The world's leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics experts, including Tesla's Elon Musk and Google's Mustafa Suleyman, have urged the United Nations to take action to prevent the development of killer robots before it is too late. The letter signed by 116 experts from 26 countries opens with the words, "As companies building the technologies in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics that may be repurposed to develop autonomous weapons, we feel especially responsible in raising this alarm." Though none has been build yet, conceptually a killer robot is fully autonomous and can engage, target and kill humans without any human intervention. Unlike a cruise missile or a remotely piloted drone, where humans make all the target decisions, a quadcopter with AI, for example, can search and destroy people that meet pre-defined criteria on its own. "Retaining human control over use of force is a moral imperative and essential to promote compliance with international law, and ensure accountability," Mary Wareham, advocacy director, Arms Division, Human Rights Watch, wrote in January.

One central mystery of neural NLP is what neural models know'' about their subject matter. When a neural machine translation system learns to translate from one language to another, does it learn the syntax or semantics of the languages? Can this knowledge be extracted from the system to fill holes in human scientific knowledge? Existing typological databases contain relatively full feature specifications for only a few hundred languages. Exploiting the existance of parallel texts in more than a thousand languages, we build a massive many-to-one NMT system from 1017 languages into English, and use this to predict information missing from typological databases.

Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS[1][4] (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, most noted for being a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson, work which was based partly on fundamental studies done by Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling and Maurice Wilkins. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".[3][6] Crick was an important theoretical molecular biologist and played a crucial role in research related to revealing the helical structure of DNA. He is widely known for use of the term "central dogma" to summarize the idea that genetic information flow in cells is essentially one-way, from DNA to RNA to protein.[7] During the remainder of his career, he held the post of J.W. Kieckhefer Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. His later research centered on theoretical neurobiology and attempts to advance the scientific study of human consciousness. He remained in this post until his death; "he was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end" according to Christof Koch.[8] Crick was the first son of Harry Crick (1887–1948) and Annie Elizabeth Crick (née Wilkins; 1879–1955). He was born and raised in Weston Favell, then a small village near the English town of Northampton, in which Crick's father and uncle ran the family's boot and shoe factory. His grandfather, Walter Drawbridge Crick (1857–1903), an amateur naturalist, wrote a survey of local foraminifera (single-celled protists with shells), corresponded with Charles Darwin,[9] and had two gastropods (snails or slugs) named after him. At an early age, Francis was attracted to science and what he could learn about it from books. As a child, he was taken to church by his parents. But by about age 12, he said he did not want to go anymore, as he preferred a scientific search for answers over religious belief.[10] Walter Crick, his uncle, lived in a small house on the south side of Abington Avenue; he had a shed at the bottom of his little garden where he taught Crick to blow glass, do chemical experiments and to make photographic prints. When he was eight or nine he transferred to the most junior form of the Northampton Grammar School, on the Billing Road.

Australian aged care provider, the IRT Group, has announced a world-first partnership with UK-based technology firm RDM Autonomous to develop driverless vehicles for residential aged care facilities. The Australian Ageing Agenda (AAA) reports that RDM Autonomous has recently opened its first satellite office in South Australia, and will be working with the IRT Group to bring autonomous cars to retirement homes. Details of the program will be revealed at the 2017 Information Technology in Aged Care (ITAC) Conference on the Gold Coast in late November, though the AAA reports that the companies plan to introduce RDM's Pod Zero (pictured) for initial testing at IRT's Kangara Waters facility in Canberra. Following the ITAC Conference, the Pod Zero will also make its way to one of the IRT Group's bases in Brisbane. Speaking with the AAA, Winston Mitchell, IRT IT project coordinator, said: "Piloting the technology on private roads within aged care communities hasn't been done before and IRT is eager to understand how driverless cars can improve residents' independence and quality of life". "Pod Zero will be programmed to safely navigate private roads within IRT Communities and residents will be able to hail Pod Zero and travel independently to appointments and social activities within their community."

Dr. Zacharias Voulgaris was born in Athens, Greece. He studied Production Engineering and Management at the Technical University of Crete, shifted to Computer Science through a Masters in Information Systems & Technology (City University of London), and then to Data Science through a PhD on Machine Learning (University of London). He has worked at Georgia Tech as a Research Fellow, at an e-marketing startup in Cyprus as an SEO manager, and as a Data Scientist in both Elavon (GA) and G2 (WA). He also was a Program Manager at Microsoft, on a data analytics pipeline for Bing. Currently he is the CTO of a data science startup in London, UK.

Rebuilding an IT landscape from scratch is often a tantalizing thought. It may mean new tools and processes to analyze vast volumes of data in real time and make more-informed decisions. Perhaps the inclusion of cloud-based models would accelerate the delivery of new capabilities and guarantee secure, continuous operations. Or better yet, the business may decide to take advantage of next-generation technology such as the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, machine learning, digital twins, or advanced analytics. Of course, to many CIOs' disappointment, this dream scenario is simply a luxury that most businesses – from the one-man startup to the largest conglomerate – cannot afford.

With Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sparring over its ethics and China announcing its intention to create a $150 billion domestic industry based on it, Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most discussed topic in the tech news cycle. It's likely to be a talking point no matter what your favourite watering hole for tech news. Billions of dollars have been invested by VCs in AI since 2016 with the US and China leading the race in record funding in terms of deals and dollars. In sharp contrast, Indian startups have collectively raised less than $100 million from (2014-2017YTD), according to data from startup analytics firm Tracxn -- that's smaller than Andrew Ng's recently launched $150 million VC fund. Another way to look at it: Grammarly, a Valley-based spell check tool raised more dollars than all of India's AI startups put together in the past three and a half years.

Scientists in the US say they have created machine learning algorithms that can identify depressed people by scanning for "clues" in Instagram photos. The researchers from the University of Vermont and Harvard University claim their algorithm's detection rate is 70%, adding that it is "more reliable than the 42% success rate of general-practice doctors diagnosing depression in person". "This points toward a new method for early screening of depression and other emerging mental illnesses," says Chris Danforth, of the University of Vermont. The research was done in two stages: the first was about identifying the clues on Instagram photos that suggests the user might be depressed, while the second stage involved teaching the computer to detect those people using machine learning algorithms. The scientists asked for access to the Instagram feed and mental health history of 166 participants, half of whom were reported to have been clinically depressed in the last three years.

I like Gartner's concept of the technology hype cycle. It assumes that expectations of new technologies quickly ramp to an inflated peak, drop into a trough of disillusionment, then gradually ascend a slope of enlightenment until they plateau. Of course, not all technologies complete the cycle or transition through the stages at the same pace. Artificial intelligence (AI) has arguably been in the trough for 60 years. I am thinking of Kubrick's HAL and Roddenberry's "computer" that naturally interact with humans.