Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are being heralded as a way to solve a wide range of problems in different industries and applications, such as reducing street traffic, improving online shopping, making life easier with voice-activated digital assistants, and more. The cybersecurity industry is no different. However, we need to be careful of the "hype" around AI and ML. And there is a lot of hype out there! A simple Google search of the term "artificial intelligence" yields about 630 million results, and AI continues to dominate the headlines and has even made its way into mainstream TV advertising.

A collaborative group that includes Salesforce, Deloitte, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Kingdom Office of AI today introduced guidelines for government officials to procure artificial intelligence systems. The guidelines that counsel vendors to ask particular questions before selling their AI to government agencies is being called by the WEF the first for any national government worldwide. In the works for about 10 months, the guidelines made by the previously mentioned organizations were brought together by the WEF's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its AI and ML team. The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution hosts fellows from nations around the world to focus on major initiatives. Governments the world over are increasingly using AI to do things like predict the needs of citizens, help with health care screening, or do things in criminal justice like power predictive policing, track suspects with facial recognition, or determine if people deserve pretrial bail hearings.

Jim Bridenstine says you have to go to the moon to get to Mars. The Brad Pitt-helmed space epic "Ad Astra" sets a new standard for science fiction films, a former NASA engineer who served as a technical consultant for the movie told Fox News. "In my view, it sets a new standard for science fiction films, updating for all to see on the big screen some of the most fantastic imagery we have obtained of our solar system since films like '2001: A Space Odyssey' were released over 50 years ago," said Robert Yowell, who served as an engineer at NASA for 11 years and as a senior mission manager for SpaceX. The new film, set in a future in which humanity has colonized a few far-flung parts of the galaxy but still hasn't reckoned with its own existential torments, is three films rolled cohesively into one: a visually stunning movie about astronauts exploring places like Mars and Jupiter; a poignant father-son tale about coming to grips with abandonment and growing up with a certain kind of dad; and a social commentary on 21st-century concerns over environmental degradation, capitalism and our place in the world. Roy McBride, a man on a mission to the edge of our galaxy that he can't really refuse.

Saudi officials display what they claim are Iranian cruise missiles and drones used in the attack on Saudi Arabia's oil industry; Benjamin Hall reports from Jerusalem. The attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil fields will drive a massive increase in the need for perimeter security gear, according to a new report. The report, released by IHS Markit earlier this week, says that knowing where drones are at all times is a new reality. While benign drones must be tracked, it is the malicious ones that must be stopped. "Drone attacks are relatively cheap and easy to initiate but can inflict major damage," IHS Markit analyst Oliver Philippou wrote in the note.

Tech companies should stop behaving as though everything that is not illegal is acceptable, says Microsoft's second-in-command. Instead, they should focus on defining – and living by – the standards that they would like to see in regulation, before it gets forced on them anyway. For some of the most potentially dangerous new technologies, such as facial recognition, that could mean voluntarily refusing to sell them to certain countries, for certain uses, or even agreeing to a moratorium altogether, said Brad Smith, the president and chief legal officer of the world's most valuable publicly-traded company. Speaking to the Guardian before the launch of his new book, Tools and Weapons, Smith said that if technology firms wanted to be proud of how they changed the world for the better, they must take more responsibility for the ways they have made it worse. "When you think about all of the issues that people worry about in the world today and what they spend their time arguing about, it's often issues like trade, immigration, nationalism, globalisation," Smith said.

The White House weighs its options as Iran warns that a military response could trigger an'all-out war'; chief White House correspondent John Roberts reports. Saudi Arabia defended itself as well as possible from the recent massive attack on its oil facilities -- an attack that the U.S. has blamed on Iran, a military expert said. "I don't think there is any country that could have defended any better than Saudi Arabia did, and that includes the United States," Peter Roberts, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, told The New York Times. "I don't think there is any country that could have defended any better than Saudi Arabia did, and that includes the United States." Eighteen drones and seven cruise missiles bombarded the facilities in an asault described as a "Pearl Harbor-type" attack.

LONDON – A U.K. parliamentary committee has released a report that highlights industrial automation in Japan, calling on the government to promote automation in British industries. Japan "has a long history of automation and is home to major robotics manufacturers," the House of Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee wrote in the report published Wednesday, adding that the country is "the origin for half of robots sold globally." Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's administration "has made a conscious choice to support automation as part of its'Abenomics' reforms, recognizing the need for continued growth and development of automation to enable the country to'drastically improve productivity,' " the report states. Referring to Japan's 2015 New Robot Strategy, the report urged the U.K. government to develop its own automation and artificial intelligence strategy by the end of 2020. The report cited an 2018 report by the International Federation of Robotics that ranked the U.K. in 22nd place in terms of robot density -- or the number of industrial robots per 10,000 workers.

David Stewart leads strategy development, drives product management and provides key marketing counsel for fraud and compliance solutions worldwide. During the past 10 years, Stewart has hosted SAS' annual Counterterrorism and Financial Crimes Forum co-sponsored by the US Department of Justice and a number of global financial institutions. He has collaborated extensively to bring data mining and machine learning capabilities to market for credit analytics, customer intelligence and financial crimes applications.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE is making its way into every aspect of life, including military conflict. We look at the thorny legal and ethical issues that the newest arms race raises. Three executives from Fukushima's melted-down nuclear-power plant were cleared of negligence today, but the disaster's aftermath is far from over. And, what a swish new Chinese restaurant in Havana says about China-Cuba relations.

The human brain is a funny thing. Certain memories can stick with us forever: the birth of a child, a car crash, an election day. But we only store some details--the color of the hospital delivery room or the smell of the polling station--while others fade, such as the face of the nurse when that child was born, or what we were wearing during that accident. For Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the day he watched AI rise out of a lab is one he'll remember forever. "This was 2012, in a room with a small team, and there were just a few of us," he tells me. An engineer named Jeff Dean, a legendary programmer at Google who helped build its search engine, had been working on a new project and wanted Pichai to have a look. "Anytime Jeff wants to update you on something, you just get excited by it," he says. Pichai doesn't recall exactly which building he was in when Dean presented his work, though odd details of that day have stuck with him. He remembers standing, rather than sitting, and someone joking about an HR snafu that had designated the newly hired Geoffrey Hinton--the "Father of Deep Learning," an AI researcher for four decades, and, later, a Turing Award winner--as an intern. The future CEO of Google was an SVP at the time, running Chrome and Apps, and he hadn't been thinking about AI.