LONDON – A lunar rover that will explore the moon on foot in 2021 was unveiled in London on Thursday. The new concept, with four legs rather than wheels, will send data back to a larger mother ship, which will transmit it back to Earth. U.K. startup Spacebit signed a contract with U.S. space robotics company Astrobotic to get the rover on board their Peregrine lander, which will carry 14 NASA instruments to the moon. Once the lander reaches the moon's surface, the rover will drop from beneath it to the surface and attempt to explore a lava tube. "It's very important to explore the lunar tubes to know the environment that we have there so potentially humans can live in those lunar tubes when they go back to the moon," SpaceBit founder and CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk said.

Cyber-security is a critical area in which machine learning(ML) is increasingly becoming significant. But ML in cyber-security extends far beyond merely applying established algorithms to cyber entities. The ML community may be unaware, but cyber-security with ML has long-standing challenges that require methodological and theoretical handling. According to recently published research work, some scholars have presented the existing cyber-security problems and provided the AI and deep learning community with related datasets to help dive deeper into ML applications in cybersecurity. One of the significant challenges that researchers and the entire ML community need to deal with if they are going to apply ML in cybersecurity successfully is malware classification and detection.

One day in 2005, a mother in Evanston, Ill., joined Flickr. Then she more or less forgot her account existed. Years later, their faces are in a database that's used to test and train some of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems in the world. The pictures of Chloe and Jasper Papa as kids are typically goofy fare: grinning with their parents; sticking their tongues out; costumed for Halloween. None of them could have foreseen that 14 years later, those images would reside in an unprecedentedly huge facial-recognition database called MegaFace.

Farmers today operate self-guided tractors steered by GPS, use drones to monitor crops and employ artificial intelligence in irrigation. Robots will probably take cowhands' jobs before they take yours. Agriculture is a major export business in the United States -- which has lately been a source of stress. American agricultural exports have been hampered recently by the Trump administration's trade war with China. "China was a big and important market" for farmers in the United States, said A. Blake Brown, a professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University.

The government has unveiled plans to invest £13m in postgraduate conversion courses in data science and artificial intelligence. The initiative will see universities and higher education providers partner with industry to develop new courses that train graduates, who may have studied a non-STEM degree, in the skills required to take up jobs in the field. The funding forms part of a wider £400m investment in maths, digital and technical education through the government's AI sector deal, which was launched last year amid criticism that ministers were failing to protect the UK's tech scene ahead of Brexit. Under the new initiative, the Office for Students and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport have allocated £3m to course development and £10m to scholarships for candidates from underrepresented backgrounds, including female, disabled and black students. It is hoped that 2,500 students will have enrolled in one of the new courses by 2023.

The first decade of the 21st century introduced us to sweeping mobile and social revolutions largely driven by names like Jobs, Zuckerberg and Bezos. In the second decade that's now closing, things got a little more… complicated. During those years, a new collection of faces have joined the earlier tech titans to continue moving us into the future. A person wears a Guy Fawkes mask, which today is a trademark and symbol for the online hacktivist group Anonymous. More a decentralized collective than a personality, Anonymous was the name claimed by the loose affiliation of hackers who brought "hacktivism" into the mainstream. During the first half of the decade, Anonymous launched attacks against targets like ISIS, the governments of the US and Tunisia, and corporations such as Sony and PayPal.

For decades, earning your way onto an elite special operations unit has largely been about your performance on aptitude tests and during physically challenging assessments, but in the very near future, the Marine Corps' special operations unit known as the Raiders, or MARSOC, may be looking to computers to help identify the best candidates. MARSOC is currently experimenting with the idea that machine learning could be used to identify and track factors that lead to success for MARSOC applicants. By first identifying the unique traits that seem to make up the most ideally suited operator, the same practice could be employed on incoming classes -- sifting through Marines that don't possess the best traits for an operator and identifying those that are particularly well suited for the rigors of the special operations community. Over this past summer, SOCOM officials began collecting and assessing a wide range of data points recorded during the selection process for the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command. "It's really going to be our first experiment. It's exciting," said David Spirk, SOCOM's chief data officer.

Emerging technologies help the public sector to enhance cities by protecting data and making the information safe and secure from the cyber attacks. FREMONT, CA: Technology helps shape the future in many ways. Along with these, the government is also changing. Governments are now trying to offer secure and safe tools to make the citizens "smart." The technologies employed by the government these days create a platform for more personalized and secure interactions and automate lower ordered tasks so the citizens can rely more on different kinds of jobs.

The UK's first ever moon rover will launch into space in 2021 in a bid to unlock the secrets of the lunar surface. The tiny, spider-esque robot - which will be the world's smallest robotic moon rover - will crawl across the moon to take photographs and gather data. Developed by London-based star-up Spacebit, the robot forms part of a collaborative mission with US company Astrobotic. Nasa announced in May that Astrobotic was to be awarded a $79.5m contract to transport 14 instruments from various partners to investigate the moon's "volatile elements" such as hydrogen and oxygen, which could be used for astronaut life support and rocket fuel in the future. SpaceBit will be one of those partners, sending the rover to the surface inside Astrobotic's Peregrine lander.

Rapidly maturing technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and quantum computing will "shift fundamentally the global balance of power", according to Dr Tobias Feakin, Australia's Ambassador for Cyber Affairs. "Those [nations] that really are at the forefront of AI and the way that it works will genuinely be at the forefront of the emerging 21st century economy," he told the Australian Cybersecurity Conference, or CyberCon, in Melbourne on Wednesday. Some nations are already positioning themselves to take advantage of these technologies. "Geopolitics now is being shaped and harnessed in a way that we probably didn't think conceivable a decade ago," Feakin said. "We need to be thinking about grand strategy in technology. How do we ensure that we're plugging into this conversation and the kinds of areas that are shaping technology, not only the technology development itself, but the kinds of legislation that shape the absorption of that technology into the global environment," he said.