The work of the British codebreakers at Bletchley Park during World War II is now a famous tale of genius, perseverance and success that saved the lives of civilians and troops alike and supposedly shortened the war by as many as two years. Using mathematical and deciphering skills as well as innovative computer technology, the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code was cracked, allowing British intelligence to discover where hostile U-boats, ships and troops were heading so that Allied troop and convoy vessels could alter their routes accordingly. The Enigma machine was so complex that its most advanced incarnation could be configured 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 different ways but had one flaw which led to its downfall - no letter could be substituted for itself. Even with this knowledge it took years many brilliant men to women months to crack the code. At the Imperial War Museum last week, two companies – DigitalOcean and Enigma Pattern – used the latest AI technology to decipher a German message in a live demonstration. Author Simon Singh, who has written on code breaking, explained the context and the importance of the encrypting machine.

Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star, with the recent discovery of an eighth planet circling Kepler-90, a Sun-like star 2,545 light years from Earth. The planet was discovered in data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. The newly-discovered Kepler-90i -- a sizzling hot, rocky planet that orbits its star once every 14.4 days -- was found using machine learning from Google. Machine learning is an approach to artificial intelligence in which computers "learn." In this case, computers learned to identify planets by finding in Kepler data instances where the telescope recorded changes in starlight caused by planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets.

About two years ago, Stephen Hawking said in a BBC interview that "the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Should we heed this warning and be afraid of artificial intelligence (AI), or should we be excited about the potential benefits that it could bring? Notwithstanding Hawking's gloomy predictions, I'm very excited about the development of AI, even though there is a long way to go before we can produce general AI. One of the main reasons for this excitement is that humans often make poor decisions, and that AI may help us to make better ones. In psychology, there are many examples showing that human rationality is limited.

"Today, in the era of Big Data, it is essential to have a central platform to house all of the government's data, a platform that taps into the potential of artificial intelligence to spread happiness among the people." A tech disruptor at a conference looking to tout the revolutionary capabilities of AI in hopes of attracting a public-private partnership? One of the many bloggers with a utopian take on the power of the cloud, AI, and smart cities? No, it was Crown Prince Shaikh Hamdan of Dubai. Dubai, a United Arab Emirates city with a population of nearly 3 million, is deploying the Dubai Pulse platform as part of its effort to turn Dubai into a smart city--and to promote "happiness among the people." Dubai Pulse is a cloud-based infrastructure accessible via smartphone.

Further blurring the lines between science and science-fiction, an artificial intelligence system leveraged by NASA has discovered two previously unknown exoplanets. One of the new exoplanets, a sizzling rocky world called Kepler-90i, is significant because it brings the known planets orbiting its star to eight, and it's the first time a numerical twin to our solar system has ever been detected. "The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system," Andrew Vanderburg, a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow and astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. "You have small planets inside and big planets outside, but everything is scrunched in much closer." Kepler-90 is a sun-like star, but all of its eight planets are scrunched into the equivalent distance of Earth to the sun.

Thursday afternoon, NASA announced a new discovery from its Kepler space telescope mission – the presence of two new exoplanets. While that alone isn't that remarkable, since Kepler has discovered and confirmed upwards of 2,300 exoplanets in distant solar systems, how scientists found those planets is noteworthy. Andrew Vanderburg, astronomer and NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, who worked on this discovery, says the planet was discovered using artificial intelligence. "Instead of using traditional methods to identify exoplanets, we've incorporated an advanced type of machine learning called a neural network to help identify planets and sort away the bad signals, the false positive signals from the real planets," he says. "It's a form of artificial intelligence, very loosely inspired by the structure of neurons in your brain."

The 100 startups on our list have raised $11.7B in aggregate funding across 367 deals since 2012. Today, CB Insights unveiled the second annual AI 100 -- a list of 100 of the most promising private companies applying artificial intelligence algorithms across 25 industries, from healthcare to cybersecurity -- at the A-Ha! conference in San Francisco. The companies were selected from a pool of 2,000 startups based on several criteria, including investor profile, tech innovation, team strength, patent activity, mosaic score, funding history, valuation, and business model. The market map below categorizes the AI 100 companies based on their industry focus. Please click on the image to enlarge.

President Donald Trump banned the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from using a list of words, which include "transgender" and "evidence-based." Needless to say, social media users did not take lightly to the president's decision. In a meeting, led by Alison Kelly, a senior leader in the agency's Office of Financial Services, CDC policy analysts, who are tasked with preparing the 2019 budget that is expected to be released in February, were handed out a list of words that were forbidden to use in official documents for the budget. The mandate from the Trump administration banned the use of seven words – "vulnerable," "entitlement," "diversity," "transgender," "fetus," "evidence-based," "science-based." The news of the ban was originally reported by the Washington Post, which caused immediate outrage among Twitter users.

The nonprofit faces $1,000 per-day fines imposed by the city if the roving 5-foot-tall Autonomous Data Machine dubbed "K-9" is caught making the rounds without a proper permit. This shouldn't be an issue, however, as the SPCA has presumably returned the $6-per-hour rental robot with a "commanding presence" to its maker, Silicon Valley startup Knightscope, following significant public uproar and threats of retribution. The backlash began in earnest after the San Francisco Business Times published an interview with SF SPCA President Jennifer Scarlett in which she implied that the robot, adorned with stickers of cute-as-a-button kittens and at least one life-sized Chihuahua, was enlisted with the purpose of shooing away homeless San Franciscans living in encampments on the fringes of the SPCA campus, which encompasses an entire city block in the rapidly gentrifying Mission District. San Francisco, which is in the throes of a seemingly never-ending affordable housing crisis, has the sixth highest largest homeless population in the United States. Just under 7,000 people are living on San Francisco's streets per estimates from the Department of Housing and Urban Development although local authorities and homeless advocacy groups believe the number to be much higher.

An eighth planet orbiting a Sun-like star over 2,500 light years away called Kepler-90 has been detected by running the data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope through a Google neural network. The network was trained using 15,000 previously vetted signals from the Kepler exoplanet catalogue, NASA explained, before it moved on to learning how to detect weaker signals. "We got lots of false positives of planets, but also potentially more real planets," said NASA Sagan postdoctoral fellow Andrew Vanderburg. "It's like sifting through rocks to find jewels. If you have a finer sieve, then you will catch more rocks but you might catch more jewels, as well."