Editor's Note: The Falling Walls Conference is an annual, global gathering of forward thinking individuals from 80 countries organized by the Falling Walls Foundation. Each year, on November 9--the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall--20 of the world's leading scientists are invited to Berlin to present their current breakthrough research. The aim of the conference is to address two questions: Which will be the next walls to fall? And how will that change our lives? The author of the following essay is speaking at this year's Falling Walls gathering.

Machine learning, as many readers will know, is a branch of artificial intelligence. It's essentially a method of programming which gives computers the ability to learn something on their own. So, then, after it's learned to fish, if you ask the computer a question, or ask it for a fish, its answer, or the fish, doesn't have to be in its memory banks – it can go and catch a new fish, or just make one up based on the information about fish it has already acquired. This is like the example of Google's DeepMind algorithm creating entirely new images of cats, people and other images based on the millions of images of cats, people and whatnot it had already seen. The new images the algorithm was creating were not exact replicas of any it had seen, and quite frankly they were terrible, but you get the idea.

British universities are being stripped of artificial intelligence (AI) experts in a brain drain to the private sector that is hampering research and disrupting teaching at some of the country's leading institutions. Scores of talented scientists have left or passed up university posts for salaries two to five times higher at major technology firms, where besides getting better pay, new recruits can take on real-world problems with computer power and datasets than academia cannot hope to provide. The impact of the hiring frenzy is revealed in a confidential Guardian survey of the UK's elite Russell Group universities, which found that many top institutions were struggling to keep up with the demand from tech firms that are aggressively expanding their AI research groups. One university executive said AI researchers were courted by industry on a routine basis and that departments regularly missed out on the best talent when companies made better offers. "We need top quality staff to teach and research and the implications of not achieving this don't need to be spelt out," the executive told the Guardian.

ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland's defense ministry has admitted sending staff to test reconnaissance drones in contested land held by Israel - an embarrassing blow for the neutral European country's status as an honest broker in the Middle East.

The increased use of artificial intelligence in financial services could pose a risk to stability, according to an international regulator. The Financial Stability Board, which includes all G20 major economies, has published a report on the implications of the increasingly widespread use of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the financial sector. It has raised concerns about an "arms race" for the use of artificial intelligence, with financial services companies investing in it simply because their competitors are. While the report said there were likely to be benefits from this development, such as the more efficient processing of information and improved regulatory compliance, this was not without risks because of the potential emergence of new "systemically important" players. The report said: "AI and machine learning services are increasingly being offered by a few large technology firms. "Like in other platform-based markets, there may be value in financial institutions using similar third-party providers given these providers' reputation, scale, and interoperability.

Just last month on June 22 and 23, the United Nations Public Service Forum 2017 took place in The Hague to celebrate public service delivery and to discuss how innovation is shaping the government of the future as well as how to accelerate such innovation. With the ever-increasing amount of data collected through a wide variety of sources and sensors, the potential for computers to learn from this data and take over certain tasks is increasing. Although the potential of technological innovations is often overrated in the short term, it seems that AI is treated as the "shiny new typewriter" of which we should be wary. AI is perceived to have the potential to accomplish much of the valuable work currently done by humans, specifically routine work where humans make an assessment within one second. One should avoid giving the computer too much autonomy in case it runs loose and acts outside the interest of the humans it serves, or creates its own bias in the form of discrimination.

In the computer game StarCraft, humans still have an edge over artificial intelligence. That was clear on Tuesday after professional StarCraft player Song Byung-gu defeated four different bots in the first contest to pit AI systems against pros in live bouts of the game. One of the bots, dubbed "CherryPi," was developed by Facebook's AI research lab. The other bots came from Australia, Norway, and Korea. The contest took place at Sejong University in Seoul, Korea, which has hosted annual StarCraft AI competitions since 2010.

How does a brick-and-mortar company of age create disruptive innovations? Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark, showed the way in 2013, by introducing MobilePay, a new and convenient way to transfer money. Today, the MobilePay is the Nordic's leading money transfer app with 3.8 million users in its core market, Denmark. Now, Danske Bank is applying the same approach as with MobilePay - but instead of payments, it focuses on customer behavior and analytics. The bank has created an in-hose startup, Advanced Analytics, whose sole purpose is to shake things up with bleeding edge AI and Machine Learning technology.

Renowned physicist Prof Stephen Hawking has said robots will eventually completely replace humanity. Prof Hawking said that he believes artificial intelligence (AI) will eventually reach a level where it will essentially be a "new form of life that will outperform humans" in an interview with WIRED magazine. He said: "I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that improves and replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans."

Upsampling image and video files usually leads to pixelation and soft textures, simply because algorithms are not capable of replacing non-existing image detail. But scientists at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany have come up with a clever solution that is capable of producing better results than anything we've seen so far. The team has developed a tool called EnhanceNet-PAT, which is capable of creating high-definition versions of low-resolution images, using artificial intelligence. It's not the first attempt at solving the super-resolution task but the approach is a new one. Talking to Digital Trends, Mehdi M.S. Sajjadi, a member of the research team said "Before this work, even the state of the art has been producing very blurry images, especially at textured regions. The reason for this is that they asked their neural networks the impossible - to reconstruct the original image with pixel-perfect accuracy. Since this is impossible, the neural networks produce blurry results. We take a different approach by instead asking the neural network to produce realistic textures. To do this, the neural network takes a look at the whole image, detects regions, and uses this semantic information to produce realistic textures and sharper images."