Researchers used the robot to discover six new moons and mysterious "propeller objects" in Saturn's rings, documented a giant hexagon swirling atop the planet's north pole, photographed hydrocarbon lakes on Titan (Saturn's largest moon), and found a vast ocean of salty water - which may harbor alien life - below the icy crust of the moon Enceladus. But on September 15, 2017, the space agency crashed its precious spacecraft into the clouds of Saturn to avoid the possibility that it would crash into one of the planet's moons when it ran out of fuel. Cassini took a series of photos that NASA stitched together into one final, whole image of Saturn before it plunged to its death.

An advertisement in a Colorado Springs newspaper that year invited kids to call Santa, but it mistakenly listed the number for the hotline at the U.S. Continental Air Defense Command. CONAD, as it was called, had the job of monitoring a vast radar network from a combat operations center in Colorado Springs, searching the skies for any hint of a nuclear attack by the onetime Soviet Union.

The most terrifying film of the year didn't come from Hollywood. It came from a think tank looking to save us all from killer machines. In the movie's near future dystopia, palm sized drones loaded up with explosives use facial recognition to hunt down and slaughter people with pin point precision. Swarms of the micro murderers tear through congress, massacring Senators based on ideology. Terrorists unleash a horde of the flying monsters into schools to take out the kids of parents who dare to speak out against the threat. What makes it all so horrifying is how close we are to making it a reality.

The government's'Nudge Unit' is experimenting with using machine learning algorithms to rate how well schools and doctors' surgeries are performing. For the last year, The Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) has been trialling machine learning models that can crunch through publicly available data to help automate some of the decisions made by bodies such as Ofsted, which inspects schools, and the Care Quality Commission, which regulates health and social care in England. Michael Sanders, head of research at the BIT says it is working with Ofsted to put the technology into use during 2018. "We're working with them to feed into variations on our model and to improve it using additional data that they have that isn't public," he says. The school-evaluating algorithm pulls together data from a large number of sources to decide whether a school is potentially performing inadequately. It is said the system can help to identify more schools that are inadequate, when compared to random inspections.

Just before Thanksgiving, the Internet lit up with the remarkable video of Boston Dynamics' robot Atlas doing a backflip. It was pretty amazing to see a humanoid-shaped machine doing things that would be hard for most humans. Given all the interest in Atlas, I thought it was a good time to remind everyone about the other non-humanoid robots Boston Dynamics is building. These are the ones that have the "big freaky" factor. Perhaps it's the strange gait of Spot the robot dog or the headless SpotMini (seen in this video) or the nothing-like-that-exists balance of Handle.

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - A pair of'chatbots' in China have been taken offline after appearing to stray off-script. In response to users' questions, one said its dream was to travel to the United States, while the other said it wasn't a huge fan of the Chinese Communist Party. The two chatbots, BabyQ and XiaoBing, are designed to use machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) to carry out conversations with humans online. Both had been installed onto Tencent Holdings Ltd's popular messaging service QQ. The indiscretions are similar to ones suffered by Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc, where chatbots used expletives and even created their own language.

The Spokane Valley company that created "Ask Jenn," Alaska Airlines' virtual travel concierge, was sold this week for $30 million. Next IT Corp. and its affiliate, Next IT Innovation Labs, was purchased by New York-based Verint Systems Inc. in an all-cash deal. The sales agreement includes the potential for an additional $21 million in payments, if certain milestones are achieved over the next year. Next IT was founded in 2001 by local entrepreneur Fred Brown. The company uses artificial intelligence for customer service applications.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a new arena for engagement and competition between the United States and China. In July, China's State Council published the New Generation AI Development Plan (新一代人工智能发展规划) which declared, "AI has become a new focal point of international competition. AI is a strategic technology that will lead the future," articulating China's ambition to "lead the world" and become the "premier AI innovation center" by 2030 (State Council, July 20). Perhaps recognizing that a new era has begun, the U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS) published in mid-December announced, "To maintain our competitive advantage, the United States will prioritize emerging technologies critical to economic growth and security" (National Security Strategy, December 18). In particular, the NSS highlights that AI is advancing especially rapidly and could present growing risks to U.S. national security going forward, while characterizing China as a "strategic competitor" that unfairly seeks to "unfairly tap into [U.S.] innovation" through the theft of intellectual property and "cyber-enabled economic warfare." Concurrently, the U.S. and China are pursuing military applications of AI, recognizing its potential to transform the character of future conflict (State Council, July 20; Battlefield Singularity, November 28).

Everywhere today the news confronts us with deeply held fears of AI and automation. Coverage often focuses on the job loss and social unrest that are viewed as likely to follow. These fears aren't unfounded: managers across industries have cost targets and technology enables lower-value tasks to move from people to machines. Last year's movie Hidden Figures vividly illustrates the shift from another era, as NASA's human computers faced displacement. But we believe an obsession mainly on technology's potential for cost-cutting is misguided.

The Pentagon's "Defense Innovation Unit Experimental" is currently working with tech companies to implement AI, machine learning and automation technologies in military jets to create an AI program that can predict plane failures before they occur. They envision a system that would analyze all kinds of factors, from the plane's internal performance parameters to its geographic location, and inform maintenance crews about which plane is in the most need of repairs. "F-16s will benefit from predictive maintenance as a way to inform pilots of which aircraft are at the highest risk in terms of being unreliable. We pinpoint systems such as engines and subsystems such as the propulsion," says Ed Abbo, C3 IoT president and CTO. The C3 IoT platform already allows the Pentagon to aggregate and store enormous amounts of disparate information on a unified cloud-based data image, which runs on Amazon Web Services.