The U.S Department of Homeland Security had funded a research approximately 6 years ago of the virtual border agent technology, better known as AVATAR (Automated Virtual Agent for Truth Assessments in Real Time) and had tested it at the U.S Mexico border on travelers voluntarily. Canada and EU has also tested the robot like kiosk that is asking travelers a series of questions. If the trend continues, International Travelers could be speaking with kiosk to determine if they are lying on any aspect at an airport or border crossings. The technology can also be used to screen the refugees and unwanted travelers travelling to any country. It can also be used to screen the citizenship applications, processing visas and many other such inter-related services.

Cisco has announced a major investment into the UK's AI scene. The networking giant has revealed a $100m (£77m) commitment that includes a new partnership with University College London (UCL) aimed at creating one of the world's largest AI research centres. The facility will house between 200 and 250 masters students and researchers looking to take on some of the biggest AI industry challenges, as well as continue Cisco's 30-year relationship with UCL. "It's wonderful to renew our partnership with Cisco and work together to upskill the UK in machine learning and artificial intelligence," said UCL provost Professor Michael Arthur. "I'm particularly looking forward to opening the new AI Centre in the coming months to position us as a sector leader in computer science."

The International Space Station should prepare for the arrival of its first android crew members, Russian state media says. The Roskosmos space agency has approved a preliminary plan to send a pair of humanoid robots called FEDOR into space in August 2019, according to "a source in the space and rocket industry" quoted by the RIA Novosti website. Robots in space have become commonplace for space superpowers: the U.S. has two operational Mars rovers, China has a lunar lander on the moon and more on the way, and Russia has several now-defunct rovers on both the moon and Mars. In 2011, NASA sent Robonaut 2, a 330-pound manually controlled "humanoid" robot, to the ISS to look into how such robots might be used to perform simple, repetitive, or especially dangerous tasks. But while previous robots were shot into space on as cargo, Russia's pair of FEDORs -- the acronym stands for Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research -- will "fly for the first time to the ISS as crew members, and not as cargo in the transport compartment," RIA Novosti wrote, adding that the robots will fly in an otherwise unmanned Soyuz rocket.

Last month, two parliamentary reports on the involvement of the British intelligence services in torture and rendition were released last week. What has been hypothesized by several journalists is now confirmed: that British functionaries--to include soldiers, civil servants and intelligence officers with MI5 and MI6--knew about and participated in a vast array of human rights abuses committed during the capture and interrogation of terrorism suspects. The Guardian's Peter Beaumont writes with great contempt for what has transpired since 2001, "[A]s it is now quite clear, it was all a bloody lie. The answers given to journalists at the Observer over the years, as well as colleagues at The Guardian and those at other news organisations, as they investigated these allegations, were rotten with untruth and evasion." Governments' lying to their citizens about covert wars is hardly new, nor is the pervasive use of kidnapping of terrorism suspects by the CIA to include its many "black sites."

The European Commission, an executive of the European Union, has announced it will be more than doubling its investments in artificial intelligence (AI). The commission will increase spending on AI by 70%, reaching €1.5bn (US$1.81bn) by 2020, in a bid to compete with Asia and the US, which are both investing at least three time as much.

John Krafcik, the CEO of Waymo, stands with the Jaguar I-Pace vehicle, March 27, in New York. Self-driving car pioneer Waymo will buy up to 20,000 of the electric vehicles from Jaguar Land Rover to help realize its vision for a robotic ride-hailing service. The commitment announced Tuesday marks another step in Waymo's evolution from a secret project started in Google nine years ago to a spin-off that's gearing up for an audacious attempt to reshape the transportation business. Speaking in a fireside chat at the National Governors Association meeting Friday, Waymo CEO John Krafcik told the gathering that the "time period will be longer than you think" for automated vehicles to be everywhere. Krafcik spent his conversation with Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval emphasizing the need for safety in developing automated driving systems and at the same time tempering some of the expectations caused by the hype around this technology.

A majority of people think that artificial intelligence will steal jobs away from human workers. In a recent survey conducted by Quartz, more than 1,600 respondents in 84 countries said that half of positions would be made redundant by automation in the next five years. A separate survey conducted by Gallup in the U.S. found that 75 percent of adults believe AI will "eliminate more jobs than it creates." "[AI is] superhuman, and we think [it] will be in every industry [and] replace 50 percent of human jobs," Kai-Fu Lee, founder of VC firm Sinovation Ventures, told CNBC in an interview last April. "It is the decision engine that will replace people."

Let's talk real for a second: AI has become the buzzword of pretty much every domain, and we're sure we're not the only ones who have noticed. AI is apparently going to revolutionise such diverse industries as fashion and recruitment, and just last week the UK and French governments announced a joint work force on AI between the Alan Turing Institute and the DATAIA. For it's part, cybersecurity is hardly immune to the allure of AI, with every vendor in the industry currently waxing lyrical about the integration of AI into their solution. Is there a little bit of AI for AI's sake at play here? Don't get us wrong, there are many benefits to AI in cybersecurity.

For many people, Google is the internet. It now dominates almost all aspects of our online lives, from how we search for information, to how we navigate from one place to another. But the route Google has taken to achieve this supremacy has been ruthless, illegal and occasionally unconventional. For 85 per cent of smartphone users that have Google's Android mobile operating system, the slew of apps that come pre-installed on the device are often owned by Google. This includes the popular Chrome web browser and Google search engine, meaning users are forced to download competing apps through the Google Play Store if they want to use them.