WikiLeaks has published thousands of documents claiming to reveal top CIA hacking secrets, including the agency's ability to infiltrate encrypted apps like Whatsapp, break into smart TVs and phones and program self-driving cars. WikiLeaks said the files released on Tuesday - mysteriously dubbed ' Vault 7' - are the most comprehensive release of U.S. spying files ever made public. The leak purportedly includes 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It details intelligence information on CIA-developed software intended to hack iPhones, Android phones, smart TVs and Microsoft, Mac and Linux operating systems. WikiLeaks alleges that some of the remote hacking programs can turn these electronic devices into recording and transmitting stations to spy on their targets.

The CIA is capable of bypassing encryption on a number of popular messaging apps including WhatsApp, according to newly released WikiLeaks documents. The whistle-blowing organisation has just published 8,761 files, which Julian Assange claims account for "the entire hacking capacity of the CIA". The enormous release is the first of several comprising the'Vault 7' collection. A WikiLeaks release claims that the CIA uses malware and hacking tools to remotely hack smartphones and turn TVs into covert microphones. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

The CIA built software that could allow it to turn any phone or smart TV into a listening device, according to WikiLeaks. A division of the US spying agency is built to explore vulnerabilities in gadgets and use them to listen in on their owners, according to new documents made public by Julian Assange. "The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984, but "Weeping Angel", developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization," the organisation wrote in a release. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

Sir Richard Lambert told an audience at Warwick Business School that companies need to take responsibility for the consequences of the rise of the robots. Speaking in the first of the WBS 50th Anniversary Distinguished Lectures held at WBS London at The Shard, Sir Richard outlined the threat to society of the increasing use of automation through machine learning, artificial intelligence and robots. The Bank of England's chief economist Andy Haldane has warned that 15 million jobs in the UK are under threat from mass automation, almost half those employed in the country. The possible destruction of so many jobs has led a number of academics, economists and prominent CEOs, like Tesla's Elon Musk, to predict that governments will have to hand out a universal basic income to citizens. Sir Richard, who was Director General of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) from 2006 to 2011, believes CEOs must make sure their companies shoulder their share of responsibility, either voluntarily or by force of regulation.

More investors are setting their sights on the financial technology (Fintech) arena. According to consulting firm Accenture, investment in Fintech firms rose by 10 percent worldwide to the tune of $23.2 billion in 2016. China is leading the charge after securing $10 billion in investments in 55 deals which account for 90 percent of investments in Asia-Pacific. The US came second taking in $6.2 billion in funding. Europe, also saw an 11 percent increase in deals despite Britain seeing a decrease in funding due to the uncertainty from the Brexit vote.

You didn't have to be following the coverage from this year's CES too closely to notice one name repeatedly cropping up, across what felt like every announcement at the show: Alexa. Alexa is an artificial intelligence, a virtual personal assistant developed by Amazon. And right now, it looks likely to be remembered as AI's first major foray into the mainstream. Developed by Amazon's Lab126 R&D division, and building on the eCommerce giant's acquisition of Cambridge AI startup Evi in 2012, Alexa made its debut – there's a temptation to say'her debut', given the gendered name and voice, but let's stay neutral for the moment – back in November 2014. It was first sold as part of the Amazon Echo, a smart speaker that enabled users to ask questions, select and listen to music and, of course, order shopping using just their voice. It wasn't until last year, however, that Alexa made a real splash.

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How well can future health events of patients be predicted from EHR data, at various lengths of time in advance? And how can such predictions improve human health? This talk answers the first question via an approach called high-throughput machine learning, and it speculates about answers to the second question. In particular, this talk argues that many healthcare applications require not just accurate prediction, but accurate prediction by causally-faithful models. Causal discovery from observational data is already a major research direction in machine learning and statistics, and this talk discusses new approaches across the spectrum from when "we know all the relevant variables" to when "we know only one relevant variable" for the task at hand.

More investors are setting their sights on the financial technology (Fintech) arena. According to consulting firm Accenture, investment in Fintech firms rose by 10 percent worldwide to the tune of $23.2 billion in 2016. China is leading the charge after securing $10 billion in investments in 55 deals which account for 90 percent of investments in Asia-Pacific. The US came second taking in $6.2 billion in funding. Europe, also saw an 11 percent increase in deals despite Britain seeing a decrease in funding due to the uncertainty from the Brexit vote.

WikiLeaks has published a huge trove of what appear to be CIA spying secrets. The files are the most comprehensive release of US spying files ever made public, according to Julian Assange. In all, there are 8,761 documents that account for "the entire hacking capacity of the CIA", Mr Assange claimed in a release, and the trove is just the first of a series of "Vault 7" leaks. Already, the files include far more pages than the Snowden files that exposed the vast hacking power of the NSA and other agencies. In publishing the documents, WikiLeaks had ensured that the CIA had "lost control of its arsenal", he claimed.