Artificial intelligence, and technology in general, will have a crucial role to play in society's progress, that is the view of the UK and American governments anyway. This Thursday President Obama announced at the first White House Frontier Conference that more than $300 million in funding, through partnerships, will be released for tech innovations that will improve healthcare, develop smart cities and enhance America's space ambition. "We may be in a slightly different period now, simply because of the pervasive applicability of AI and other technologies," said President Obama in a video shown at the start of the conference. President Obama believes AI, in particular, will be able to help solve the biggest crises that face the world, such as disease, famine, climate change and economic inequality. Others, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, suggest AI's rise will be the biggest threat to the survival of the human race.

Tesla Motors and SpaceX founder Elon Musk added to his warnings of a dystopic future straight out of a "Terminator" film on Thursday in a Twitter post on the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). Citing an article in The Economist on a recent cyberattack preventing internet users from reaching the sites of Twitter, PayPal, Netflix and hundreds of other companies, Musk tweeted that it's "only a matter of time before advanced AI is used to do this." Musk's aversion to autonomous technologies may come as a surprise--his previous comments on the matter aside--for those following his company's embrace of self-driving auto technology, which it plans to roll out next month. Musk has also founded a non-profit called OpenAI dedicated to "democratizing AI technology." Two years ago, Musk called for more regulatory oversight of the technology area, which he described in an interview with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AeroAstro Department head Jaime Peraire as humanity's "biggest existential threat."

Could hundreds or thousands of drones in the sky ever replicate the thrill we get from watching a fireworks display? Intel is hoping to reproduce a little of that magic with its Shooting Star drones. They're equipped with lights to provide a show in the night sky, and Intel is offering a whole fleet of them as a service to theme parks, entertainment companies, and cities. Last year, the company managed to get 100 of them flying in formation to produce patterns and, of course, the Intel logo. Now it's managed to synchronize 500 of the devices to display more ambitious and complex patterns (and yes, a better Intel logo).

Sony's lineup of games and demos is often slightly different depending on the region. It's something you may have noticed with PlayStation's VR debut in both Europe and the US, -- and that's even more true for Japan. The virtual reality headset launched in Sony's homeland with several titles on the PlayStation Store that are not available elsewhere. While standalone (much less stand-out) games are few, there's still handful of experiences that are only playable with a Japanese PlayStation account. Fortunately for you, I've got one, and have played through some of this Japan-only content.

Would you like to translate terabytes of data into unforgettable holidays for millions of people around the globe? Booking.com, the world's largest accommodation booking website, is looking for rock star Data Scientists to add to join our highly successful Personalization Team within the Front End department. This product development team crunches endless amounts of data to provide our customers with the best possible experience. They focus on anything from understanding and predicting market data, to ranking all properties on our website, and providing our customers with the most relevant personalized recommendations. As a Data Scientist you'll work side by side with Developers, Designers and Product Owners, and take full ownership of your work – from the initial idea-generation phase to the implementation of the final product on our website. Our ideal candidate is result-focused, innovative and has solid quantitative background and a good business understanding.

Intel began promoting its first commercial drone in the U.S. this week, as it seeks to carve out a place for itself in the fast-expanding market. The Falcon 8 drone, which was announced two weeks ago, was on show at the Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas that opened on Tuesday. Intel has been building its drone expertise throughout the year with a series of acquisitions, and the Falcon 8 has grown out of its January purchase of Germany's Ascend Technologies. The drone has eight rotors arranged in a distinctive V-shape, designed that way so the rotors at the front don't get in the way of a payload, said Natalie Cheung, a drone marketing manager at Intel. "We've really thought about what are some of the issues commercial customers face today and when they want to get that crisp, hi-res image, you don't want any of the rotors in the image," she said. Redundancy is a key feature of the device -- it can continue flying even if up to two rotors on either side stop spinning.

Now machines are going on internet-watching sprees too – but with something to show for it. After viewing a year's worth of online videos, a computer model has learned to distinguish between sounds such as bird chirps, door knocks, snoring and fireworks. Such technology could transform how we interact with machines and make it easier for our cellphones, smart homes and robot assistants to understand the world around them. Computer vision has dramatically improved over the past few years thanks to the wealth of labelled data machines can tap into online. They can now recognise faces or cats as accurately as a human can.

Over the past few months my blogs have attempted to demystify some of the techniques used by Data Scientists to build models or process large amounts of data. For all the flashy techniques and algorithms this is not where Data Scientists spend 90% of their time. The hard yards of any analysis lies in the data munging. By Data Munging we mean the process of taking raw data, understanding it, cleaning it and preparing it for analysis or modelling. It is by no means the glamorous part of data science however if done well it plays a more important role in getting to powerful models and insights than what algorithm you use.

This brings the three-year-old company's total funding to over $8 million. The company will use the funds to build out the "Unbabel Language Engine" – its proprietary technology platform that combines Natural Language Processing, artificial intelligence, quality estimation algorithms, and a global network of 40,000 human post-editors. This will enable cost-effective, quality translations for conversational content in emails and chat on a global scale. "With a $38 billion market in translation services, it's clear that the expense is huge for any company looking to do business in a multilingual world. However, this market is comprised of an incredibly long tail of high-cost, low-tech, and massively inefficient solutions where the business model is basically'throw more humans at it,'" explained Vasco Pedro, Co-Founder and CEO of Unbabel.

Liberia has lost access to the entire internet in apparent preparation for shutting down the entire internet. Repeated attacks are flooding the country's network with requests and taking it down entirely. That has intermittently knocked the entire web offline, meaning that people can't access any websites or web services. The attacks appear to be a way for hackers to test a variety of ways of attacking internet connections and taking offline. In that way they resemble the attacks launched recently, when hackers brought down many of the world's biggest websites.