PRINCETON – Last month, AlphaGo, a computer program specially designed to play the game Go, caused shockwaves among aficionados when it defeated Lee Sidol, one of the world's top-ranked professional players, winning a five-game tournament by a score of 4-1. Why, you may ask, is that news? Twenty years have passed since the IBM computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, and we all know computers have improved since then. But Deep Blue won through sheer computing power, using its ability to calculate the outcomes of more moves to a deeper level than even a world champion can. Go is played on a far larger board (19 by 19 squares, compared to 8x8 for chess) and has more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe, so raw computing power was unlikely to beat a human with a strong intuitive sense of the best moves.

With Congress revisiting how Pentagon units share authority under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, the intelligence agencies under the next presidential administration should likewise review their own unity of effort to become more agile and able to integrate, the top Defense intelligence official said Thursday. "The integration of intelligence of the past 15 years is a journey that is not finished," said Marcel Lettre, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, at a banquet for agency and industry professionals in the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance. "I hope the new administration finds clear progress from the last 15 years and takes it on with a mantle of seriousness, or even sees an opportunity to redouble the effort." Lettre, who was sworn in in December to preside over a 17 billion budget, eight components and 110,000 employees, said he also hopes the next administration will "institutionalize and make irreversible" the intelligence community's digital data sharing modernization effort known as the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (pronounced "eyesight"). "Key critical data sets are the coin of the realm for the intel community," he said.

Artificial intelligence (A.I. as many refer to it) is quickly becoming our reality. And even though its technology is all around us, many of us don't understand what that technology is. The "misconception" about artificial intelligence, is that it's a "robot," says Tim Urban, whose stick-figure-filled explainer on the technology has been read by more than 4 million people on his website, Wait But Why. The robot, however, is merely the "container" for the artificial intelligence, Urban told Olivia Stern for "Sunday TODAY with Willie Geist." "The A.I. is the software inside the container. The A.I. is, in particular, software that can make decisions."

London AI is a community that brings startups, corporates and academics in the AI sphere together to understand the current state of the technology and what is in store for the near future . While some of our talks will take a technical deep dive, the forum is open to all those with a strong interest in the field. All proceeds go to Code Club, a nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11. There are over 3000 clubs in the UK, teaching over 44,000 kids! Click here to learn more about their philosophy and how you can get involved.

Will the'rise of the machines' wipe out humanity – as portrayed in the Terminator movies? Will robots free us from the drudgery of work and enable us to enjoy endless leisure time? Or will Artificial Intelligence simply make us all redundant, creating mass unemployment, poverty, and economic meltdown? The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been in the news a lot recently. Everyone seems to be talking about it but few seem to know what it really means for business and society. To shed some light on the subject, the Norfolk Network invited AI technology expert Dom Davis to share his views and then asked four local business people to discuss what AI might mean for their industry.

In a blitzkrieg attack that took place over 12 hours in late 2012 and early 2013, criminals stole 45-million (U.S.) from two banks by hacking into credit card processing firms in India and the United States, then withdrawing money from ATMs in 27 countries. "In the place of guns and masks, this cybercrime organization used laptops and the Internet," New York attorney Loretta Lynch said at a news conference. "Moving as swiftly as data over the Internet … they became a virtual criminal flash mob, going from machine to machine, drawing as much money as they could, before these accounts were shut down." The mob infiltrated credit card processing firms, stole prepaid Visa and MasterCard debit card account numbers issued by the banks in the Middle-East and programmed them with extreme balances. The account numbers were emailed or texted to cohorts on the ground, who used a device to encode the account numbers onto the magnetic stripes of dummy cards.

No longer the stuff of Hollywood fantasy, sexually "functioning" robots are now available to buy and try. And according to some commentators, they are the future of sex. Newspapers speak of an upcoming trend in robotic sexual activity, and Vanity Fair referred to the "the Rolls-Royce of sex dolls" in a recent profile of an American manufacturer. So the future of sex robots is coming fast, it seems. The much publicized "Roxxxy" ("always turned on and ready to talk or play"), marketed as "the world's first sex robot", was available to pre-order last year and is supposed to be ready now to buy online (for just 6,995 plus shipping).

If your mind instantly went to Skynet, I can put your mind at ease; it's not Skynet. That's not, however, to say that this problem isn't just as scary, only without the cool special effects. While Sci-Fi has made the risks of robot takeover well-known, the more immediate concerns are the subtle decisions being made by (sometimes) poorly coded, or designed, algorithms that can drastically alter each of our lives. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. The Obama administration published a report this week that examines problems associated with the shift to an increasingly automated world.

Still in the depths of sleep, I reach out and grab it, knocking a cold cup of coffee over the unread mountain of books on my bedside. I swear loudly, mop up the mess with one hand and look blearily at the message on my screen. It's from Otis, 27, who I have apparently just matched with on Tinder: "Hey sexy like ur curls. Wanna come over n get naked and I'll show you my curls." There is no denying that the pursuit of love in the 21st century has become littered with digital landmines. There are now more than 91 million people around the world on dating apps – and most of that is thanks to Tinder.

Concerns have been raised about the scope of a data-sharing agreement between Google-owned DeepMind and the UK's National Health Service (NHS) after it was revealed the agreement covers access to all patient data from the three London hospitals involved, rather than a more targeted subset of data relating to the specific medical condition the healthcare app in question (Streams) is focused on. Back in February DeepMind announced a collaboration with the NHS to build an app for clinicians treating kidney disease. The company also acquired an existing early stage clinical task management app, called Hark, built by a team from Imperial College London -- evidently with the intention of building on that base tech, but giving it a more specific medical focus in the first instance. The Streams app aims to streamline alerts and access to patient data for doctors and nurses working in the front-line of medical care. But it is not a general medical data alerts or messaging platform.