Climate deniers aside, there are very few people who are not concerned about the effects of climate change. According to a poll released by Monmouth University in January, nearly 70% of respondents said "the world's climate is undergoing a change leading to more extreme weather patterns and sea level rise",[1] and a more recent poll from Gallup reported 64% of "Americans are worried a great deal and/or a fair deal about global warming" [2]. What many people are unaware of is the fact climate scientists and business leaders are increasingly turning to Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to combat climate change. In many ways, this is inevitable as the sheer amount of data required to measure the effects of climate change requires the use of next-generation analytics. For example, the large data sets used to analyze climate are often prone to generating false positives and our understanding of climate change is still in its nascent stages.

Do you believe that companies live and die by their understanding of how customers use and grow with their products? Do you love the idea of rapidly iterating on new features as experiments against thousands of users to find the ones which move the needle and hit customer engagement out of the ballpark? Would you like to drive real change at the world's hottest SaaS company, and the best place to work in Australia? Atlassian is looking for an analytical mind to work in our Product Growth team to analyze the way customers use our our amazing suite of products – JIRA, Confluence, BitBucket, Bamboo, HipChat... We use real data science to point the way, then design experiments to improve customer engagement and growth; we work with Product Managers, Designers and Engineers to build a magical experience for customers. It's not for the faint of heart -- you'll need to slice and dice large-scale data, looking for key trends and patterns.

Artificial Intelligence or AI as it popularly called is surely and steadily working its way to become more like humans. We have had an AI which injured its host will fully while another AI robot ran out of its enclosure in Russia. Now another AI has successfully managed to beat an ace fighter pilot in a combat simulation. Recently, an artificial intelligence (AI) named ALPHA developed by a University of Cincinnati doctoral graduate went up against retired U.S. Air Force Colonel Gene Lee in a high-fidelity air combat simulator. The result, the Colonel lost. In a series of flight combat simulations, the A.I. successfully dodged Lee, and shot him down every time.

Anki has a big hit with its iPhone-controlled Anki Overdrive race cars that use sophisticated artificial intelligence. And now it has its second act in the form of a cute, smart A.I. toy robot named Cozmo. Cozmo is a playful, intelligent, and seemingly sentient being that is aware of people and its surroundings. It is a labor of love for San Francisco-based Anki, which has worked on 45 different versions of the toy over the past four-and-a-half years. You could think of Cozmo as something like Eve the robot in Pixar's Wall-E animated film.

The idea of human-robot relationships may sound absurd to you, especially if you aren't the biggest fan of technology, but these types of relationships will happen in the next twenty to fifty years, and maybe even sooner. In case you are wondering about the above picture, it is from the movie Serenity. The man in the photo is Mr. Universe--a man who sits in front of screens all day monitoring the universe--and the "woman" is his female companion robot that he married. The idea of someone like this is absurd right? Except when you look at what is happening in western society, you realize it isn't.

David Axe for the Daily Beast reports The U.S. Marine Corps is around six years away from putting a laser cannon on its trucks, according to one top general. The goal: to outfit ground forces with a weapon that can shoot down enemy aircraft faster and more precisely--and at lower cost--than today's guns and surface-to-air missiles.

Over twenty years ago, I worked for company called The Carnegie Group, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratories. That company is long gone. Today, a think-tank goes by the same name. While extant, the erstwhile Carnegie Group worked on some of the most cutting edge AI products of its time. It was funded by a consortium of firms such as Caterpillar and USWEST (now Qwest Corp.) and its sole aim was to look for the application of AI technologies in businesses.

Pretty much every cinematic portrayal of artificial intelligence has been less than encouraging. HAL 9000 kills the crew members on the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey, making us all a little bit afraid of handing the reins over to computers. Sonny kills his creator in I, Robot, increasing worldwide scepticism about the integration of humans and their smart robots. Even real life AI has given us pause. For example, when an IBM computer defeated Russian chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in the 1990s, it was definitely a cause for concern.

The Drum shines a light on how the GroupM media investment unit is leveraging its relationship with AppNexus to harness machine learning, and better improve the performance of its media traders, and usher in the age of'programmable marketing'. Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI) – for many of those involved in the advertising industry such terms are nothing more than buzz phrases used by panelists on the conference circuit, with little real application to contemporary media practice. However, while the more cynical in the industry may dismiss the above phrases as merely the domain of science fiction, the impact of such technologies (be it positive, or negative) will be felt a lot sooner than such cynics think. The latest issue of The Drum magazine, guest edited by IBM's AI system Watson demonstrated that, while not without its problems, the technology is within the grasp of the contemporary marketer. Meanwhile, at the cutting edge of the media industry's use of AI, is the ad tech sector (or'programmatic advertisers').

The ROCSAFE Project (Remotely Operated CBRNe Scene Assessment & Forensic Examination) has recently been funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme. Led by Dr Michael Madden in NUI Galway, it will make advances in autonomous robotics, probabilistic reasoning, intelligent decision support, and miniaturised sensors, all of which will work together to gather forensic evidence in the event of a chemical, biological, radiation/nuclear or explosive (CBRNe) incident. ROCSAFE's overall goal is to fundamentally change how CBRNe events are assessed, and ensure the safety of crime scene investigators, by reducing the need for them to enter dangerous scenes to gather evidence. There are 13 partners in total involved in the project across Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Germany, along with a further group of advisory board members. There is more information at http://www.nuigalway.ie/remoteforensics/.