In July 2009, deadly riots broke out in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, China. Nearly 200 people died, the majority ethnic Han Chinese, and thousands of Chinese troops were brought in to quell the riots. An information battle soon followed, as mobile phone and internet service was cut off in the entire province. For the next 10 months, web access would be almost non-existent in Xinjiang, a vast region larger than Texas with a population of over 20 million. It was one of the most widespread, longest internet shutdowns ever.

"Ready, fire, aim!" has never had much of a positive connotation, either in financial or military circles, but the Navy's newest weapon could be changing that, at least somewhat. The Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM), set to replace the service's 40-year-old Harpoon missile, takes a technological step forward in long-range strikes, using sensors and on-board artificial intelligence to let a target's own defenses work against it. It would allow a missile to be launched with less-than-perfect targeting information because it will be able to find the correct target while in route. Instead of just using its own radar systems to locate a target, the LRASM uses a passive sensor to identify the target's own radar signals, which warships always have powered up to detect attack. Meanwhile, the missile's advanced algorithms sort through incoming data to ensure that the identity of the target – say, that it's a cruiser and not a cargo ship – and to zero in on the ship's most vulnerable spot.

Open data is one of those topics you probably already heard about a few years ago. Like most digital topics, it was blown away by big data, data lakes, and data scientists. Hot on the hype curve today we have machine learning, artificial intelligence, labelled data, blockchain, and much more. What do they all have in common? Data is the heartbeat of the digital economy. Where does this data come from?

The Bank of England's warning that the pace of artificial intelligence development now threatens 15m UK jobs has prompted calls for political intervention. According to scientists and legal experts, responding to the bank's warning this November, there is now an urgent need for the development of intelligent algorithms to be put on the political agenda. This is happening now and across the board and that's the difference. That's why a lot of us need to start talking about this now. The Government needs to pick up on this and put it on the political agenda and look at regulatory issues, said Chrissie Lightfoot, a patent lawyer and author, who debated fears over unemployment caused by AI at London's Science Museum last October.

When a Google computer program beat the world's best player of an ancient Chinese board game last May, it might have seemed like an incremental milestone. But for some, the success of the program known as AlphaGo marked more than a man vs. machine clash. It set up a broader race between China and the United States over artificial intelligence, a competition that could mold the future of humankind just as the widespread arrival of electricity did in the last century. The Go tournament took place in Wuzhen, a city of canals that is more than 1,300 years old, a fitting venue for a competition involving the strategy board game Go that has been played for several thousand years. Go is renowned for its complexity, and it is said that there are more variations to the game than there are atoms in the universe. Perhaps it was a coincidence of timing, but the AlphaGo competition kicked off events that demonstrated China's resolve to close the gap with -- and quickly surpass -- the United States in deploying artificial intelligence, or AI.

The year is coming to an end. I did not write nearly as much as I had planned to. But I'm hoping to change that next year, with more tutorials around Reinforcement Learning, Evolution, and Bayesian Methods coming to WildML! And what better way to start than with a summary of all the amazing things that happened in 2017? Looking back through my Twitter history and the WildML newsletter, the following topics repeatedly came up.

Advancements in artificial intelligence could be exploited by criminals in order to launch automated cyber attacks, manipulate public opinion through fake videos, or weaponise commercial drones, researchers warned yesterday. A joint report from policy experts from Cambridge, Oxford and Yale universities, as well as military experts, claimed that attacks using AI by rogue states and criminal groups poses an imminent threat to both physical and political security. The 98-page'Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence' report also calls for policymakers and researchers to examine and prepare for the possibility of the technology being manipulated, and to take greater care when publishing notes on their findings. Despite the potential benefits of AI to society, there are concerns that the technology is being developed with little regard to public safety, particularly when it comes to machine learning and training computers to be as intelligent as humans, according to the report. "We all agree there are a lot of positive applications of AI," said Miles Brundage, a research fellow at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, speaking to Reuters.

Can I have an AI and two blockchains? That's a joke but people tend to confuse or misuse the terms. There is undoubtedly a hype around these terms. In this post we are going to talk about AI (Artificial Intelligence), what it is and whether it is able to achieve what it is promising. We are going to do this, while going through the cases presented at the AI Congress 2018.

REUTERS/Denis Balibouse Sophia, a robot integrating the latest technologies and artificial intelligence is pictured during a presentation at the "AI for Good" Global Summit in Geneva Rapid advances in artificial intelligence are raising risks that malicious users will soon exploit the technology to mount automated hacking attacks, cause driverless car crashes or turn commercial drones into targeted weapons, a new report warns. The study, published on Wednesday by 25 technical and public policy researchers from Cambridge, Oxford and Yale universities along with privacy and military experts, sounded the alarm for the potential misuse of AI by rogue states, criminals and lone-wolf attackers. The researchers said the malicious use of AI poses imminent threats to digital, physical and political security by allowing for large-scale, finely targeted, highly efficient attacks. The study focuses on plausible developments within five years. "We all agree there are a lot of positive applications of AI," Miles Brundage, a research fellow at Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute.

Updated In 2013, James "Jimi" Crawford founded a company called Orbital Insight, barely noticed at the time amid the Silicon Valley froth. Crawford had worked at NASA for 15 years and wrote software for Mars rovers. He left NASA to run engineering for Google Books, and while there he noticed that Elon Musk's SpaceX and other new companies were driving down the cost of building and launching satellites. Crawford saw an opportunity to collect and analyze what he anticipated would be a deluge of images from a surfeit of new satellites that would circle the Earth, taking readings and pictures. Orbital Insight's first product looked at images of cornfields all over the world, analyzing the health of plants to predict yields for traders who bet on future price swings. About two years later, Silicon Valley's top investors decided Orbital Insight might be huge.