There are certain places you'd expect the developers of a well-known military shooter to look for inspiration. What you perhaps don't expect is for the team behind the latest Call of Duty title to count among their influences an elegiac cooperative indie game about the meaning of life. You don't expect them to play Journey. But according to Michael Condrey, co-founder of Sledgehammer Games, the San Francisco studio behind Call of Duty: WWII, that's exactly what they did. The next instalment of Activision's military behemoth takes the action back to the second world war, returning to the origins of the series.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can transform the productivity and GDP potential of the UK landscape. But, we need to invest in the different types of AI technology to make that happen. Our research shows that the main contributor to the UK's economic gains between 2017 and 2030 will come from consumer product enhancements stimulating consumer demand (8.4%). This is because AI will drive a greater choice of products, with increased personalisation and make those products more affordable over time. Labour productivity improvements will also drive GDP gains as firms seek to "augment" the productivity of their labour force with AI technologies and to automate some tasks and roles.

HM Revenue & Customs is planning a series of trials on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in some of its processes, with an emphasis on customer contact and casework. Interim chief digital and transformation officer Mike Potter (pictured) referred to the plans in a presentation to the Public Sector Show in London yesterday. He said the department plans to launch the trials in the near future as part of a move towards robotic automation and "taking the graft out of people's jobs to focus on higher value work". Potter declined to provide details of the trials, saying there is a need to talk with staff before making more information public. But he said the department is exploring areas it thinks is more viable, and his presentation included a slide dividing early use cases into three groups: contact handling, to direct people to the right places without human intervention; casework, with AI being used to augment decision-making; and helping customers through effective self-service. These are part of a broader effort for HMRC to use its data more intelligently and to supplement its processes with machine learning.

JERUSALEM – Israel's Mossad intelligence agency has set up an investment fund to help development of new espionage techniques, and is offering grants of up to 2 million shekels (about $570,000) per project to bring in new ideas. A government statement on Tuesday said Mossad was seeking technologies in various fields, including robotics, miniaturization and encryption as well as new automated methods of gleaning information from documents and new ways of carrying out operations more stealthily. A statement by the new fund, called Libertad, said it would be willing to give grants of up to 2 million shekels per project in exchange for non-exclusive rights to the technology. Developers would retain the rights to their products and would be able to sell them on, it said. "The Mossad wants to encourage innovation and creation of groundbreaking technology … the technology developed will be implemented by us, in cooperation between the parties," Libertad explained in a document.

The following is a guest article from Dr. Sven Krasser, chief scientist at CrowdStrike. Without a doubt, machine learning is one of the hottest topics in cybersecurity at the moment, and most vendors boast their newest machine learning additions as the panacea that liberates you from all security woes. Machine learning allows security products to do vastly better in various areas. However, it is best understood as a set of techniques that dramatically optimize detection techniques. It does not allow sidestepping inherent limitations e.g.

As we learned during the general election, political campaigns now routinely involve paid social advertising utilising a variety of data to identify likely supporters or swing voters. Such'social scoring', whether done manually or by an algorithm, is concerning to some. Professor John Rust of Cambridge University's Psychometric Centre told the Guardian: "The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology; it can predict and potentially control human behaviour." He finds it "incredibly dangerous" that people's "attitudes are being changed behind their backs".

Imagine a world where robots ruled, where they could continuously improve their intelligence without human intervention or programming. It sounds like the future--but it's also our present reality. Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn't a new idea, though it's certainly developed a more forward-facing interface in recent years. In 2010, only $14.9 million was invested in the technology. But in 2014, a Bloomberg report showed that Venture Capitals had invested $309.2 million into AI startups for a 300% increase.

Recitations from Tel-Aviv University introductory course to computer science, assembled as IPython notebooks by Yoav Ram. Exploratory Computing with Python, a set of 15 Notebooks that cover exploratory computing, data analysis, and visualization. No prior programming knowledge required. Each Notebook includes a number of exercises (with answers) that should take less than 4 hours to complete. Developed by Mark Bakker for undergraduate engineering students at the Delft University of Technology.

The US Air Force has teamed up with IBM to develop a supercomputing system that mimics the human brain. The system, said to be the first of its kind, will rely on a 64-chip array from IBM's TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System, allowing for pattern recognition and sensory processing power equal to 64 million neurons and 16 billion synapses. Ultimately, it aims to merge the'right brain' capabilities of IBM's system with the'left brain' capabilities of a traditional system to optimize efficiency – and, it will run on just 10 watts. The US Air Force has teamed up with IBM to develop a supercomputing system that mimics the human brain. The system, said to be the first of its kind, will rely on a 64-chip array from IBM's TrueNorth Neurosynaptic System A single TrueNorth processor consists of 5.4 billion transistors wired together to create an array of 1 million digital neurons that communicate with one another via 256 million electrical synapses.

Steve Chien and Kiri Wagstaff of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have predicted that in the future, the behavior of space probes will be governed by AI rather than human prompts from earth. While humanity has made great strides in exploring the galaxies beyond our own, in order to learn even more about our universe, we may need to hand the controls over to robots. First, probes may fall outside communications range, which means they will have to continue without instruction on their journey. That also means that eventually they'll have to work out when, and how, to return with the data they have collected. A key aspect of this is knowing which data to document, and how to identify it: for example, deciding if weather is due to a storm or is normal for the planet being observed.