Growing artificial intelligence systems are unearthing previously unknown wrongdoing in organisations, but they should be matched by human oversight. It all started as a normal day for David and John (not their real names). Out of the blue, the Audit and Compliance team called them, seeking clarifications about some of their recent trades. Shortly afterward, David and John realised they had just become more victims of the rise of the machines. Both traders had engaged in inappropriate behaviours. David had favoured a single counterparty at the expense of his employer but this had been cloaked by a complex trading pattern.

A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: "Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target." A one-gram shaped charge can punch a hole in nine millimeters of steel, so presumably you can also punch a hole in someone's head. You can fit about three million of those in a semi-tractor-trailer. You can drive up I-95 with three trucks and have 10 million weapons attacking New York City. They don't have to be very effective, only 5 or 10% of them have to find the target. There will be manufacturers producing millions of these weapons that people will be able to buy just like you can buy guns now, except millions of guns don't matter unless you have a million soldiers. You need only three guys to write the program and launch them. So you can just imagine that in many parts of the world humans will be hunted. They will be cowering underground in shelters and devising techniques so that they don't get detected. This is the ever-present cloud of lethal autonomous weapons. Mary Wareham laughs a lot. It usually sounds the same regardless of the circumstance -- like a mirthful giggle the blonde New Zealander can't suppress -- but it bubbles up at the most varied moments. Wareham laughs when things are funny, she laughs when things are awkward, she laughs when she disagrees with you. And she laughs when things are truly unpleasant, like when you're talking to her about how humanity might soon be annihilated by killer robots and the world is doing nothing to stop it. One afternoon this spring at the United Nations in Geneva, I sat behind Wareham in a large wood-paneled, beige-carpeted assembly room that hosted the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), a group of 121 countries that have signed the agreement to restrict weapons that "are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately"-- in other words, weapons humanity deems too cruel to use in war. The UN moves at a glacial pace, but the CCW is even worse.

It's smart torpedoes that wait, like mines, until special sounds wake them up and tell them to attack. Last summer, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board commissioned a study to examine angles on a particular challenge for DoD, with participants drawn from consulting, defense and technical industries, as well as the military and academia. In possibly the worst John Lennon cover ever made, participants were asked to "Imagine if….We could covertly deploy networks of smart mines and UUVs [Unmanned Underwater Vehicles] to blockade and deny the sea surface, differentiating between fishing vessels and fighting ships… …and not put U.S. Service personnel or high-value assets at risk." The scenario, and several others like it, were at the core of the study on autonomy, specifically autonomous machines and computers and systems, and what they mean for the Pentagon and the wars of the future. This matters a great deal, because what the Pentagon thinks of autonomy will shape the weapons it orders and the way it fights wars, and, likely, the way that laws of war are written.

New Delhi: Delhi-based artificial intelligence start-up Octo.ai has raised 200,000 from early stage investor Outbox Ventures, Rahul Khanna, managing partner of venture debt fund Trifecta Capital and Jaspreet Bindra, head of e-commerce at Mahindra & Mahindra, the company said on Tuesday. The company will use the fund for enhancing technology. Ltd) is an open-source analytics platform built for machine learning. It helps companies retain their data and apply machine learning to power real-time insights, recommendations and personalised feeds on their platform. It allows them to install Octo, and send personalised push messages to each user to drive more active users and engagement.

Facebook has released AI code that can help machines to'see' Expert calls for long-term blueprint for China's AI industry AI guides your daily life, but is it liberal or conservative? Visit Orlando's new app puts an AI tour guide in the palm of your hand

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

AI, and the branch of this discipline called deep learning, crashed the public consciousness on March 9 when Google DeepMind's AlphaGo program beat South Korean champion Lee Se-dol at ancient Chinese game Go. Since then, barely a week has gone by without a fresh breakthrough – or scare story. True AI implies a change in the relationship between machine and human – from predictable task worker reliant on our instructions, to a system which has the capacity to surprise and surpass us. For many, the loss of control inherent in this change is alarming. Hal and Skynet are suddenly too close for comfort.

A staff member presents a robot designed for children at the 2016 Chinese Congress on Artificial Intelligence (CCAI 2016) in Beijing, capital of China, Aug. 26, 2016. The two-day CCAI 2016 kicked off here Friday. BEIJING, Aug. 26 (Xinhua) -- Tan Tieniu, a top expert in China's artificial intelligence (AI) sector, on Friday suggested creating a plan to guide the country's AI research and development in the next decade or longer. China should independently develop an AI innovation system, with a focus on core technology, high-end equipment and applications, basic theories and facilities in the AI sector, said Tan, vice president of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence. By doing so, China could have a world-leading AI industry by 2025, said Tan, also vice president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, at the two-day 2016 China Conference on Artificial Intelligence (CCAI 2016), which will conclude on Saturday.

Japanese research center Riken and twenty companies have created a joint platform to develop applications of artificial intelligence (AI) in the fields of medicine, industry or infrastructure, announced today the Nikkei newspaper. Research Center of Advanced Intelligence Integrated opens on September 1st in Tokyo, and will include the participation of Japan's leading automotive, Toyota Motor and other tech giants including Sony and NEC, among other large companies and " start-up "Japanese. The aim is to develop artificial intelligence systems capable of solving specific problems involving a large amount of data analyzed. One of the specific fields of application is industrial manufacturing, in which Toyota and NEC working in an AI technology to help promote the efficiency of production chains from the analysis of details of the procedure that are beyond human workers, according to Japanese newspaper he said. In the health area, Sony computer research branch is developing an AI system to recommend personalized treatments to patients after comparing your medical history with all available clinical studies.

An "AI writing robot" produced up to 58 articles per day for a Chinese publication at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this month. The Xiaomingbot wrote reports for the news syndication service Toutiao, delivering news items within two minutes of events ending. During the two weeks of the Olympics, the robot reporter produced a total of 450 stories. Xiaomingbot is not the first artificial intelligence (AI) reporter, though the quantity of reports makes it arguably the most prolific. The articles--ranging from around 100 words to 821 articles--appear to have been well received by readers, though some comments seen by Quartz reportedly claimed the prose was "too robotic."