It is easy to confuse the current geopolitical situation with that of the 1980s. The United States and Russia each accuse the other of interfering in domestic affairs. Russia has annexed territory over U.S. objections, raising concerns about military conflict. As during the Cold War after World War II, nations are developing and building weapons based on advanced technology. During the Cold War, the weapon of choice was nuclear missiles; today it's software, whether its used for attacking computer systems or targets in the real world.

Wouldn't you like to know if members of the government are taking bribes, signing illegal contracts or embezzling tax dollars? Spanish researchers created a uniquely-purposed computer model that can figure out the likelihood of government corruption. Their model is based on A.I. neural networks and can predict where in the provinces of the country corruption is more probable based on economic and political variables. One major takeaway from the research - corruption appears more probable when the same party stays in power for too long. The study modeled corruption in certain Spanish provinces for periods of one, two or three years.

Google shares were roughly flat when the market closed on Thursday after Alphabet posted earnings less than what Wall Street expected. The after hours GOOGL stock price, however, did take an initial dive before rallying toward its $1,181.50 Alphabet, the parent company of Google, revealed its earnings report for fiscal quarter ending December 2017 shortly after the market closed. The company posted a $32.32 billion revenue, higher than Wall Street expectations. However, the company posted $9.70 earnings per share, missing expectations.

Stuart Russell, Anthony Aguirre, Ariel Conn, and Max Tegmark recently wrote a response to my critique of their "Slaughterbots" video on autonomous weapons. I am grateful for their thoughtful article. I think this kind of dialogue can be incredibly helpful in illuminating points of disagreement on various issues, and I welcome the exchange. I think it is particularly important to have a cross-disciplinary dialogue on autonomous weapons that includes roboticists, AI scientists, engineers, ethicists, lawyers, human rights advocates, military professionals, political scientists, and other perspectives because this issue touches so many disciplines. I appreciate their thorough, point-by-point reply.

How tired are we of "artificial intelligence" and "machine learning" being sprinkled like pixie dust on every product being hawked by vendors? The challenge for cybersecurity professionals is to see through the fog and figure out what's real and what's just marketing hyperbole. Often, marketing hyperbole exceeds the reality. Notoriously, Tesla's Autopilot sensors can be fooled in certain edge conditions, iPhone X can be fooled to unlock a phone by a doppelganger, and Apple's Siri isn't very good at taking directions. Even the winning team in the DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge lost spectacularly to actual hackers at the DEFCON conference following its win against other machines at Black Hat.

The artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare startup Medopad has announced over £100m in trade deals with Chinese companies, including Tencent. Medopad's chief executive Dan Vahdat accompanied the UK prime minister Theresa May on a visit to China this week. Other business bosses visiting China with May included Jessica Butcher, co-founder of augmented reality (AR) startup Blippar and Nikhil Rathi, the chief executive of the London Stock Exchange. Medopad creates remote patient monitoring apps, and uses mobile technology and advanced analytics to deliver efficient care to patients. The company has signed 15 trade deals with Chinese organisations that will see it advance the use of AI in healthcare platforms across China.

But the patent disclosure goes to the heart about a global debate about privacy and security. Amazon already has a reputation for a workplace culture that thrives on a hard-hitting management style, and has experimented with how far it can push white-collar workers in order to reach its delivery targets. Privacy advocates, however, note that a lot can go wrong even with everyday tracking technology. On Monday, the tech industry was jolted by the discovery that Strava, a fitness app that allows users to track their activities and compare their performance with other people running or cycling in the same places, had unwittingly highlighted the locations of United States military bases and the movements of their personnel in Iraq and Syria. In theory, Amazon's proposed technology would emit ultrasonic sound pulses and radio transmissions to track where an employee's hands were in relation to inventory bins, and provide "haptic feedback" to steer the worker toward the correct bin.

Montreal-based Element AI has expanded to London, UK. Dr. Julien Cornebise, a former DeepMind scientist, will lead the lab as director of research. Cornebiese was an early employee of Deepmind before it was acquired by Google in 2012. He created and led the Health Applied Research Team, and has been working with Amnesty International since he left DeepMind in 2016. The company says that it's focusing on'AI for good' through this office, while also expanding its network of researchers, scientists, and the private and public sector.

The news professionals are talking about now, curated by LinkedIn's editors. Waymo's self-driving cars logged the most miles of all driverless vehicle companies in California, according to a report from the state's DMV. Waymo drove 352,545 miles in the year ending in November 2017 (roughly 50% less than the year prior, due to shifting much of its fleet to Phoenix). In second place, GM's Cruise division logged 131,676 miles. "This is still Waymo (née Google) and GM's party, and everyone else is playing catch-up," says The Verge.

The stunning detail of the Martian landscape was taken on a ridge of elevation 327 metres (1,073 feet). The image looks over the Gale Crater which is about 3.5-3.8 billion years old and covers an area 96 miles (154 kilometres) in diameter - about the same size as Rhode Island and Connecticut combined Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, released the panorama, which gives an overview of much of the rover's 11 mile (18 km) path along the crater's outer edge. The photos were taken on October 25, 2017, by Curiosity's Mast Camera, or Mastcam. At an elevation of 327 metres (1,073 feet), the image looks over the crater, which is about 3.5-3.8 billion years old and covers an area 96 miles (154 kilometres) in diameter - about the same size as Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. Most of the scene's horizon is the crater's northern rim, roughly around 1.2 miles (two kilometres) above the rover.