The Chinese government's plans for mass surveillance using facial recognition have received a boost from one of the country's tech powerhouses, after Alibaba led a $600m investment in SenseTime, which develops technology for tracking individuals. The company is working on facial and object recognition technology that accurately can spot people using cameras, recently demonstrated on CCTV in Beijing. Honda is using SenseTime for its driverless car research and development and it is also being used at shopping counters that allows customers to check-out using their faces. SenseTime already smashed the record for AI funding, beating British competitor DeepMind which was bought by Google for an...

UK startup Juro, which is applying a "design centric approach" and machine learning tech to help businesses speed up the authoring and management of sales contracts, has closed $2m in seed funding led by Point Nine Capital. Prior investor Seedcamp also contributed to the round. Juro is announcing Taavet Hinrikus (TransferWise's co-founder) as an investor now too, as well as Michael Pennington (Gumtree co-founder) and the family office of Paul Forster (co-founder of Indeed.com). Back in January 2017 the London-based startup closed a $750,000 (£615k) seed round, though CEO and co-founder Richard Mabey tells us that was really better classed as an angel round -- with Point Nine Capital only joining "late" in the day. "We actually could have strung it out to Series A," he says of the funding that's being announced now. "But we had multiple offers come in and there is so much of an explosion in demand for the [machine learning] that it made sense to do a round now rather than wait for the A. The whole legal industry is undergoing radical change and we want to be leading it."

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been receiving special coaching on how to present himself when he appears before US politicians demanding to know what he is doing to protect users' data, and how Russia was able to use his platform to allegedly meddle in the 2016 presidential election. Amid continuing controversy over the inappropriate harvesting of the data of up to 87 million Facebook users by British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, Mr Zuckerberg will try and reassure Congress he is taking the concerns of them and the general public seriously. He will also try to deflect the efforts of those who favour more stringent government regulation. "It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm," he is expected to tell the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, according to written testimony released ahead of his appearance. "We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here."

The next thing in biometric authentication could be a new version of something already familiar to web users -- Captcha, the tried, true and too often maddening method of convincing a site you're not a bot by typing in distorted letters and numbers on the screen. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working with funding from the U.S. military, have developed what they call Real-Time Captcha, a technique that combines authentication techniques into one interaction, requiring the user to look into a smartphone's camera and spot and answer a random question, while the program matches the user's face and voice to pre-recorded settings. In essence, the program asks a question and then watches and listens as the user answers it. The big advantage to the system, researchers say, is speed. Human users can get through the process faster than an artificial intelligence or machine reading program can answer the question, while finding and/or manipulating an image or voice recording.

The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) mentioned that they have been using drones for surveying data and traffic videos. "The maintenance team was very happy to have aerial video. It also is going to help from a standpoint of how much it costs. Flights using an airplane are more expensive than flying a drone," said Doug Nintzel, the agency spokesman. The ADOT's drone fleet is rising, and drones are also used for bridge inspections and geotechnical work.

India has some of the finest engineering talent, with more than 1 million engineering students graduating each year, and there is every opportunity to use AI to help the economy blossom in every vertical beginning from healthcare to automobile to government services. There is a lot of hype about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the fear it has unleashed. There is a lot of buzz that it would soon replace humans. But to be honest, there's no need to fear, not yet. But what is important to note is that AI is helping us become better at decision-making.

APART from highlighting the digital vulnerabilities in tertiary education institutions, the revelation of cyber attacks on four main Singaporean universities last week has caught the attention of cyber security experts. One of them is Stuart Fisher, the Senior Vice President of Deep Instinct, a cybersecurity startup that sees itself revolutionising the cybersecurity industry through the application of deep learning. To recap, the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the country's Ministry of Education (MOE) said last week that they received information about the breaches affecting at least 52 online accounts. The incident was found to be a phishing attack where unsuspecting users were directed to a credential harvesting website. Credentials were then used to gain unauthorized access to the institutes' library website to obtain research articles published by staff.

They will be "weapons of terror, used by terrorists and rogue states against civilian populations. Unlike human soldiers, they will follow any orders however evil," says Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, Australia. "These will be weapons of mass destruction. One programmer and a 3D printer can do what previously took an army of people. They will industrialise war, changing the speed and duration of how we can fight. They will be able to kill 24-7 and they will kill faster than humans can act to defend themselves."

Wars of the future will be carried out largely by robots. In a step towards that scenario, machines have been used to in place of people during a joint UK-US military breaching exercise. Human soldiers watched unmanned tanks clear an area for landmines and bridge a gap over obstacles in an exercise with remote controlled tanks. It's the first time robots have been used for this purpose. Human soldiers watched unmanned tanks clear an area for landmines and bridge a gap over obstacles.

Over the weekend, experts on military artificial intelligence from more than 80 world governments converged on the U.N. offices in Geneva for the start of a week's talks on autonomous weapons systems. Many of them fear that after gunpowder and nuclear weapons, we are now on the brink of a "third revolution in warfare," heralded by killer robots--the fully autonomous weapons that could decide who to target and kill without human input. With autonomous technology already in development in several countries, the talks mark a crucial point for governments and activists who believe the U.N. should play a key role in regulating the technology. The meeting comes at a critical juncture. In July, Kalashnikov, the main defense contractor of the Russian government, announced it was developing a weapon that uses neural networks to make "shoot-no shoot" decisions.