NITI Aayog, the government's premier policy-making body, is exploring the use of blockchain and AI technologies in areas such as education, health, and agriculture. Having completed three years since its formation, the NITI Aayog is now working towards the adoption of AI and Blockchain in the areas of governance as it believes that such technologies will result in significant benefits if deployed in these areas among others. In a note highlighting its achievements in the last three years, NITI Aayog said it "is working on a strategy paper for blockchain in India which will outline use cases as well as map out the schemes of Government of India that stand to benefit from the utilisation of the technology." A senior official at the Aayog, who did not wish to be identified, stated, "It is like a distributed ledger. Suppose, you have made 50000 photocopies of a book and you make some change in the original book, then the blockchain technique allows you to replicate the change in all the copies by changing just the original book. We are still exploring and believe this technology can have potentially beneficial uses in the areas of education, health, social sector etc."

In 2016, 37,461 people died in traffic accidents in the US, a 5.6 percent increase over 2015, according to the US Department of Transportation (DoT). This is down from 1970, when around 60,000 people died in traffic accidents in the US. The addition of safety features such as seat belts and air bags have reduced the number of deaths, and new technology from autonomous vehicles could help even more as driver error is eliminated. This ebook, based on a special feature from ZDNet and TechRepublic, looks at emerging autonomous transport technologies and how they will affect society and the future of business. DoT researchers estimate that fully autonomous vehicles, also known as self-driving cars, could reduce traffic fatalities by up to 94 percent by eliminating those accidents that are due to human error.

An Associated Press investigation finds that Russian cyber spies exploiting a national vulnerability in cybersecurity are trying to break into the emails of scores of people working on military drone technology.

For Elon Musk, the term artificial intelligence conjures apocalyptic scenarios of autonomous robots wreaking destruction in a world dominated by hyper-intelligent machines. Stephen Hawking foresees a future in which smart machines replace sluggish humans across a range of activities, driving millions out of work.

For Elon Musk, the term artificial intelligence conjures apocalyptic scenarios of autonomous robots wreaking destruction in a world dominated by hyper-intelligent machines. Stephen Hawking foresees a future in which smart machines replace sluggish humans across a range of activities, driving millions out of work. Last month Bill Gates, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, imagined a gentler future – one with longer holidays and more free time. "The purpose of humanity is not just to sit behind a counter and sell things, "he said. We can all speculate about the future.

The firm, called MarketsFlow, has seen strong demand for its equity raising more than 215 per cent of its target. Marketsflow, a new digital wealth management platform, has closed a fully funded investment round via equity crowdfunding. Initially looking to raise £210k, the fundraise has seen more than £562k of commitments from nearly 800 investors giving Marketsflow a pre-money valuation of £2.4m. Describing itself as using innovative machine learning and AI-based Intelligence to power its robo-advice service, Marketsflow launched its first digital wealth platform in January 2017. In October it subsequently applied to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the UK regulator, for wholesale/retail Advisory permissions.

Images released by SpaceX last week showed Musk's original Tesla Roadster perched on a large cone inside the Falcon Heavy on what appeared to be a secure mount to keep it stationary as the rocket made its maiden flight.

The supermarket chain Tesco could face a bill of £4bn in a case over equal pay for women, writes BBC business editor Kamal Ahmed. Lawyers say female staff could get up to £20,000 in back pay, having received less money than men for comparable work. Paula Lee, of Leigh Day solicitors, said the most common rate for women was £8 an hour, whereas for men the hourly rate could be as high as £11 an hour. Up to 200,000 workers could be affected by unequal pay, she added. Tesco said all its staff could progress equally and were paid fairly, whatever their gender or background.

An extraordinary ballet was danced through the skies over central Florida on Tuesday, as SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket passed its first test launch with (mostly) flying colors. With its highly anticipated first flight behind it, the Falcon Heavy is now the world's most powerful operational rocket by a factor of two, capable of lifting 140,000 pounds of cargo into low-Earth orbit. Only the Saturn V rocket that sent humans to the moon has lifted so much, so far. "I'm still trying to absorb everything that happened. It seemed surreal to me," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a post-launch press briefing on Tuesday.

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence technique that will teach robots and computer programmes to interact with a human instructor and perform tasks for the army. Researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory and the University of Texas at Austin considered a specific case where a human provides real-time feedback in the form of critique. First introduced by researchers as Training an Agent Manually via Evaluative Reinforcement (TAMER), the team developed a new algorithm called Deep TAMER. It is an extension of TAMER that uses deep learning – a class of machine learning algorithms that are loosely inspired by the brain to provide a robot the ability to learn how to perform tasks by viewing video streams in a short amount of time with a human trainer. The team considered situations where a human teaches an agent how to behave by observing it and providing critique, for example, "good job" or "bad job" – similar to the way a person might train a dog to do a trick.