Peace groups are pushing the Liberal government to play a lead role in crafting a global ban on "killer robots." Canadian government and civilian officials were at a United Nations disarmament conference in Geneva this week for the third round of talks on whether to outlaw lethal autonomous weapons systems. With the swift acceleration of artificial intelligence and automated technology, there are growing concerns around the development of so-called killer robots. Unlike drones and other technologies that are controlled remotely by humans, lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) could operate independently in military missions. Proponents say with proper safeguards it could actually save lives, but critics say they will lead to an arms race and even threaten humanity.

You have a fever, can't eat and you're barely strong enough to get out of bed. So you phone your GP surgery for an appointment, only to be told that the first one is two weeks away. A mobile app, Your.MD, is promising something radically different. Billed as a personal health assistant, it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to mimic, as far as possible, your consultation with a GP. If you tell Your.MD your symptoms, it will tell you what it thinks your problem might be.

The subprime financial crisis revealed that our data is only as good as our ability to analyze and understand it. AI will be necessary to helping prevent the next crisis before it happens. In his new film "The Big Short," based on the book by Michael Lewis, Adam McKay attempts the difficult task of explaining exactly how the credit and subprime housing bubble led to the 2008 worldwide economic crash. One of McKay's main points in outlining how Michael Burry, and a handful of other Wall Street outsiders, were able to predict the impending crisis is that they simply investigated the underlying data. As Ryan Gosling's character narrates in the film: "A few did what the rest never thought to do… they looked."

Daniel Kottke is a regular among familiar eucalyptus groves outside Stanford University's Frost Amphitheater, seeing the Dead there whenever he gets the chance. Into the '80s, the venue remains a picnic ground for Stanford research scientists and Silicon Valley characters old and new, conspiring on various levels of future building. Apple founder Steve Jobs accepts the acid from Daniel Kottke, and they go their separate ways. Spontaneously, Daniel offers his old friend a few hits of Windowpane he has in his pocket. "An old-times gesture," Daniel says.

According to the latest World Economic Forum report (PDF), roughly 7 million jobs are expected to be lost in the next five years thanks to automation and the use of robots. Does that sound like doomsday on the horizon? In fact, the closer you look, the brighter the future appears. Some of the biggest names in tech are coming to TNW Conference in Amsterdam this May. The report says that the highest numbers of job losses will be administrative roles in healthcare, energy and finance industries. It also states that 2 million new jobs will open up by 2020 in areas like computing, math, architecture and engineering.

To arrive at those numbers, the WEF surveyed 15 countries that make up 1.9 billion workers, including China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the UK and US. There is hope, though, and it comes in the form of retraining workers so that they can adapt as technology changes. "To prevent a worst-case scenario -- technological change accompanied by talent shortages, mass unemployment and growing inequality -- reskilling and upskilling of today's workers will be critical," WEF founder Klaus Schwab and board member Richard Samans explained. The full report, titled "The Future of Jobs," is available here.

Artificial intelligence has had its share of ups and downs recently. In what was widely seen as a key milestone for artificial intelligence (AI) researchers, one system beat a former world champion at a mind-bendingly intricate board game. But then, just a week later, a "chatbot" that was designed to learn from its interactions with humans on Twitter had a highly public racist meltdown on the social networking site. How did this happen, and what does it mean for the dynamic field of AI? In early March, a Google-made artificial intelligence system beat former world champ Lee Sedol four matches to one at an ancient Chinese game, called Go, that is considered more complex than chess, which was previously used as a benchmark to assess progress in machine intelligence.

Kaggle is a Data Science community where thousands of Data Scientists compete to solve complex data problems. In this article we are going to see how to go through a Kaggle competition step by step. The contest explored here is the San Francisco Crime Classification contest. The goal is to classify a crime occurrence knowing the time and place it happened. Here, the objectives are fixed by Kaggle.

Artificial intelligence "chat-bots" could be the future of online interaction, Facebook has said. The social media giant is building the ability into its Messenger app for third-party software to engage in lifelike text exchanges with users. The move was announced at the firm's annual F8 developers' conference in San Francisco, with founder Mark Zuckerberg predicting that bots could eventually be better than real people at natural language text conversations. He said: "We think you should be able to text message a business like you would a friend, and get a quick response. "Our goal with artificial intelligence is to build systems that are better than people at perception seeing, hearing, language and so on."

Taanayel, Bekaa, Lebanon - After more than five years of brutal conflict, Hope of Syria may sound like an ambitious name - but this young team of robot engineers is eager to help shoulder the responsibility of rebuilding their country. The team, composed entirely of Syrian refugee students, recently won a national robotics competition in Lebanon, when their robot, SYR01, managed to shoot the most balls into a net. They will now compete in the Vex world robotics competition on April 20 in the US state of Kentucky, coming up against some 450 other teams from around the world. While winning the tournament is their first priority, team member Amjad al-Homsi, 17, says they also want to draw attention to the plight of Syrians. "[It's about] putting the spotlight on Syrians," Homsi, the team's engineering network manager, told Al Jazeera.