The United Nations decided to formally address the issue of killer robots. At the International Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva, the 123 participating nations voted to form a group in 2017 of governmental experts to look at lethal autonomous robots that can select targets without human control, which could lead to a ban, reported Human Rights Watch. Many of Silicon Valley's elite, including Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, have expressed concern over the development of killer robots. Musk and Wozniak both signed on to a letter last year urging the UN to take up the issue, calling for an international ban on the creation of lethal autonomous weapons. Stephen Hawking and leading AI researchers -- including University of California Berkeley computer scientist Stuart Russell, Google Director of Research Peter Norvig and Microsoft Managing Director Eric Horvitz -- were among the over 1,000 scientists who signed the letter calling for a killer robot ban.

It's that time of the year again: The time when pundits and analysts assess the present and forecast the future. Some of the predictions weren't terribly favorable for the United States, as it is not expected to be among the top ten fastest growing economies in the world. If technology and innovation pique your interest, then 2017 may be just what the doctor ordered. "Artificial intelligence" (AI) is a term that may bring to mind the 1982 hit, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. However, nearly 35 years later, the impact of AI on technological advancements in everything from retail marketing to healthcare is remarkable.

IMAGE: This is a map of known and predicted bat hosts of filoviruses, showing hotspots in Southeast Asia. Findings highlight new potential hosts and geographic hotspots worthy of surveillance. So reports a new paper in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Filoviruses have devastating effects on people and primates, as evidenced by the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa. For nearly 40 years, preventing spillover events has been hampered by an inability to pinpoint which wildlife species harbor and spread the viruses.

Trains with a guard become driver-only trains, which then become driverless trains. That's the fear underlying Aslef's dispute with Southern railways and accounts for the rearguard action to prevent further job losses across the rail industry. There is also scorn for Southern's management, which has attacked drivers' basic terms and conditions, and there is anger at transport secretary Chris Grayling's anti-union stance. But, at its heart, the dispute is over the status and even the very existence of the job of train driver, which has been around for nigh on 200 years. Like most people, train drivers will have read the screaming headlines warning of a robot revolution that spells the end for millions of jobs.

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.

December 14, 2016 – New York & London – DataArt, a leading global technology consultancy, predicts that 2017 will be a year of integration, disruption and transformation due in large part to the digitalization of key industry sectors. Cyber security and data protection will become major board-level concerns as financial institutions realize that failing to protect customer information will be their biggest source of regulatory non-compliance and reputational risk. Organizations will invest heavily in correcting technology vulnerabilities, lax cultures and poor processes. As a result, data management in all its forms will dominate 2017. Rapid digitalization of customer-facing services will be a matter of organizational life and death as e-commerce and fintech elevate expectations for the optimal user experience (UX).

Born of research in the Amazon forest, the Plantix mobile app is helping farmers on three continents quickly identify plant diseases using artificial intelligence. For several years in the Brazilian rain forest, a team of young German researchers studied the emission and mitigation of greenhouse gases due to changing land use. The team's analysis was yielding new knowledge, but the farmers they worked with weren't interested in those findings. They wanted to know how to treat crops being ravaged by pathogens. "They couldn't understand why we can estimate the carbon stock of their soil, but we couldn't give them an idea of how to treat damaged plants in an appropriate way," said Robert Strey, one of the researchers.

A Russian company has launched a programme that can identify a stranger among 300 million Twitter users in less than a second. The social media platform has responded to the new software, called "FindFace", saying it its use is in "violation" of its rules and it is taking the matter "very seriously". Trump'obviously aware' Russia behind election hacks, White House says Syria's Assad says Donald Trump will be Russia's'natural ally' Trump'obviously aware' Russia behind election hacks, White House says Syria's Assad says Donald Trump will be Russia's'natural ally' "We see lots of opportunities for Twitter users on the service," Artem Kukharenko, co-founder of NTechLab told BuzzFeed. "We think this is something many people will use," he added, claiming the technology could be used to reduce spam profiles. "Not in the US, but in other countries there is a real problem of politicians, reporters, finding that someone created a fake account for them. "I was involved back in Russia with scandals with a fake account posing as a politicians that tweeted something and created political scandal." he said. Christopher Weatherhead, Technologist at Privacy International said: "The software created by NTechLab highlights the ease to which cross-referencing profiles photos is possible.

If your name is Lucas or Hannah, you owe your parents a thank you for all the success you've likely had with online dating. According to Tinder, those were the most right-swiped names on the dating app in 2016. The numbers were pulled from all left and right swipes in the U.S. between December of 2015 and November of this year.

Artificial intelligence and smartphones are being trialled to stamp out malaria in remote parts of the Philippines. Technology originally developed for marketers to find Nike ticks and Adidas three-stripes on Instagram has been repurposed to detect the disease in blood samples. A person with no medical training could take a picture of a blood sample with their smartphone, and immediately know whether malaria is present or not. 'If this works, it could be trailblazing, said Marvi Rebueno Trudeau, head of the public-private partnership, including the Shell Foundation and the Global Fund, that is testing the technology. 'The way we're doing it right now, the microscopers collect the blood, make a slide, put it in the microscope.