China agreed Saturday to return an American sea drone it had captured after the Pentagon demanded it back, defusing tensions at the end a week of confrontations over Beijing's territorial ambitions in the South China Sea. China's Defense Ministry said it would return "in an appropriate manner" the U.S. sea vessel seized this week by the Chinese navy. But the ministry also accused the U.S. of "public hyping" that was "not conducive to solving the problem smoothly." Chinese officials did not specify what happened or when Beijing would hand back the device. The ministry, in a statement, said the device was unidentified when found and that officials later concluded it was an American drone.

Russian hackers have been implicated by the CIA and FBI in an audacious effort to sway voters in the recent U.S. presidential election in the direction of Donald Trump. Like other key events in U.S. history, such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11, the revelation of the Russian cyber intrusion is a wake-up call. It signals that a new "code war" is underway through the weaponization of information. The irony can't be missed, of course, that the CIA, which itself sought to influence democratic elections around the world from the earliest days of the Cold War, is calling out the Russians. Former CIA director Bill Colby once regaled me with tales of his years as a young operative in Italy, paying off journalists and channeling laundered funds to the Christian Democrats in elections during the 1950s to (successfully) defeat the Communists at the polls.

Gigaom will be holding our first annual competition for the AI start-up that delivers the highest ROI to corporate customers. The GAIN competition coincides with the annual conference Gigaom AI Now held in San Francisco, CA, February 15-16th 2017. AI startups are leading the way for bringing positive impacts of AI to many of the world's long-term challenges. "Record number of investments are being made in early stage AI start-ups. The competition will identify which new ventures can deliver the highest ROI to businesses today," explained David Hehman, Gigaom's Start-up & VC editor.

In the aftermath of a contentious presidential campaign, there are signs that many Americans have lost faith in democracy, with allegations of election fraud, suggestions of Russian involvement, and complaints about the electoral college. But the problem runs still deeper: Like most other countries, individual states in the US employ the antiquated plurality voting system, in which each voter casts a vote for a single candidate, and the person who amasses the largest number of votes is declared the winner. If there is one thing that voting experts unanimously agree on, it is that plurality voting is a bad idea, or at least a badly outdated one. Ariel Procaccia is assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is co-founder of the not-for-profit websites RoboVote.org In fact, for centuries economists, mathematicians, political scientists, and more recently computer scientists have designed and studied better approaches to voting.

Gigaom, the leader in emerging technology research, today announced that it will host its annual conference Gigaom AI Now in San Francisco, CA, February 15-16th. The one-and-a-half day conference, held at the Golden Gate Club, will share how companies are using AI today to drive significant ROI across every aspect of business, from administration to product development, sales and marketing, and customer experience. Attendees at this event will learn from world-leading practitioners how today's progressive businesses are applying the most innovative AI tools, platforms, and technologies in-house to drive revenue and improve operations across the enterprise. "In the last couple of years, AI has become the technology no enterprise can afford to ignore. It will change every department in almost every business. We have designed this event to focus entirely on how enterprises can use AI right now to improve their business in substantial ways," shared Gigaom Publisher, Byron Reese.

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The self-driving car project Google started seven years ago has grown into a company called Waymo, signaling its confidence that it will be able to bring robot-controlled vehicles to the masses within the next few years. "We are getting close, and we are getting ready," Waymo Chief Executive John Krafcik said Tuesday after unveiling the company's identity. To underscore his point, Krafcik revealed the project had reached a key milestone in the journey to having fully autonomous cars cruising on public roads. In a trip taken in October 2015, a pod-like car with no steering wheel and brake pads drove a legally blind passenger around neighborhoods in Austin, Texas, without another human in the vehicle. It was the first time one of the project's cars had given a passenger a ride without a human on hand to take control of a self-driving car if something went wrong.

Arches, which works across multiple asset classes and currencies, is being touted as "particularly suited" for specialized products - such as derivatives, niche commodity, OTC fixed-income and small cap equities markets - where generating and concentrating liquidity is a challenge. Privately held 4th Story that has partnered with the likes of the NYSE Euronext and Reuters amongst others, is understood to have been working on the new system for around one year before its market release. It is known for its suite of automated trading and analysis products that help brokers, hedge funds and institutional traders get their trading ideas to market quickly and efficiently. These products provide rapid testing and implementation of arbitrarily complex quantitative, algorithmic and automated strategies. For some this might all be akin to a minority sport.

Gigaom, the leader in emerging technology research, today announced that it will host its annual conference Gigaom AI Now in San Francisco, CA, February 15-16th. The one-and-a-half day conference, held at the Golden Gate Club, will share how companies are using AI today to drive significant ROI across every aspect of business, from administration to product development, sales and marketing, and customer experience. Attendees at this event will learn from world-leading practitioners how today's progressive businesses are applying the most innovative AI tools, platforms, and technologies in-house to drive revenue and improve operations across the enterprise. "In the last couple of years, AI has become the technology no enterprise can afford to ignore. It will change every department in almost every business. We have designed this event to focus entirely on how enterprises can use AI right now to improve their business in substantial ways," shared Gigaom Publisher, Byron Reese.

While artificial intelligence is a loaded term that for some may conjure up images of a malicious Skynet system from the Terminator movie franchise, the reality is not as ominous. And when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, argued during the U.S. Congress' first AI hearing -- dubbed "The Dawn of Artificial Intelligence" -- that it is already at work in the United States, improving the efficiency and productivity of systems across the map, he was right. "Artificial intelligence is already seeping into our daily lives," said Cruz, who is chairman of the Senate subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. The hearing, which included representatives from Microsoft, Carnegie Mellon University and NASA, among others, focused on the potential implications machine learning will have on the country's labor market, national security and transportation. One of the largest areas for growth through artificial intelligence is smart city planning and smart infrastructure.