Data, data everywhere – but will it make our lives better, or put us at risk? In recent months it has become clear that while the opportunities presented by ever-growing data are abundant, so too are the threats. That's why we need better governance – a set of guiding principles as to how this new technology is used and developed – not least because misuse threatens to turn the public against such innovations. Data breaches from companies including Uber and Morrisons have made headlines, but the ways in which corporations can use data legally, to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and pinpoint information for their own commercial uses, are less well publicised. Concerns about the possible military uses of AI have grown to the point that over 20,000 researchers have recently signed a letter warning policy makers of the dangers of autonomous weapons that use algorithms to strike specific targets.

Robot investigators could be widely used in future to examine documents in complex cases, the head of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has suggested. David Green said he would like to see the possibility of employing artificial intelligence "carefully examined" after using technology to sift through a cache of 30 million documents disclosed by Rolls-Royce during a major investigation. He also said it was now "pretty clear" that his agency would continue as an independent body after the government dropped plans to have it taken into the National Crime Agency. The SFO director set out how the Rolls-Royce documents had been examined by a computer algorithm which had the ability to learn as it went along. The technology was trying to find legally privileged documents which could not be used in the case, but Mr Green suggested that in future similar methods could be used to identify useful evidence in investigations.

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 by researchers from Google and The University of Texas at Austin using machine learning. 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 signals from planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets.

Today, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University are employing artificial intelligence to improve predictive capability.

The NASA has discovered the first star system apart from ours, with as many planets as our own. The biggest known system till now had seven planets. The Kepler-90 is some 2,500 light years away from Earth. The "mini version of our solar system" was discovered with NASA's Kepler telescope and Artificial Intelligence. What does this mean for the search for extra-terrestrial life?

MIAMI: A solar system with as many planets as our own has been discovered with the help of NASA's Kepler space telescope and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the US space agency said Thursday. "Our solar system now is tied for most number of planets around a single star," NASA said in a statement. However, none of the planets are expected to be hospitable to life. The eight-planet system -- the largest known outside of ours -- orbits a star called Kepler 90 some 2,545 light-years away. "The Kepler-90 star system is like a mini version of our solar system," said Andrew Vanderburg, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin.

Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced the deployment on Thursday. The nine airmen are all members of the 174th Attack Wing. They include pilots, sensor and camera operators and image analysts. The teams will use drone surveillance to capture up-to-the-minute information on the fire's location to allow for better placement of fire personnel.

Technological advances in artificial intelligence are fuelling a new race between hackers and those toiling to protect cybersecurity networks. Cybersecurity is always a race between offence and defence but new tools are giving companies that employ them a leg up on those trying to steal their data. Whereas past responses to cybercrimes often looked for known hacking methods long after they occurred, AI techniques using machine learning scan huge volumes of data to detect patterns of abnormal behaviour that are imperceptible to humans. Experts expect machines will become so sophisticated that they'll develop answers to questions that humans won't clearly understand. David Decary-Hetu, assistant professor of criminology at the University of Montreal, says defenders have an edge right now in using artificial intelligence.

Cognovi Labs, developer of the SaaS platform for emotion-based artificial intelligence, saw their Oct. 22 prediction of a Doug Jones victory realized in Tuesday's Alabama Senate election. Acting well ahead of poll data, Cognovi made the prediction almost three weeks before the sexual harassment claims surfaced against Moore. The prediction was based around Cognovi Emotion AI findings that showed Jones' superior ability to trigger an intense emotional bond with the electorate, which allowed him to generate the required turnout to win the election. This result follows a string of successful Cognovi predictions for several high-profile outcomes, including predicting the Brexit referendum hours before the polls closed; and foretelling the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In addition to political events, Cognovi utilizes its AI platform to make predictions for businesses, investors, corporations, ad agencies and public figures.

We are creating an intelligence that is external to humans and housed in the virtual economy. This is bringing us into a new economic era--a distributive one--where different rules apply. A year ago in Oslo Airport I checked in to an SAS flight. One airline kiosk issued a boarding pass, another punched out a luggage tag, then a computer screen showed me how to attach it and another where I should set the luggage on a conveyor. I encountered no single human being. The incident wasn't important but it left me feeling oddly that I was out of human care, that something in our world had shifted. That shift of course has been going on for a long time. It's been driven by a succession of technologies--the Internet, the cloud, big data, robotics, machine learning, and now artificial intelligence--together powerful enough that economists agree we are in the midst of a digital economic revolution. But there is less agreement on how exactly the new technologies are changing the economy and whether the changes are deep. Robert Gordon of Northwestern University tells us the computer revolution "reached its climax in the dot-com era of the 1990s."