ARLINGTON: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing artificial intelligence that can help humans understand the floods of data they unleashed 50 years ago with the Internet and make better decisions, even in the heat of battle. Such "human-machine collaboration" -- informally known as the centaur model -- is the high-tech holy grail of the Defense Department's plan to counter Russian and Chinese advances, known as the Third Offset Strategy. "We've had some great conversations with the deputy," said DARPA director Arati Prabhakar, referring to the chief architect of Offset, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work. "In many of our programs you'll see some of the technology components" of the strategy. "Fundamentally, what's behind the push of the Third Offset Strategy is this idea that the department needs to reinvigorate our ability to develop these advanced technologies," Prabhakar said.

Organizations do--companies, governments, hospitals, and political campaigns. They employ predictive analytics, technology that learns from data to render per-person predictions, one individual at a time. People have been struck by the final words in the title of my new book on this subject, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die (www.thepredictionbook.com). An old friend even sent me a photo of the book aside an onion, suggesting the material might be lightened to predict who will click, buy, lie, or cry. Or, we might consider changing it to, "The power to predict who will drink Coke, choke, or croak."

Waterloo-based messaging app Kik has launched a "bot shop" that will function a bit like Apple's App Store, only for chat bots. The Kik bot shop with exist as a special section in Kik's app. There, users can begin chatting with bot created by 16 partners, including Vine, Sephora, H&M and The Weather Channel. Prior to launching this new feature, Kik had dabbled with bots created by the likes of Vice Media and MTV, but Kik's 275 million registered users could only find the bots if Kik promoted them. So rather than switch from the Kik app, where users spend an average of 97 minutes per week, to a dedicated weather app, you ask the weather bot if it's still raining.

Facebook is using artificial intelligence (AI) to help users with visual impairment understand what their friends are sharing online. The Menlo Park-based social media company launched "automatic alternative text" on Monday, allowing people who use screen-reading software to receive summaries of what's displayed in Facebook photos. "While visual content provides a fun and expressive way for people to communicate online, consuming and creating it poses challenges for people who are blind or severely visually impaired," the company wrote in a blog post. "With more than 39 million people who are blind, and over 246 million who have a severe visual impairment, many people may feel excluded from the conversation around photos on Facebook. We want to build technology that helps the blind community experience Facebook the same way others enjoy it."

IBM is currently attempting to merge artificial intelligence and the blockchain into a single, powerful prototype. With blockchain tech's promise of near-frictionless value exchange and artificial intelligence's ability to accelerate the analysis of massive amounts of data, the joining of the two could mark the beginning of an entirely new paradigm. Over the past three months, IBM's chief architect in charge of Internet of Things security Tim Hahn has focused specifically on introducing the blockchain to his company's artificially intelligent computer named Watson. "What we're doing with blockchain and devices is enabling the information those devices supply to effect the blockchain…You begin to approach the kind of things we see in movies." Potential applications include using distributed ledgers to let devices perform tasks like running self-diagnoses at set times and more advanced services that may someday let regulators virtually go back in time to the point where a device failed and "to identify exactly what went wrong," Hahn said.

As Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stood gazing at the Martian surface -- a virtual reality simulation, of course -- he talked about a future for the company that investors should look forward to. At the company's annual GPU Technology Conference, which started here Tuesday, Huang in the opening keynote address told attendees that Nvidia's focus will be even more centered around its core GPU (graphics processing unit) technology. GPUs provide graphics on computers, in video games and in various other applications. Nvidia competes mostly with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in this field, but No. 1 chipmaker Intel (INTC) is among other rivals. Huang said the company's key markets will be virtual reality, autonomous cars and artificial intelligence, including chips for drones and deep learning.

In the 1950s, artificial intelligence (AI) became a hot topic of scientific conversation in science fiction novels. The prospect of attacks by intelligent machines became a trend that led the imagination down dark paths of technological domination. AI is no longer science fiction and is on a path of destruction, but not one that could have been predicted 60 years ago. It is playing no small role in the prevention of cybercrime, and leading the fight back in protecting data. Machine learning is providing teams with the capability to thwart APTs (advanced persistent threats) through zero day attacks and with the analytic prowess they need to identify both internal and external threats.

Your electric bills could soar if you kept Nvidia's monster DGX-1 computer running continuously for one month. The DGX-1 supercomputer can deliver the computing power of 250 two-socket servers in a desktop box, claimed Nvidia, which introduced the system Tuesday at its GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. The computer can deliver about 170 teraflops of performance, and multiple boxes on a rack could deliver 2 petaflops of performance. The fastest computer in the world delivers a peak performance of about 10 petaflops. Nvidia says DGX-1 is about 56 times faster than a server with two Intel Xeon-E5 2697 v3 chips, which can deliver about 3 teraflops of performance.

Bergan Flannigan, of Plattsburgh, N.Y., says she used to "get a lot of stares" when she wore her prosthetic leg with the metal pipe exposed. "I feel like people don't look as much" with the cover, she says, "which I like." Bergan Flannigan, of Plattsburgh, N.Y., says she used to "get a lot of stares" when she wore her prosthetic leg with the metal pipe exposed. "I feel like people don't look as much" with the cover, she says, "which I like." Prosthetic limbs for people who have lost an arm or a leg have come a long way in the past decade.

Its Computer Science program was ranked among the top 25 in the world in 2015 by QS. The Cheriton School is part of Waterloo's highly regarded and unique Faculty of Mathematics, which also placed in the top 20 in the 2015 QS rankings With those credentials, it is little wonder that the Faculty has more than 7,500 graduate and undergraduate students. The unit's unique blend of computer scientists, mathematicians and statisticians comprise 250 full-time professors. Its researchers lead the scientific community with the depth of their work and the wide spectrum of computer science, mathematics and statistics topics covered. They span the range from theoretical foundations to the immediately practical in all areas.