Veteran weather forecaster Jim Witt remembers the Great Blizzard of 1947, which arrived without warning and paralyzed the northeastern United States. "They had no idea anything was going to happen," Witt recalls. Even during the storm, which eventually dropped 26.4 inches of snow on New York City, weather bureaus were predicting a light snowfall. After missing their forecasts all day, the bureaus predicted a second storm--even as the skies were clearing up, says Witt, whose protégés became senior weather scientists at the National Center for Computational Sciences, the National Hurricane Center, NASA, and AccuWeather. We've come a long way since then.

Early Saturday morning the Dragon cargo spacecraft that's been attached to the International Space Station since Dec. 17 is expected to be released and sent back to Earth. The plan was to have the flight controllers on the ISS use the robotic arm of the station to move the Dragon into place on Friday so that come Saturday morning, a ground-controlled crew could release the craft at the perfect time to send it back to Earth, NASA said in a release. Coverage of the release will start at 4:30 a.m. EST Saturday and the craft is scheduled for a 5 a.m. Less than four hours later, at 10:26 a.m. EST, the craft, full of experiments, is expected to splash into the Pacific Ocean. There "recovery forces" are expected to pull the Dragon from the water and taken it by ship to Long Beach, California.

In the near-future, AI researchers involved in collaboration with policymakers should conduct additional in-depth studies to better understand and anticipate aspects of AI related to (for example) job automation at a more granular level, considering impact across time, sectors, wage levels, education degrees, job types and regions. For instance, rather than low-skills jobs that require advanced hand-dexterity, AI systems might more likely replace routine but high-level cognitive skills. Additional studies could investigate areas like national security.

In this paper we present a broad overview of the last 40 years of research on cognitive architectures. Although the number of existing architectures is nearing several hundred, most of the existing surveys do not reflect this growth and focus on a handful of well-established architectures. Thus, in this survey we wanted to shift the focus towards a more inclusive and high-level overview of the research on cognitive architectures. Our final set of 84 architectures includes 49 that are still actively developed, and borrow from a diverse set of disciplines, spanning areas from psychoanalysis to neuroscience. To keep the length of this paper within reasonable limits we discuss only the core cognitive abilities, such as perception, attention mechanisms, action selection, memory, learning and reasoning. In order to assess the breadth of practical applications of cognitive architectures we gathered information on over 900 practical projects implemented using the cognitive architectures in our list. We use various visualization techniques to highlight overall trends in the development of the field. In addition to summarizing the current state-of-the-art in the cognitive architecture research, this survey describes a variety of methods and ideas that have been tried and their relative success in modeling human cognitive abilities, as well as which aspects of cognitive behavior need more research with respect to their mechanistic counterparts and thus can further inform how cognitive science might progress.

Saks Fifth Avenue isn't intimidated by the emergence of artificial intelligence and consumer preferences shifting to online retail, the luxury department store's president told CNBC on Friday. "When you think about the online versus the offline experience, we don't need AI in our stores. We have'I,'" said Marc Metrick, president of Saks. "We have living, breathing, 4,500 style advisors in our stores." "The focus for Saks in the luxury space is really kind of convergence between tech and this living, breathing, selling associate," Metrick said in an interview on "Squawk Box." Metrick spoke as e-commerce giant Amazon has been aggressive in expanding its retail muscle, including through partnerships and acquisitions.

Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the world's most well-known scientists and has had his life story told in books, documentaries, and Oscar-winning dramas. But conspiracy theorists claim we hardly know anything about the award-winning physicist, who celebrated his 76th birthday on Monday. For there are certain corners of the internet where people are convinced that the real Professor Hawking died decades ago and that in the intervening years the political and scientific elite have installed a lookalike to act in his place. Some of those who believe he has been supplanted think Professor Hawking, Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge, died in 1985 - three years before the publication of his best-selling book A Brief History of Time. The idea might seem outlandish, but conspiracy theorists have outlined six signs that they claim clearly support their idea, ranging from the way he looks to the complexity of his theories.

From Fry and Bender in Futurama, to Data and the crew of the USS Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation, to deceptive Ava in Ex Machina, robot friends are a regular trope in science fiction. After all, is the idea of being pals with a mechanoid any weirder than Captain Kirk's intergalactic romantic life? But… could this ever happen? Could we one day be going for a drink with our robotic pals? Or are the machines destined to remain our slaves?

You don't need to have been victimized by the WannaCry ransomware--or worried about hack attacks on presidential elections--to understand that cybersecurity is the most pressing technology problem of our time and may soon become the biggest problem, period. Fending off the onslaught of attacks is a nearly insurmountable task for security professionals. But it's a perfect job for machines that can parse thousands of logs a second and identify potential threats a human might not even see. That's why artificial intelligence (AI) has become a key weapon in the fight against cyber crooks, rogue hackers, and aggressive nation states. But experts also warn that AI is not a magic fix.

PARIS (Reuters) - The French government aims to broaden its powers to block foreign takeovers of French companies deemed as strategic, to also include firms involved in data protection and artificial intelligence ('AI'), the finance minister said on Friday.

The Pakistani assertion that Votel said no unilateral action inside Pakistan was being considered may have referred to the possibility of cross-border U.S. drone strikes and other military missions targeting Taliban and other militant figures outside the border area.