The telecommunications services industry is one of the fastest growing industries in the world and is already using machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) to enhance their customer service. According to a study by Transparency Market Research (TMR), the global market for artificial intelligence is estimated to post an impressive 36.1% CAGR between 2016 and 2024, rising to a valuation of US$3,061.35 billion by the end of 2024 from US$126.14 billion in 2015. As the market is seeing a rapid growth in Europe, North America and Latin America, the telecom services spending in Asia-Pacific region was projected to grow by around 2.06% in 2016 compared to 2015. Technavio's market research analysts predict that the global telecom IoT market to grow steadily and post an impressive CAGR of more than 42% by 2020. Even as IoT is set to revolutionize industries in its own way, it is worth noting that IoT would produce terabytes, petabytes and exabytes of big data.

March 25--U.S. Rep. Elise M. Stefanik, R-Willsboro, has introduced a bill to designate a special commission to review artificial-intelligence development in the United States. The independent National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence would be included in the FY 2019 National Defense Authorization Act and be comprised of private sector experts, academics and former Department of Defense officials. The commission's primary responsibilities would be to review advancements in AI across the country, identify national security needs that could be addressed with AI, ensure the United States remains competitive with development, and recommend ways to use such technology more effectively. Ms. Stefanik, who chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, said it is important to create this new commission as the world, including China and Russia, continues to make progress on artificial intelligence development. "The purpose is to jump-start and ignite a national assessment of what our machine learning capabilities need to be to make sure we are a global leader," she said.

The project, which The Cure Parkinson's Trust contributed to, was submitted to the inaugural Benevolent AI Award – a competition run with the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC). Parkinson's UK's research proposal, which demonstrated how AI technology could solve specific research challenges in Parkinson's, was chosen to receive AI-driven research support from BenevolentAI, one of Europe's largest private AI companies. The project will use BenevolentAI platform's capabilities to reason, deduce and suggest entirely new treatments for Parkinson's. The aim is to identify at least three currently available medicines that can be repurposed to address Parkinson's, and two brand-new ways to treat the condition with new drugs. There have been no major breakthroughs in Parkinson's treatments in the last 50 years.

A new report from the OECD – the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development – looked at the extent to which jobs may soon be automated in 32 different countries, and found that 66 million people are at risk of losing their job to machines. That means 14% of jobs currently held by humans could soon be managed by robots. The level of risk varies from industry to industry and country to country, but in the UK about 10% of jobs are considered at high risk. However, the results are a lot more positive when compared with previous studies, some of which estimated the percentage of jobs susceptible to automation could be as high as 47%. So what happens when a person loses their job to a machine? Who is most at risk of being replaced by a robot?

One KUKA robot, one Settlers of Catan board game, and a group of determined professors and passionate students leads to a valuable education in the industries of tomorrow. It's possible to imagine that in the not-too-distant future robots playing board games against human opponents in real life will be relatively common, but for now that scenario is mostly restricted to imagination. That is, of course, unless you happen to look in a somewhat non-descript classroom hidden on the fourth floor of the Computer Science and Mathematics Department at the OTH Regensburg (Technical University of Applied Sciences) in Germany. In this classroom that very scenario is playing out day after day thanks to the efforts of several years of students and a group of determined professors – as well as one KUKA robot that stoically plays the globally popular Settlers of Catan board game at the request of its human masters. It's a great story of providing the tools and resources to help today's students become tomorrow's innovators.

Look at China, which in 2017 outlined plans to become the global leader in AI by 2030 and has already made tremendous progress. Lung cancer is the most common cancer in the country and Chinese life insurer Ping An has developed AI that this year broke records for detecting lung nodules in CT scans. The hope is that this will help staff improve detection of lung cancer. Diagnostics is just one part of healthcare that is being transformed, and we've highlighted five applications for AI that could have a transformative effect on people around the globe. Those of us in countries with relatively good access to affordable healthcare might be so used to seeing a doctor face to face that a health appointment with an AI-powered machine sounds a little sinister. After all, healing people is associated with human touch.

We have a tendency to beat around the bush when we talk to each other. We use extra words, phrases, and non-literal statements just to be polite. But to most robots this is nothing more than "code bloat" in the form of useless language. If you've been called an impolite jerk your entire life, maybe you're just a better robot than most people. Researchers from from the Colorado School of Mines and Tufts University recently conducted a series of experiments involving human-machine interactions.

I grew up in a plattenbau neighborhood, in a micro-district inspired by Le Corbusier. It is fashionable to despise this architectural style, but I must admit that I secretly love factory-built assembled plattenbau projects. The thing is, I love them on the design sketches, on maquette miniatures, I love them in the imagination of their architects, I love them on 70s postcards of an idyllic, innocent urban landscapes of heartland's France towns social housing developments (which we know ended up eventually converting into ethnic ghettos and welfare-subsidised slums). They say mass-production buildings and vast spaces create ghettos. They blame Le Corbusier for their misery.

When I tell people that I work at an AI company, they often follow up with "So what kind of machine learning/deep learning do you do?" This isn't surprising, as most of the market attention (and hype) in and around AI has been centered around Machine Learning, and its high profile subset, Deep Learning, and around Natural Language Processing, with the rise of the chatbot and virtual assistants. But while machine learning is a core component for artificial intelligence, AI is in fact more than just ML. So what does it really mean for an application to be "intelligent"? What does it take to create a system that is "artificially intelligent?

Despite these ongoing discussions, governments seem more and more inclined to continue to invest time, effort, and money in developing cyber capabilities, less concerned about trying to deter hostile activities and more concerned about being able to dominate them. Indeed, much of the publicized comments by senior officials from leading cyber powers demonstrates less concern about defending against attacks and more about being able to execute them. Such a focus makes trying to dissuade hostile actors a nominal token at best, hoping that the sheer volume of cyber fire power may be enough to deter nefarious state cyber activity. In late February 2018, Admiral Rogers – the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command – testified before Congress that the President had not give him specific orders or authority to strike back at Russian cyber operations at their source ahead of the midterm elections. Presumably the intimation was that in the sake of guarding itself, Cyber Command would initiate offensive attacks intent on changing the calculus and behavior of these Russian operations.