A Tory minister has been mocked for'robot a*** licking' after he gushed about the Government's artificial intelligence (AI) strategy online. Theresa May yesterday welcomed a new report which said Britain is the best equipped country in the world to embrace AI - but added on Twitter: 'I want us to do even more'. Her digital policy minister Matt Hancock rushed to respond to his boss online telling her that he was'on it'. But his tweet was greeted with mockery by Labour deputy leader Tom Watson who replied: 'We're not quite there with robot a*** licking yet but Matt's on it.' The jibe comes as both parties try to vie to be the champion of the rise of the robots despite fears they could cause millions of job losses in the UK as they muscle humans out of the workplace.

Even as the world's top artificial-intelligence researchers gathered in Los Angeles this week, many are beginning to wonder just how much longer the U.S. will remain the epicenter of AI. The Neural Information Processing System (NIPS) conference in Long Beach is the number one place for presenting breakthroughs in AI. But U.S. government policies threaten to put a dampener on the recent boom in the field. The U.S. Congress's tax plan is the latest challenge, threatening to raise costs for graduate students significantly. This follows reduced funding for fields including AI and tightening of rules on immigration for international researchers.

That means that people once again must register their drones (or any other remote-controlled flying device that meets the criteria) at the FAA's site for small Unmanned Aircraft System registration service. The registration still costs $5, and you still have to put put that registration number on the drone when you're flying it. The FAA suggests writing it on in permanent marker, using a label, or even etching it into the drone. The potential penalties for failing to register are potentially steep-- civil penalties up to $27,500 and criminal penalties up to $250,000 or three years in jail. Of course, those are assuming severe incidents result from unregistered drone flight, but the site does say pilots need to keep the registration certificate handy during operation or could possibly face punishment.

The most dramatic cybersecurity story of 2016 came to a quiet conclusion Friday in an Anchorage courtroom, as three young American computer savants pleaded guilty to masterminding an unprecedented botnet--powered by unsecured internet-of-things devices like security cameras and wireless routers--that unleashed sweeping attacks on key internet services around the globe last fall. What drove them wasn't anarchist politics or shadowy ties to a nation-state. It was a hard story to miss last year: In France last September, the telecom provider OVH was hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack a hundred times larger than most of its kind. Then, on a Friday afternoon in October 2016, the internet slowed or stopped for nearly the entire eastern United States, as the tech company Dyn, a key part of the internet's backbone, came under a crippling assault. As the 2016 US presidential election drew near, fears began to mount that the so-called Mirai botnet might be the work of a nation-state practicing for an attack that would cripple the country as voters went to the polls.

Artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups will be given the opportunity to receive up to £68,000 in funding as part of the 2018 Velocity Health programme. Velocity Health is an accelerator programme spear-headed by global healthcare firm Merck Sharp & Dohme (MSD) and Wayra UK, the accelerator platform owned by Telefónica. It was set up in 2015 and targets start-ups working to meet the challenges facing the NHS. This year, MSD and Wayra UK are seeking firms using machine learning and AI to support disease and illness prevention. Two companies will be offered a maximum of £68,000 each in funding and "acceleration services".

While the legislation won unanimous support and is backed by the business community, Democrats and others said it is neither comprehensive nor perfect and more must be done to make things right for people who were falsely accused by a computer system implemented by the Republican governor's administration. A law enacted earlier this year prevents the state from adjudicating a claimant's case as fraud without human verification.

Google is deepening its push into China as it seeks an edge in one of technology's most competitive fields: artificial intelligence. The Alphabet unit will announce the opening of a new Beijing research facility on Wednesday during its second annual developers conference in Shanghai, the company says. The Google AI China Center will have a small group of researchers supported by several hundred China-based engineers. Google has been re-building its presence in China, where it defied the government in 2010 by refusing to self-censor search content and later had most of its services blocked. The U.S. giant has been ramping up hiring and promotion of its TensorFlow AI tools, features that Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google, highlighted when he visited the country earlier this month.

The US search engine has announced it will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) research center in China, albeit most Google services have been blocked in the country. According to Google, the research center will be "the first of a kind" in Asia, and will target China's local talent. Despite new censorship restrictions on the Internet, introduced last year, the initiative has received a warm welcome among Chinese policy makers, who seek to advance technologic development in the country. China has been maintaining tight control over the Internet, with officials saying that the web has undermined socialist ideas and stability in the country. To access forbidden content, many people use VPN services, which grant them access to Google services and other blocked web-sites.

A USA TODAY motion graphic explaining the steps hackers use to take down servers. A graphic representation of the dangers posed by botnets, stealth robotic computer networks that place malicious hardware on the computers of unsuspecting users. SAN FRANCISCO -- A New Jersey man has pleaded guilty to computer crimes charges for an online attack that caused a massive Internet outage last year, according to federal court documents unsealed Tuesday. The Justice Department says Paras Jha built the Mirai botnet, which operated hundreds of thousands of infected household devices to flood websites with traffic, knocking out services such as Netflix and PayPal. The plea agreement was filed Dec. 5 in federal court in Alaska.

There's no use launching a spacecraft to explore a far-off location if you can't maintain reliable communication with it. NASA's missions have traditionally relied on complicated human-controlled radio systems, but the agency is now investigating artificial intelligence to control its radios.