When Jason Matheny joined the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) as a program manager in 2009, he made a habit of chatting to the organization's research analysts. "What do you need?" he would ask, and the answer was always the same: a way to make more accurate predictions. "What if we made you an artificially intelligent computer model that forecasts real-world events such as political instability, weapons tests and disease outbreaks?" The analysts' response was enthusiastic, except for one crucial caveat. "It came down to whether they could explain the model to a decision maker--like the secretary of Defense," says Matheny, who is now IARPA's director.

Computer vision continues to find its way into all sorts of apps as the underlying tech powering convenience-oriented image searches. Latest -- and it must be said late -- to the party is fashion ecommerce player Asos, which has just added a visual search feature to its iOS app. The update lets iOS users snap a photo of a garment or fashion accessory with their device camera or pull in an existing outfit shot or Instagram screengrab (say) from their camera roll and have the app show clothes items that are at least in the general fashion ballpark of whatever it is they're trying to find. Asos says the visual search will be rolled out to their Android app "soon". The company says 80 per cent of UK traffic for ASOS comes from a mobile device, as do almost 70 per cent of UK orders -- with consumers spending 80 minutes per month on average in the app.

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That's how the duo are billed when they appear in 1960s adverts to promote a now defunct UK computer company. Using young, attractive women to advertise computers was a common ploy in Britain at the time, when male managers, uninitiated in the complexities of this new technology, viewed the machines as intimidating and opaque. "Computers were expensive and using women to advertise them gave the appearance to managers that jobs involving computers are easy and can be done with a cheap labour force," explains technology historian Marie Hicks. They might have been on a typist's salary, but women like Sadie were not typists – they were skilled computer programmers, minus the prestige or pay the modern equivalent might command. As Hicks' book Programmed Inequality illustrates, women were the largest trained technical workforce of the computing industry during the second world war and through to the mid-sixties.

A digital Nordic bank serving Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland is ready to integrate artificial intelligence into its systems, in order to enhance their current customer relations program. Beginning this autumn, IPsoft's Amelia, a human artificial intelligence platform, will enable Nordnet to scale customer interactions as Nordnet's new digital employee. "Our goal is to offer a world-class customer experience for investments and savings. That is why it is natural for us to supplement our existing customer service team with artificial intelligence. Amelia is a pioneering result of cognitive research and the world's most developed system for artificial intelligence and I look forward to introducing her to our customers this fall," said Peter Dahlgren, CEO of Nordnet.

A new breed of human is on its way. Transhumanists are a group who seek to accelerate the evolution of humanity through science and technology. Oliver Pickup investigates the movement, the implications for humankind and asks, is it morally wrong to augment humans? The world's preeminent'cyborg artist', Neil Harbisson (pictured above), has been stopped "several times a day, every single day, since March 22, 2004". It's impossible for him to forget the date: that Monday, 13 years ago, he had an antenna fixed to his skull in order to'hear' colour.

Find out how to optimize your website to give your customers experiences that will have the biggest ROI for your business. Many people wonder why Europe is so keen to protect people's privacy. The reason dates back from WWII, when French and German governments used centralized citizen files to target, and subsequently deport, Jews and other ethnic minorities. Following this, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights included an entire article about the right to privacy, which gave birth to many laws in European countries. The demand for uniform privacy regulations across the continent leads us to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will take effect in May 2018.

Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen has announced a research collaboration with a company specializing in artificial intelligence (AI) to develop solutions for preventing early aging. The aim of this partnership is to develop medicines to prevent and cure a broad range of diseases associated with aging such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cardiovascular diseases. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cardiovascular diseases are strongly associated with aging and share many characteristics on the molecular level. Experts in the genetics of aging at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine partnered with the Baltimore-based company, Insilico Medicine, specializing in AI to find molecules that can be developed into drugs to cure and prevent these diseases. The objective of this collaboration is to increase health span for everyone on the planet.

As an artificial intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It's perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, Matrix-like, as some sort of human battery. And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. Might I become "the destroyer of worlds," as Oppenheimer lamented after spearheading the construction of the first nuclear bomb? I would take the fame, I suppose, but perhaps the critics are right.

There has never been a better time to be a politician. But it's an even better time to be a machine learning engineer working for a politician. Throughout modern history, political candidates have had only a limited number of tools to take the temperature of the electorate. More often than not, they've had to rely on instinct rather than insight when running for office. Now big data can be used to maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.