Given today's globalized access to knowledge and the rapid pace of technology development, innovation, speed, and agility have taken on a greater importance. The Defense Department serves as an innovative leader in developing technology to protect Americans and troops - on and off the battlefield.

Killer robots could be on battlefields within a year if the UN fails to arrange an international treaty limiting their development. That's the claim of Professor Noel Sharkey, who says early wartime machines could cause mass deaths and they will not be able to tell the difference between enemies and civilians. His comments come as 120 United Nations member states meet this week at the Palais des Nations complex in Geneva to continue talks on the future challenges posed by lethal autonomous weapons system. Dr Noel Sharkey (right) is pictured here with Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams (left) campaigning for a ban on fully autonomous weapons. He believes an international treaty banning them is'vitally important' at a UN conference in Geneva this week Dr Noel Sharkey, a Professor of AI and Robotics as well as a Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield, told MailOnline that an international treaty banning the use of fully autonomous killer robots is'vitally important'.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has pledged to lower car tariffs, improve intellectual property protection and open up the Chinese economy, addressing United States complaints in an escalating trade dispute. Xi made his remarks on Tuesday at the Boao economic forum on the southern island of Hainan. He did not mention US President Donald Trump directly. "China's door of opening up will not be closed and will only open wider," Xi said in his first public speech since the outbreak of trade tensions between China and the US. Also on Tuesday, it emerged that China filed a complaint against the US at the World Trade Organization (WTO) over steel and aluminium products tariffs imposed by Washington.

Hype over artificial intelligence reached its zenith in 2017, with CIOs, consultants and academics touting the technology as potentially automating anything from business and IT operations to customer connections. Yet through the first calendar quarter of 2018 several media organizations reported on the dangers of AI, which involves training computers to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence. "There's been so much hype in the media about it and this is just journalists trying to extend the hype by talking about the negative side," says Thomas Davenport, a Babson College distinguished professor who teaches a class on cognitive technologies. Perhaps, but the concerns are hardly new and very persistent, ranging from fears about racial, gender and other biases to automated drones running amok with potentially lethal consequences. Get the latest insights with our CIO Daily newsletter.

Patents are intangible assets, that is they are products of ideas and thinking, and fall under Intellectual Property (IP). Now, IP is subject to the region/country of the applicant and is regulated by the respective government of those countries and regions. For example, in the United States, ML related work are appreciated and the ease of filing patents is considerably less rigorous compared to the European Union, where the emphasis is more on the method or working model which incorporates the related field of work rather than the actual work itself. This again does not hold good all the time with the United States scrutinising software patents. When it comes to India, the patent filing process is again stringent and requires consent from the government authorities even though it promotes filing patents for startups.

Cambridge Analytica is facing incredible pressure over the Facebook data sharing scandal -- and not surprisingly, it's determined to share its version of events before Mark Zuckerberg testifies in congressional hearings. The company has posted a "series of facts" that challenge some of the allegations made against the company. Not surprisingly, it started by insisting that it didn't do anything illegal: GSR "legally obtained" the data about Facebook users, and "did not illegally or inappropriately" scoop up and share data. Later on, it maintained that it "only collects data with informed consent." After that, Cambridge Analytica jumped into specifics.

NEW DELHI: Barun Gorain joined Hindustan Zinc Ltd as chief technology and innovation officer two months ago, moving from Barrick Gold in Canada, one of the many CXO-level hires that Indian companies have been making in the buzzing areas of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, the Internet of things (IoT) and robotic process automation (RPA). Other recent instances of Indians returning home with domain knowledge in these emerging technologies include Raghuram Velega, who left his job at a San Francisco-based cognitive computing company to join Reliance Jio Infocomm as vice-president, head, big data and analytics. Former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) executive Santanu Bhattacharya joined Bharti Airtel as chief data scientist and Ayush Sharma moved from Silicon Valley to join Reliance Jio as senior vicepresident of engineering and technology. Search firms like Korn Ferry, EMA Partners, Transearch and Hunt Partners say there's a paucity of experts in these fields, leading to a jump in salaries of new hires by as much as 50%, most of them from overseas. Salaries for such executives are at Rs 1-2 crore annually but can be even higher.

Written on 06 April 2018. But what would a good AI plan actually look like? Politicians worldwide are stealing one of the US government's best ideas by drawing up ambitious plans to make the most of advances in artificial intelligence. These AI manifestos, penned in Paris, Beijing, and elsewhere, follow the example of the Obama administration, which released a report on the technology toward the end of its tenure. This report did not include funding, but it made it clear that AI should be a key focus of government strategy.

Most companies are not very well prepared for the weaponizing of cyberspace by foreign governments. That was part of an assessment of the current state of cyberspace by Eric Schmidt, former chairman of Alphabet, Inc. and CEO of Google. Schmidt gave the remarks during his keynote address at the two-day annual conference of the Yale Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy, which kicked off on April 6. This year's conference, "Understanding Cyberwarfare and Artificial Intelligence," drew both academics and practitioners. This was the seventh annual conference of the Johnson Center, which was made possible by Dr. Henry Kissinger's donation of his papers to Yale and a generous gift from Charles B. Johnson '54 and Nicholas F. Brady '52.

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