Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will appear before the US House Commerce Committee on 11 April to explain his company's part in the Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal. The hearing will be broadcast on C-SPAN and be available to stream online on the channel's website. The story broke on 17 March that Cambridge Analytica, a "strategic communications" consultancy, had harvested information from the profiles of 50m Facebook users - now thought to be closer to 87m - and sold it on to the Donald Trump campaign for use in the micro-targeting of swing voters in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election. The Vote Leave campaign pushing for Britain to quit the European Union are also understood to have employed the company's services prior to the Brexit referendum in 2016. Cambridge Analytica had acquired the data from Global Science Research (GSR), a firm run by academic Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who had been carrying out a personality test using a third-party app called This is Your Digital Life that required its 270,000 paid participants to provide access to their Facebook pages.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm. Burly robots and humanoids are common in sci-fi but it would not be too ambitious to say that the human race may see a cyborg infiltration down the line. With the emergence of AI, various sectors such as defense, medical and aerospace are increasingly making use of the technology to boost productivity and cost-effectiveness. This is why investing in AI-related stocks is a prudent decision at this point. An area which is already experiencing a massive usage of machine learning and robotics is the defense sector. Drew Cukor, chief of the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Function Team stated on Mar 6, 2018 that the near future is about to observe humans and computers working "symbiotically" in order to increase the efficacy of a weapon system to be able to detect a target and obliterate it.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm. Burly robots and humanoids are common in sci-fi but it would not be too ambitious to say that the human race may see a cyborg infiltration down the line. With the emergence of AI, various sectors such as defense, medical and aerospace are increasingly making use of the technology to boost productivity and cost-effectiveness. This is why investing in AI-related stocks is a prudent decision at this point. An area which is already experiencing a massive usage of machine learning and robotics is the defense sector. Drew Cukor, chief of the U.S. Department of Defense's (DoD) Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Function Team stated on Mar 6, 2018 that the near future is about to observe humans and computers working "symbiotically" in order to increase the efficacy of a weapon system to be able to detect a target and obliterate it.

All receive a cash boost of around $125,000 from Nasa to fund research for nine months and can then apply to be selected from Phase II funding. "The NIAC program gives Nasa the opportunity to explore visionary ideas that could transform future Nasa missions by creating radically better or entirely new concepts while engaging America's innovators and entrepreneurs as partners in the journey," said Jim Reuter, acting associate administrator of Nasa's Space Technology Mission Directorate. "The concepts can then be evaluated for potential inclusion into our early stage technology portfolio." Other schemes selected include a steam powered jumping robot named'Sparrow' capable of exploring icy ocean world's such as Saturn's moon Titan, which many experts believe holds the best chance for finding life in the galaxy.

When China's government said last summer it intends to surpass the US and lead the world in artificial intelligence by 2030, skeptics pointed to a major problem. Despite gobs of data from the world's largest online population, lightweight privacy rules, and 8 million fresh college graduates in 2017, the country doesn't have enough people skilled in AI to overtake America. This week Kai-Fu Lee, onetime head of Google's operations in China, launched a new project to help close the country's AI talent gap. His helpers include the Chinese government and some of North America's leading computer scientists. The project is an example of how US and Chinese efforts to progress in AI are entangled, despite recent rhetoric about superpower technology rivalry.

In November of 2012, Jan Scheuermann did something she never thought she would do again: She fed herself a piece of chocolate. For the last decade Scheuermann, 54, has been a prisoner in her own body. She suffers from a mysterious degenerative disorder that attacks the nervous system, severing the connections between the brain and muscles. Now a quadriplegic, Scheuermann has no movement below her neck. She can't move her limbs, let alone grasp, move, or hold anything.

Australian authorities say they are investigating whether Facebook breached the country's privacy law when personal information of more than 300,000 Australian users was obtained by Cambridge Analytica, a Trump-linked political consulting firm, without their authorization.

For decades, corporate America has spurned big-lab research-and-development spending, the type that delivered the dizzying and broad tech and economic progress of the last century. But a belief that artificial intelligence is going to drive the next big economic wave has led today's largest companies -- like Google, IBM and Microsoft -- to revert to the old, ambitious R&D model. These five companies -- plus Amazon, Facebook and Google -- combined are investing more in research and development than many entire economies. In 2015, for instance, the entire U.K. economy -- companies and the government -- invested $53.8 billion in R&D, less than the $58.2 billion posted by the big eight. Take a look at the chart below.

SENDAI – Municipalities and private firms are hoping robots and drones will be able to help with future disaster recovery efforts -- an initiative that incorporates lessons learned from the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake -- by sending out warnings, gauging damage and accessing places were people cannot. To that end, the Sendai Municipal Government is testing a speaker-equipped drone for sending evacuation warnings during flight. Drones are quieter than helicopters, meaning messages would be easier for those on the ground to hear, city officials said. In such a system, the drone would automatically take flight after receiving a warning from the country's J-Alert early warning system and would issue evacuation messages to local residents. In the 2011 disaster, two city government workers and three volunteer fire department rescuers were killed in the tsunami while warning local residents to evacuate.

But to lump all Washington backlash together is too simplistic. Public scrutiny can be good, bad or downright ugly for technological progress and recent events provide stark examples of all three. But on March 18 a driverless car operated by Uber Technologies Inc. killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz. Five days later in California a driver died when his Tesla crashed while in semiautonomous mode. Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey suspended Uber's testing and the National Transportation Safety Board launched investigations of both accidents.