In today's world, data is the new basis of competitive advantage – and businesses are paying close attention to how they use their data, especially highly-regulated customer information. While the goal is to extract insights and knowledge for better decision making, organizations must also ensure they are abiding by the legal and data privacy requirements. This process can be time-intensive for legal professionals, who must stay on top of ever-changing laws, often across multiple global jurisdictions. And there is a lot at stake, with noncompliance resulting in increasingly higher fines and substantial risk to a business' reputation. In the US alone, there are more than 70 government authorities with a legal point of view on data privacy, from states and state agencies, to congress and federal agencies, including the US Attorney General, Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

It's amazing to think that, in barely more than a decade, we've gone from the Keystone Cops to self-driving cars safely navigating the streets of many cities. A big part of that story is the amazing power of simply setting a clear goal and attaching a prize to it. I remember how graduate students and professors on the MIT team became so engrossed in the DARPA Grand Challenge, they forgot to eat and sleep. Humans can be incredibly dedicated and successful when we have a target in mind.

In the early days of computing, there was an acronym: GIGO. It stands for Garbage In, Garbage Out. The few people in the mainframe industry understood that if the data going into the system wasn't good then than what came out wasn't accurate information. The advent of the PC meant far more people began using computers, and most of them understood far less than the early programmers and users. A pundit pointed out the GIGO began to mean Garbage In, Gospel Out.

In our world, facial recognition is all about human biases, right?

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. Although flying a drone might sound like the biggest risk in operating one, dealing with the batteries is potentially more explosive. At the 100 hospital emergency rooms that report electronics-related injury cases to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, more than 200 incidents (PDF) involving drone batteries, stemming from fire, smoke, and explosions, were recorded between 2012 and 2017. Not every drone-battery incident results in an injury, but each pilot and expert I interviewed had a story about an exploding or fiery lithium battery going off especially after it had repeatedly crashed to the ground inside a drone.

On social media, KinkySdollS says its human-like dolls are available for sale or rent and can speak. Mayor Sylvester Turner says he's not trying to be the "moral police," but that it's not the kind of business he wants in the city.

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) the doom of the architecture profession and design services (as some warn) or a way to improve the overall design quality of the built environment, expanding and extending design services in ways yet to be explored? I sat down with my University of Hartford colleague Imdat As. As is an architect with an expertise in digital design who is an assistant professor of architecture and the co-founder of Arcbazar.com, His current research on AI and its impact on architectural design and practice is funded by the US Department of Defense. Recently we sat down and talked about how this emerging technology might change design and practice as we now know it--and if so, would that be such a bad thing?

But artificial intelligence now'thinks' it has the answer. Using deep learning techniques, data scientists from Warwick Business School trained a computer system on 200,000 images from the website Scenic-or-Not, where members of the public vote on how beautiful a British scene is. These include Loch Scavaig on the Isle of Skye... and Newbury Road roundabout. The project was linked to earlier studies by the same team from Warwick's Data Science Lab that showed a direct correlation between residing in a scenic location and good health. If the AI could recognise beauty like a human, city planning for wellbeing could potentially be automated.

Local governments are excellent laboratories for experiments for delivering public services to citizens. Few cities have taken to this role of experimenting with artificial intelligence in service delivery more so than Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates and the second wealthiest after Abu Dhabi. The UAE has invested heavily in technology for improved government service delivery, and recently created the position of Minister of AI. While the government is supporting AI-based technology pilots and implementation throughout the UAE, Dubai is proving to be particularly adept at identifying opportunities to experiment and implement these artificial intelligence technologies. As part of its rapid economic development, Dubai has created an environment to attract start-up companies and investment capital across a wide range of technological development.

At this week's United Nations General Assembly, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Red Cross teamed up with tech giants Amazon, Microsoft, and Google to announce an unlikely new tool to stop famine before it starts: artificial intelligence. The Famine Action Mechanism (FAM), as they're calling it, is the first global tool dedicated to preventing future famines -- no small news in a world where one in nine people don't have enough food. Building off of previous famine-prediction strategies, the tool will combine satellite data of things like rainfall and crop health with social media and news reports of more human factors, like violence or changing food prices. It will also establish a fund that will be automatically dispersed to a food crisis as soon as it meets certain criteria, speeding up the often-lengthy process for funding famine relief. For a famine to be declared in a country or region, three criteria have to be met: At least one in five households has an extreme lack of food; over 30 percent of children under five have acute malnutrition; and two out of 10,000 people die each day.