Under the agreement, Technica Corp. will research and develop a fog computing platform with artificial intelligence that integrates and distills disparate smart edge device data into a common platform. Technica engineers will leverage the company's SmartFog platform to collect, correlate, and analyze data limited power and bandwidth environments to provide increased situational awareness for warfighters in contested and denied environments. SmartFog utilizes distributed processing and machine learning tools to create and maintain actionable intelligence. The ARL's Computational and Information Sciences Directorate (CISD) is responsible for the project and works closely with academic and industry partners to conduct basic and applied research resulting in technologies that support state-of-the-art capabilities in the distribution and/or assimilation of digitized battlespace information.

But how do you describe what you saw? Your answer is probably dependent on the time you live in. In 1561, you might have called the weird flying thing a heavenly portent. In the U.K., just before the start of World War I, you would probably say you'd been startled by an unexpected zeppelin. During the Cold War era, you might have called the thing a flying saucer of possible alien origin, or perhaps a secretive Soviet spy weapon: objects that fell into the category of UFOs.

We live in ever-changing times, so information we can trust is more important than ever before, and it's not always where our academics agree that's most revealing, but where they disagree. Futuremakers is the fly on the wall to that debate. You may already have read a hundred articles about artificial intelligence and the future of society, but these longer conversations – featuring four of our academics at the cutting edge of research and at the forefront of their profession – explore each topic in detail, from the automation of jobs to the inherent bias of algorithms. In 2013 two Oxford academics published a paper titled'The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?' estimating that 47% of US jobs were at risk of automation. Since then, numerous studies have emerged, arriving at very different conclusions.

In early 2018, one of Malaysia's key security forces made a startling announcement. The Auxiliary Force, a branch of the Royal Malaysia Police Cooperative, had entered into a partnership with the Chinese company Yitu Technology to equip the Force's officers with facial-recognition capabilities. Security officials will be able to rapidly compare images caught by live body cameras with images from a central database. The head of the Auxiliary Force explained that this use of artificial intelligence (AI) was a "significant step forward" in efforts to improve public security. He also noted that his agency planned eventually to enhance the body-camera system so as to enable "real-time facial recognition and instant alerts to the presence of persons of interest from criminal watch lists."1

In recent years, Boris Johnson has excelled at making ignorant pronouncements and illiterate blunders. From offensive remarks on burqas to reciting Kipling in Myanmar and his ludicrous statements on Brexit, Johnson has perfected the art of getting it wrong. It feels like he's managed to offend just about everyone. For video game educators like myself, that moment arrived way back in 2006, when Johnson attacked video games as a learning tool. "They [young people] become like blinking lizards, motionless, absorbed, only the twitching of their hands showing they are still conscious," he wrote.

Today, bigness means the retailer's machine learning efforts benefit from data generated by people who shop at Walmart every week and activities around the tens of millions of items on its website. "Scarcity of data is what makes artificial intelligence really hard," Mr. King told Ms. Castellanos. "If you have volumes of data like we do, you can really apply it much quicker across the board," he said. Mr. King shared his take on several technologies, some not quite ready for prime time. Overseas traders charged with hacking SEC's public filings site.

In 2017, a poker bot called Libratus made headlines when it roundly defeated four top human players at no-limit Texas Hold'Em. Now, Libratus's technology is being adapted to take on opponents of a different kind--in service of the US military. Libratus--Latin for balanced--was created by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University to test ideas for automated decision-making based on game theory. Early last year, the professor who led the project, Tuomas Sandholm, founded a startup called Strategy Robot to adapt his lab's game-playing technology for government use, such as in wargames and simulations used to explore military strategy and planning. Late in August, public records show, the company received a two-year contract of up to $10 million with the US Army.

So much debate still rages about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what it means for the future of society and humanity. While this continues, governments around the world are actively embracing the prospect of transforming their departments into smart digital governments that are able to deliver improved services to organisations and life-enhancing services to and resources to citizens who really need them. And do so in more collaborative, joined up ways that rely on sharing information and insights. Layer on the prospect of being able to do so at significantly lower cost and with greater operational efficiency; it's no wonder that the prospect of AI is irresistible. Rightly so, for we can already see just how disruptive a force AI has been in the commercial sector: in retail (with Alibaba and Amazon), in transport (with Uber), in entertainment (with Netflix) and thousands more applications.

A significant use of AI not mentioned in this puff piece is the way that the Chinese are implementing surveillance technology in policing. While Pelley did ask about how Xi Jinping, the authoritarian leader of the Chinese government, might intend to use such technology for nefarious purposes, like targeting dissidents, Lee demured by saying that he couldn't read Xi's mind. Meanwhile, police near Beijing have been equipped with "smart" glasses. They use the same technology as Google glasses, which proved to be a commercial failure as a personal consumer good and are now being used by law enforcement. The Chinese are using these wearable pieces of technology to pick up facial features and car registration plates, which they then cross-check with a database of suspects in real time.

When thinking about 2019, the first thing that comes to mind is: "How are we going to top 2018?" These past few years, we have reached a new level of dystopian weirdness -- toasters taking down the internet, a nation-state meddling in elections and more biggest-ever breaches -- than we could have ever predicted. Outside "more, bigger breaches," the following are three themes most likely to make headlines throughout the year. This year, I expect we'll hear more about evidence of China's nation-state activity in the U.S., with more frequent and notable examples of attacks against the population, not just the U.S. government. There are two main drivers for these attacks: the need to continue to map the U.S. government's employee base -- including its covert operatives -- and the deepening trade war between the U.S. and China.