Police use of facial recognition technology usually only makes the headlines when it's connected to a high-profile crime. But it's increasingly being deployed in more mundane circumstances: There have been reports of police departments employing facial recognition to spot criminals from gas station security footage, identify suspects who aren't carrying photo ID, and assist in social media surveillance. Lawmakers are starting to scrutinize the technology as well. Municipal legislators in San Francisco unveiled an ordinance proposal on Tuesday that, if passed, would make the city the first in the country to completely ban government use of facial recognition systems. The bill would also establish an audit system for agencies acquiring any surveillance technologies.

I recently saw a tweet from Mat Velloso - "If it is written in Python, it's probably machine learning. If it is written in PowerPoint, it's probably AI." This quote is probably the most accurate summarization of what has happened in AI over the past couple of years. A few months back, The Economist shared the chart below that shows the number of CEOs who mentioned AI in their Earnings calls. Towards the end of 2017, even Vladimir Putin said: "The nation that leads in AI'will be the ruler of the world."

The changing parameters of opportunity and risk from the emerging AI revolution run much deeper than might be generally supposed, say Professor Anthony Elliott and Julie Hare. From personal virtual assistants and chatbots to self-driving vehicles and tele-robotics, AI is now threaded into large tracts of everyday life. It is reshaping society and the economy. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, has said that today's AI revolution is "unlike anything humankind has experienced before". AI is not so much an advancement of technology, but rather the metamorphosis of all technology.

Ding-dong, your doorbell is looking a bit creepy. Ring video doorbells, Nest Hello and other connected security cameras are the fastest-growing home improvement gadgets since garage-door openers. These cameras, often built into buzzers, alert your phone when someone is at your door and save footage online. Mine has helped me get deliveries and catch porch pirates stealing packages. Earlier this month, one caught a man licking a family's doorbell for three hours.

Two hospitals in Ohio and West Virginia turned patients away due to a ransomware attack that led to a system failure. The hospitals could not process any emergency patient requests. Hence, they sent incoming patients to nearby hospitals. It is due to incidents like these that cyber threats are one of the top concerns for several industry leaders today. However, such situations can be avoided with modern technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

New technologies promise to achieve what no politician has yet managed in the 70-year history of the UK's National Health Service (NHS): improving patient care while simultaneously saving money. In the government's 10-year-plan announcement this month, far-reaching new technological measures were announced. They demonstrate just how key digital transformation will be to the future of the health service. Changes in the pipeline include referrals being centralised into the NHS e-Referral Service. GP appointments via Skype are set to become more commonplace too.

Stop me if you've heard this before: Artificial intelligence (AI) will eliminate jobs, encode biases against ethnicities and genders, and automate war machines. And it might just lead to a third world war. If developed recklessly, without transparency and safeguards, AI stands to amplify humanity's traits. In the right hands, AI promises to advance scientific frontiers beyond what was previously possible. In fact, it already is.

When it comes to digital transformation, a term that has almost become synonymous with it is Artificial Intelligence. The technology has made an impact on almost every aspect of every business. The scale of importance artificial intelligence holds in the current space can be gauged by the fact that even the Government of India announced special initiatives for it in the Union Budget 2019. A National Programme on'Artificial Intelligence' has been envisioned by the government, which would be catalysed by the establishment of the National Centre on Artificial Intelligence as a hub along with Centres of Excellence. Also, nine priority areas have been identified for the same and a National Artificial Intelligence portal will be developed soon.

At least 14 UK police forces have made use of crime-prediction software or plan to do so, according to Liberty. The human rights group said it had sent a total of 90 Freedom of Information requests out last year to discover which forces used the technology. It believes the programs involved can lead to biased policing strategies that unfairly focus on ethnic minorities and lower-income communities. And it said there had been a "severe lack of transparency" about the matter. Defenders of the technology say it can provide new insights into gun and knife crime, sex trafficking and other potentially life-threatening offences at a time when police budgets are under pressure.

"GEOINT encompasses all aspects of imagery … and geospatial information and services. Geospatial intelligence, or the frequently used term GEOINT, refers to the discipline of exploitation and analysis of satellite imagery and other forms of earth observation data to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the earth. The term GEOINT is typically used for the defense and internal security domains and offers the capability of monitoring, predicting and countering threats, while helping strategize and support various field operations. The ongoing digital revolution and advancements in satellite and earth observation technologies, combined with UAVs and sensors have opened up a new era for defense, security and intel operations, redefining very way of flow of information in pre-, real-time and post-combat operations. Here are the six top GEOINT trends that will dominate the industry in coming times. With satellites beaming thousands of images every day, and sensors collecting millions of data points, it is just not possible for human eyes to digest and analyze all the information. There is a dire need for adopting AI and automation technologies to handle the persistent imagery environment. We should envision a future where artificial intelligence and humans work together to "generate some really interesting insights in a responsible way.