two weeks at the 2017 UN convention in Geneva--on a possible ban of lethal, autonomous weapons. Talks will begin in April or August, and 88 countries have agreed to attend.

Born of research in the Amazon forest, the Plantix mobile app is helping farmers on three continents quickly identify plant diseases using artificial intelligence. For several years in the Brazilian rain forest, a team of young German researchers studied the emission and mitigation of greenhouse gases due to changing land use. The team's analysis was yielding new knowledge, but the farmers they worked with weren't interested in those findings. They wanted to know how to treat crops being ravaged by pathogens. "They couldn't understand why we can estimate the carbon stock of their soil, but we couldn't give them an idea of how to treat damaged plants in an appropriate way," said Robert Strey, one of the researchers.