Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, a celebrated Bangladeshi author and academic, was stabbed in the back on March 3, while attending a programme at a university in the northeastern district of Sylhet. The lone attacker, Foyzur Rahman, was caught before he could continue stabbing Iqbal from behind. The 24-year-old attacker later said he wanted to kill Iqbal because he believed the academic was an "an enemy of Islam". Iqbal, who has authored more than 200 books, is now out of danger and is recuperating at the Combined Military Hospital (CMH) in the capital, Dhaka, according to his wife, Yasmin Haque. The stabbing has brought back memories of a series of fatal attacks against secular bloggers in Bangladesh nearly three years ago.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. After William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his 1984 novel Neuromancer, it almost immediately entered our everyday vocabulary. A play on information theorist Norbert Wiener's idea of cybernetics, cyberspace became shorthand for the world inside our networked computers, that digital landscape where we met to chat, play games, and exchange intimate secrets. Today, cyber is part of our political language, too, used to describe everything from digital warfare to online intelligence gathering. What often gets forgotten about the origin story of this term is that Gibson wasn't just talking the future of computers, but of a world where tech corporations rule every aspect of our lives.

Video: Is regulating AI a bad idea? Entrepreneur Elon Musk has long held the position that innovators need to be aware of the social risk artificial intelligence (AI) presents to the future, but at South by Southwest (SXSW) on Sunday, the SpaceX founder pieced together his plan for the second coming of the Dark Ages, noting AI "scares the hell" out of him. Machine learning, task automation and robotics are already widely used in business. These and other AI technologies are about to multiply, and we look at how organizations can best take advantage of them. Making an appearance on a couch with his friend, creator of science fiction western series Westworld Jonathan Nolan, Musk said that although he's not usually an advocate for regulation and oversight, the AI proposition is where he can make an exception.

On 1 March Roboteam announced the launch of its Artificial Intelligence Control Unit (AI-CU) software to provide autonomous and artificial intelligence capabilities to the warfighters. The AI-CU software will provide intuitive control and operation of unmanned systems and payloads according to the company. This will include unique features such as autonomous navigation, facial recognition and other artificial intelligence-enabled capabilities for operators of unmanned systems. The AI-CU allows operators to control numerous platforms and payloads simultaneously, based on multi-robot operator control unit (MOCU) compliant, open source software. Roboteam said that with the use of AI, an operator can control semi-autonomous platforms with voice commands while receiving real-time facial recognition data in the field.

The Global Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture (AIA) Market is expected to grow at a significant CAGR of 24.3% during the forecast period. The factors driving the growth of the global AIA market are rising adoption of information management systems (IMS), automated irrigation, increasing crop productivity by implementing deep learning techniques, and increasing global population. Furthermore, growing trend of precision farming and increasing adoption of smart sensors are also fueling the demand of the global AIA market. Replacement of human labor is also expected to overcome by AIA, to minimize scarcity of physical labor. However, the high cost of collecting data of agricultural land is a major restraint of the AIA market growth.

"This acquisition of ScanEagle is one way to modernize the military to deter those who want to wage war against our country," Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said at a ceremony at a Manila air force base, attended by the U.S. ambassador.

Ever since its failure was confirmed in late 2015, China's Tiangong-1 spacecraft has been tracked by organizations to try determine where it will fall following reentry, expected to take place in the first week of April. While the loss of the module may have been a setback, it hasn't stopped China from pursuing its ambitious goal of building its own space station, Tiangong. Translating to "heavenly palace" from Mandarin, the Tiangong program is a bold one, considering China was a relative newcomer to the space race but has already established a habitable presence in orbit around Earth. Tiangong-1, before it failed, saw two visits by crews who spent time in the module, proving that it was habitable. The Chinese are following the tested approach of building a space station one module at a time.

I open Google Translate twice as often as Facebook, and the instant translation of the price tags is not a cyberpunk for me anymore. That's what we call reality. It's hard to imagine that this is the result of a centennial fight to build the algorithms of machine translation and that there has been no visible success during half of that period. The precise developments I'll discuss in this article set the basis of all modern language processing systems -- from search engines to voice-controlled microwaves. The story begins in 1933.

The Trump administration issued a ruling that expands the entities which can exempt themselves from the contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. A federal judge in Boston Monday threw out a lawsuit by Massachusetts' attorney general that attempted to block the Trump administration's rules expanding exemptions from ObamaCare's birth control mandate. U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton said Massachusetts lacked standing to sue and noted that "the record is uniquely obscure" regarding whether employers in the state would take advantage of the exemptions. In a statement, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said that she was disappointed in the decision but remained committed to ensuring "affordable and reliable reproductive health care for women." ObamaCare originally required most companies to cover birth control at no additional cost, though it included exemptions for religious organizations.

Top tech firms have been cracking down on savvy internet users who continue to create fake, AI-assisted porn of many of Hollywood's leading ladies. But now it seems the videos, also known as'deepfakes,' have taken an even darker turn. 'Deepfakes' hobbyists have begun using the technology to create digitally-altered videos of world leaders, including President Donald Trump, Russian president Vladimir Putin, former president Barack Obama and former first lady and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Experts warn the videos could be realistic enough to manipulate future elections and global political as soon as 2020. Researchers developed a technology called Face2Face, which lets users control the facial expressions and audio of another actor in real-time video. This is different from'Deepfakes' The technology has been used in research labs for several years now, but has been democratized for public use only recently, particularly through software called'FakeApp.'