Seeing Mark Zuckerberg summoned to Washington as a consequence of the improperly accessed personal data of millions of Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica marks a powerful defining moment of 2018 and a pivotal moment in our digital existence. Two fronts have clashed: the fast-moving pack of internet giants, harvesting and mining seas of data, and the static, slow-moving forces of politics and regulations. At the center of it all is artificial intelligence. Nobody wants to hand off their data unless they feel that their digital footprint is protected and guarded. This desire now is also supported by legislation.

Imagine credit card rewards tailored to your spending, travel options based on your past preferences, text prompts to shift some money over to savings and scans of your spending patterns to block fraudsters from using your card. Card issuers are doing all of this now – with much more in the works – all powered by artificial intelligence. The public faces of these AI-based systems are such as Alexa, Erica (Bank of America), Mezi (American Express) and Watson (IBM). Behind the public faces, these big data systems look at your past behavior, crunch the numbers and reply with personalized suggestions based on your spending and savings goals. Here's how AI is changing credit card rewards and even how you budget and save: "Customize is the key word," says Craig Snodgrass, chief data officer at Cardlytics, which partners with more than 2,000 financial institutions to run their online and mobile banking rewards programs.

Between 2009 and 2010, every fifth smartphone sold was a Blackberry. By 2017, Blackberry was making headlines for failing to claim even 0.0 per cent of the global smartphone market (it managed just 0.04 per cent that year), but such a dramatic decline was not enough to deter it completely. Without the same level of fanfare that comes with the unveiling of a new iPhone – or even a Samsung smartphone – most people may have missed the launch of the latest BlackBerry device, though according to its makers, it's "an icon reborn". The BlackBerry Key2 LE is actually a cheaper version of the BlackBerry Key2, a high-spec smartphone released earlier this summer. What makes both phones "iconic" is the inclusion of a physical keyboard.

"A new iOS update is now available," the message reads. "Please update from the iOS 12 beta." It will pop up repeatedly, as people use the phone, and even when it is dismissed it will come back. What's more, there is not actually a new iOS update, so the notification is impossible to act on or make go away. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

When Samsung launched the Galaxy Home speaker earlier this month, people were quick to point out how its name seemed ripped off from Google. Not to be outdone, Huawei is unveiling its own AI speaker here at IFA 2018, and it's clearly borrowed much more from the Google Home... just not the name. The AI Cube is a cylindrical speaker that looks like a stretched out version of Google's device, though it will offer Amazon's Alexa instead of Assistant. Like Samsung, Huawei is promising high-quality audio on its speaker. That's not all -- the AI Cube is also a 4G router.

August 20th 2018 – Reykjavik, Iceland – Researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Massive Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS) worked with CCP Games using their massively multiplayer online game set in space, EVE Online to gain a more granular understanding of patterns of proteins arranged within the body's cells. Built on a map that shows hundreds of thousands of microscopic images of human cells, EVE Online players worked alongside an artificial intelligence to accomplish this goal. In a study to be published in the September issue of Nature Biotechnology, the researchers found that players, or "citizen scientists" as KTH and MMOS now call them, helped boost the artificial intelligence system used for predicting protein localization on a subcellular level. The combination of crowdsourcing and AI led to improved classification of subcellular protein patterns and the first-time identification of ten new members of the family of cellular structures known as "Rods & Rings," according to Emma Lundberg, a researcher from KTH who leads the Cell Atlas, part of the Human Protein Atlas, at the Science for Life joint research center. She is also the first ever scientist who was put into a videogame as an agent NPC (non-playable character) to direct the project in-game as Professor Lundberg.

Search has always been a key enterprise technology going back to the days of the first enterprise content management systems. This is hardly surprising given how important finding the right data is for any of the applications used by enterprises in their business processes. Since the rise of big data and the use of big data sets, search has become even more important. If enterprise data is the real wealth of a business, then search is the tool that uncovers that wealth. But what do you do with the increasingly large amounts of data that enterprises now have access to?

Artificial Intelligence is growing at a rapid pace in the last decade. You have seen it all unfold before your eyes. From self-driving cars to Google Brain, artificial intelligence has been at the center of these amazing huge-impact projects. To aspiring candidates, it is the right time to become an artificial intelligence engineer. The buzz has been seen on our platform as many artificial intelligence experts are coming forward and broadcasting their projects.

Sony won't allow Fortnite players on PlayStation to play against their friends with other consoles – because those people are having inferior experiences. The company might allow people to take part in cross-platform play on other titles, said the company's boss. But Fortnite on PlayStation will not get that privilege, he said. And that's because the best experience is to play on PlayStation, he said. So allowing other people to play would be a compromise.

Video games that allow players to buy digital items using real money must now carry a special warning icon on the box under new rules designed to stop children unwittingly spending hundreds on in-game purchases. The new warning icon -- a hand holding a credit card -- will appear on game boxes alongside existing warnings for other dangerous content, including references to sex and drugs, violence, bad language, gambling and discrimination. The new warning has been created by the Pan European Game Information (Pegi) organisation, which provides game ratings for most of Europe, including the UK. It will appear on video game boxes later this year, ready for Christmas, Pegi says. Many popular games, including popular football simulator Fifa and multiplayer shooter Fortnite, now offer players the chance to buy in-game items.