NASA is poised to make a significant announcement involving the search for Earth-like planets, in an effort that has been aided by artificial intelligence designed by Google. NASA and Google have scheduled a news conference to reveal their findings at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. The discovery pertains to the Kepler space telescope, which is tasked with finding planets akin to our Earth in other solar systems. "The discovery was made by researchers using machine learning from Google," NASA said on its website. Machine learning involves training an artificial intelligence to evaluate complex situations based on a number of factors and inputs.

If there's any emerging technology that's gripped the public consciousness in recent years it's AI and machine learning (ML). Autonomous vehicles, shopping recommendations, Siri and Alexa, these are just a few of the day to day examples of the rapid evolution of ML applications. The fervour around AI and ML's development is only fuelling these advancements. As public interest grows we're already seeing more students attracted to ML and AI courses. Just look at the popularity of Professor Andrew Ng's Coursera course on machine learning or the record number of Stanford students who enrolled in the machine learning class this semester.

In October 2017, the UAE Government launched'UAE Strategy for Artificial Intelligence (AI)'. This marks the post-mobile government phase which will rely on various future services, sectors and infrastructure projects.

As Israel prepares for yet another war directly on its border, the truth about Israel's vast military capabilities has been largely absent in the corporate media. However, if one were to be fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to be able to travel to Israel's border with Syria in the north and the Gaza strip in the south, they might see what looks more or less like a scene from RoboCop. Israel is the first country in the world to use unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) to not only patrol its borders but also to replace soldiers on missions, as well. The new Border Patroller model can be armed with remote-controlled weapons, reconnaissance means, and additional components that cannot be fitted on the traditional Guardium model it had been using for years prior. The robot is also able to patrol underground and gather information for units that are present on the surface.

In a recent essay, Martin Rees, an astrophysicist and retired University of Cambridge professor, says he is certain that, for good or ill, we are coming upon the limits of human knowledge -- a point at which computers could one day overtake us. The idea certainly taps into deep-seated fears about artificial intelligence, but I'd argue that we shouldn't worry about computers outsmarting us, or even the real (or imagined) limits of human knowledge. What we need to worry about is wasting the knowledge we already have. It is not a question of whether there is a limit to scientific understanding but whether we are limiting ourselves in our scientific understanding. Science, be it in the form of cancer biology or climatology or statistics, can help provide perspective and potential solutions for many of our most pressing problems.

City-sanctioned land drones could be hitting a sidewalk near you by February 2018. That was the report Austin Transportation Department Chief of Staff Karla Taylor gave to the Urban Transportation Commission on Tuesday evening. Her briefing was an update on the development of a pilot program that would allow private companies to deploy electric-powered personal delivery robots on sidewalks, crosswalks and other pedestrian ways. City Council authorized the pilot through a resolution the members passed in August. "(Council members) see it as a disruptive or emerging technology that's coming whether or not we want to pilot it," Taylor told the UTC.

Britain's transport network could be overhauled to curb disruption and delays, by making use of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, the chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission said today. But to do so, Lord Adonis said a national framework for infrastructure data is needed, to improve sharing of information among firms and lead to better quality and consistency of data. The former Labour transport secretary said making such a change could lead to faster road and rail journeys, fewer water leaks, and more reliable mobile and broadband connections. Read more: Here are Britain's infrastructure priorities from now to 2050 Lord Adonis said firms and agencies need to ramp up their efforts to share data on how well their infrastructure operates, while taking security precautions into account. A "digital framework task group" would have responsibility for driving progress here, and ensure firms shared information.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has filed its defence in response to the civil proceedings commenced by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrac), admitting that disparate datasets contributed to a contravention of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006. Under Section 82(1) of the Act, CBA is required to identify, mitigate, and manage the risk a reporting entity may reasonably face that might involve or facilitate money laundering or the financing of terrorism if it has adopted a standard anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing program. "CBA admits that at various times between about 20 October 2012 and 12 October 2015, due to an error in the process of merging data from two systems, its account level automated transaction monitoring did not operate as intended in respect of 778,370 accounts," the bank wrote in its claim. "CBA admits that this deficiency in its automated transaction monitoring over that period constituted a contravention of s82(1) of the Act." Part A of the Act also requires the bank to undertake risk assessments of the inherent risk that new products and services -- including new channels and technologies for delivering those products and services -- might involve or facilitate money laundering or terrorism financing, and keep those risk assessments up to date.

From the tall windows of WIRED's offices in San Francisco's South-of-Market neighborhood I've watched almost a decade of radical change made physical in concrete and glass. The city's forest of new skyscrapers is at least in part the legacy of Mayor Ed Lee, who died early Tuesday morning after almost seven years in office. San Francisco is rolling into the second quarter of the 21st century with the purposeful but cautious stutter-step speed of a first-generation self-driving car--the wealthiest, youngest, smartest people on earth live alongside some of the poorest; utopia and dystopia are barely a few blocks apart. That's the city Ed Lee built. It's a cliché to say upon a politician's death that he or she had a complicated legacy, but here we are. Lee was a housing advocate who presided over a city in a deepening housing crisis, facing massive gentrification, displacement, and homelessness.

The two biggest societal challenges for the twenty-first century are also the biggest opportunities – automation and climate change. The epitaph of fossil fuels with its dark cloud burning a hole in the ozone layer is giving way to a rise of solar and wind farms worldwide. Servicing these plantations are fleets of robots and drones, providing greater possibilities of expanding CleanTech to the most remote regions of the planet. As 2017 comes to end, the solar industry for the first time in ten years has plateaued due to the proposed budget cuts by the Trump administration. Solar has had quite a run with an average annual growth rate of more than 65% for the past decade promoted largely by federal subsidies.