Only 26 percent of computer professionals were women in 2013, according to a recent review by the American Association of University Women. That figure dropped by nine percent since 1990. Some say the industry is masculine by design. Others claim computer culture is unwelcoming -- even hostile -- to women. So, while STEM fields like biology, chemistry, and engineering see an increase in diversity, computing does not.

Top Gun pitted Maverick and Goose against the Iceman and Viper. At the UK Drones Show Championships at Birmingham NEC on Sunday, it was Saggy Nun and Collision who competed to be crowned the nation's fastest pilot of an unmanned flying vehicle. It was Collision, aka 22-year-old graduate trainee Brett Collis, who took the £1,000 prize in this new event in which pale young men sporting special goggles synched with flying cameras navigated an illuminated 3D obstacle course in the dark. FPV (first person view) drone racing is rapidly becoming a lucrative business: Sky Sports recently decided to show a US race series on its Mix channel and in March a 15-year-old British boy called Luke Bannister won $250,000 (£173,900) when he triumphed at the World Drone Prix in Dubai. Wearing his call sign on the back of his T-shirt, Collis explained how he graduated to drone racing from video games.

"When my father was misdiagnosed and administered the wrong medication placing him in a coma nearly 20 years ago, I saw firsthand the need for technology to help physicians make accurate decisions," said Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood, IBM Fellow and Chief Scientist of the Medical Sieve Radiology Grand Challenge Project at IBM Research – Almaden in San Jose, Calif. This week in Chicago, Dr. Syeda-Mahmood's mission meets the real world as IBM Research debuts a new Watson-powered demo that shows the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in radiology. The demo is the result of a shared vision by Dr. Syeda-Mahmood and Dr. Eugene Walach from IBM Research – Haifa to help radiologists make accurate patient diagnoses quickly and easily. In any given day, radiologists can review up to thousands of medical images to make health diagnoses. To date, accuracy has relied mainly on medical professionals piecing together multiple sources of clinical information visually and manually to make critical decisions, including electronic health records, research publications and other data.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is all around us today--and it's often invisible as we go about our daily lives. Companies are successfully using AI for credit card fraud detection, speech recognition, Web search rankings, automated customer service, legal discovery, photo search, translation, and even farming. A few weeks ago, Google's AI program AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, a human champion of Go, an ancient and complex game long thought to be beyond computers' ability to master. It won after learning to play from millions of games. The list of positive uses of AI is growing.

Apple, better known for laptops and mobile phones, has admitted for the first time that it is working on technology to develop self-driving cars. The company, which has been rumoured to be interested in the automated car market for the past two years, confirmed its previously secret initiative in a statement to the US highways regulator. "The company is investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation," the letter from Steve Kenner, Apple's director of product integrity, to the head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stated. The letter offered no details of the project, instead highlighting the "significant societal benefits of automated vehicles", which it described as a life-saving technology, potentially preventing millions of car crashes and thousands of fatalities each year. Although fully automated cars are not expected to be in use in the UK for several years, trials have already taken place both in Britain and the US.

Vatican City, Dec 4, 2016 / 03:03 am (CNA/EWTN News).- This week the Vatican hosted a high-level discussion in the world of science, gathering experts to discuss the progress, benefits and limits of advances in artificial intelligence. A new conference at the Vatican drew experts in various fields of science and technology for a two-day dialogue on the "Power and Limits of Artificial Intelligence," hosted by the Pontifical Academy for Sciences. Among the scheduled speakers were several prestigious scientists, including Stephen Hawkins, a prominent British professor at the University of Cambridge and a self-proclaimed atheist, as well as a number of major tech heads such as Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, and Yann LeCun of Facebook. The event, which ran from Nov. 30-Dec.

Nikolas Badminton is a researcher and futurist based in Vancouver, Canada, and provides opinions about humanity, the future of work and life with technology. His opinions and thoughts on the future can be seen at nikolasbadminton.com. Money makes the world go round, or so they say. Payments, investments, insurance and billions of transactions are the beating heart of a fractal economy, which echoes the messy complexity of natural systems, such as the growth of living organisms and the bouncing of atoms. Financial systems are larger than the sum of their parts.

Of all the big firms in Silicon Valley, Amazon had the most to lose from Donald Trump's presidency. And lose it did, albeit briefly, its share price dropping 5% shortly after the election. During the campaign, Trump warned that Amazon had a "huge antitrust problem" – a reasonable stance for the populist that he once aspired to be. Most likely, though, his animosity had more to do with the fact Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post, an influential newspaper that took an early strong dislike of Trump. By the time of Amazon's massive cloud-computing conference, which kicked off in Las Vegas at the end of November, such squabbles seem to have been forgotten.

In July 2013, an up-and-coming artist had an exhibition at the Galerie Oberkampf in Paris. It lasted for a week, was attended by the public, received press coverage, and featured works produced over a number of years, including some created on the spot in the gallery. Altogether, it was a fairly typical art-world event. The only unusual feature was that the artist in question was a computer program known as "The Painting Fool." Even that was not such a novelty.

It's generating a great deal of interest, getting substantial backing from venture capitalists and even being billed as a must-have addition to the cyber-security arsenal. The idea of machine learning has been around for many years but today's realisations differ radically from earlier technologies. In simple terms machine learning software has no programmed-in knowledge about the domain to which it is to be applied but gains that knowledge by being taught. For example if you want to develop a machine-learning based optical character recognition system you feed it with many images of letters of the alphabet and you tell it "this is an'A' this is a'B'" and so on. Given sufficient data correctly identified, it will get very good at optical character recognition.