Is it acceptable for a driverless car to deliberately swerve in a way that saves its own passengers yet kills a pedestrian? That and other ethical dilemmas related to artificial intelligence will be put under the microscope by Kiwi researchers receiving $400,000 in funding from the charitable Law Foundation trust. With AI technology set to increasingly transform transport, crime prevention and other areas the Otago University research aims to inform public policy over three years. "New technologies are rapidly transforming the way we live and work, and (this funding) will help ensure that New Zealand's law and policy keeps up with the pace of change," Law Foundation executive director Lynda Hagen said. Research project leader Colin Gavaghan said the legal, practical and ethical challenges posed by AI technologies, which learn and adapt for themselves, fascinated him.

Financial institutions (FI's) face many challenges, but one of the biggest of all is fighting fraud. With so much money and valuable data at stake, the financial system will always be a target for criminals and FI's must shoulder a lot of the responsibility for security. One of the most effective methods of keeping fraudsters at bay is staying up to date with the latest technologies and there are few areas of technological innovation more exciting than artificial intelligence (AI). It's true that we are still a long way off developing true AI, but the developments that have occurred in this field are already offering great potential for FI's. How do you ensure that your security safeguards and authentication processes are rigorous enough to combat fraud, while delivering the speed and reliability modern-day consumers expect?

A hurricane hits a shore town. What is the estimated property damage? A city is doing an inventory of trees. An aid group is trying to get food to an impoverished rural population. What's the best location to make a drop?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming at us before we fully understand what it might mean. Established ways of doing things in areas like transport regulation, crime prevention and legal practice are being challenged by new technologies such as driverless cars, crime prediction software and "AI lawyers". The possible implications of AI innovations for law and public policy in New Zealand will be teased out in a new, ground-breaking Law Foundation study. The three-year multi-disciplinary project, supported by a $400,000 Law Foundation grant, is being run out of the University of Otago. Project team leader Associate Professor Colin Gavaghan of the Faculty of Law says that AI technologies – essentially, technologies that can learn and adapt for themselves – pose fascinating legal, practical and ethical challenges.

The couple have a 5-year-old daughter, Hailie Jade. U.S. Fulbright scholar JOHN EDWARD TOBIN, 24; with possession of marijuana; in Voronezh, Russia, where he was studying. In a bizarre chain of events, the Russian security service arrested Tobin on drug charges, then accused him of being a spy, an allegation denied by the State Department. The spy insinuations were later dropped, but officials may now charge him with drug dealing. A.R. AMMONS, 75, gregarious, self-effacing poet whose deceptively simple riffs on the relationship between Man and Nature have been likened to those of the 19th century transcendentalists Whitman and Emerson; of cancer; in Ithaca, N.Y.

Originating as a BBC radio series in 1978, Douglas Adams's inspired melding of hippy-trail guidebook and sci-fi comedy turned its novelisations into a publishing phenomenon. Douglas wrote five parts from 1979 onwards (the first sold 250,000 in three months), introducing the world to Marvin the Paranoid Android, the computer Deep Thought, space guitarist Hotblack Desiato (named after Adams's local estate agent) and the Guide itself, a remarkably prescient forerunner to the internet. Aldiss's first novel is a tour-de-force of adventure, wonder and conceptual breakthrough. Set aboard a vast generation starship millennia after blast-off, the novel follows Roy Complain on a voyage of discovery from ignorance of his surroundings to some understanding of his small place in the universe. Complain is spiteful and small-minded but grows in humanity as his trek through the ship brings him into contact with giant humans, mutated rats and, ultimately, a wondrous view of space beyond the ship. One of the first attempts to write a comprehensive "future history", the trilogy - which also includes Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953) - is Asimov's version of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, set on a galactic scale. Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory with which to combat the fall into barbarianism of the Human Empire, and sets up the Foundation to foster art, science and technology.

Max's comment remains relevant to a great deal of 21st Century AI research in machine vision (i.e. up to 2014 at least), focusing on training machines to attach labels as opposed to understanding structures (I would now add "and processes involving interacting structures"). One of the points he could have made but nowhere seems to have made, is that natural vision systems are mostly concerned with motion and change, including change of shape, and change of viewpoint. The emphasis on static scenes and images may therefore conceal major problems e.g.

The day we can't tell the difference between a human and robot just got a little bit closer. A Turing Test of sorts has been put to humans to see if they could differentiate between their fellow human and non-human combatants in a first-person shooter game. For the first time in the five years that the contest has run, humans couldn't tell the difference. The contest, conceived of and organized by Philip Hingston, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia, puts human and computer players on the battlefields of the first-person shooter game UT2004. After a few rounds of combat, the humans have to decide which players are human and which are bots.

An orangutan has been captured performing DIY better than some humans. The incredible new footage reveals a female great ape using a saw to skilfully divide a branch in two. The talented ape uses her right hand to hold the tool and her feet to grip the tree branch like a vice. She even blows away the sawdust to inspect her work like a true craftsman. An orangutan has been captured performing DIY better than some humans.

"Alexa, why are you winning the smart home market?" It seems every appliance that's any appliance is adding Alexa support at CES 2017, giving Amazon a commanding lead in the race to become the de facto smart home standard. As someone who lives in Australia, where Amazon Echo hasn't launched, though, I'm left wondering when we'll get to join Alexa's gang. In the battle to become the brand that's synonymous with the smart home experience, building a global footprint will become important very soon. In a global market, selling to two of 200 countries won't keep you in the driver's seat for long.