Tenured professors are being offered 3X their salaries to leave academia and join leading AI companies including Google. Demand for Ph.D-level expertise in AI continues to fuel academic recruiting efforts globally. It's becoming increasingly common for any of the leading AI companies to sponsor global conferences where the primary goal is to meet leading academicians, patent-producing researchers, and AI experts with Ph.D backgrounds. A recent New York Times article, Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent provides insights into how competitive it is to find AI expertise today including a glimpse into the salary bidding wars that go on for academicians with proven expertise in the field. CEOs of AI companies most skilled keeping innovation moving at quick, high-intensity pace that keeps top talent challenged while keeping the core business growing are getting the highest approval ratings.

Russia's next president could be an artificially intelligent robot that claims'enemies of the people will be shot'. Forty thousand Russians have nominated a piece of AI software on their phones to stand against Vladimir Putin for the 2018 Russian presidency. The AI assistant known as Alisa, similar to the Apple's voice-activated Siri, was created by Russian technology company Yandex. Russia's next president could be an artificially intelligent robot that claims'enemies of the people will be shot'. Since the AI's launch in September, Alisa has stirred controversy on social media, with users sharing a series of contentious statements from the software.

Nasa is set to make a'major' announcement in its hunt for alien life on Thursday. Very few details have been revealed about the briefing this week, which will take place via teleconference on at 1:00pm ET (6:00pm GMT). However, Nasa says the news will focus on work done by its Kepler planet hunting telescope which has been working with Google's AI system to find potentially-habitable worlds. The Kepler mission has spotted thousands of exoplanets since 2014, with 21 Earth-sized planets now known to orbit within the habitable zones of their stars. The briefing is likely to reveals the telescope's latest catalogue, which is set to be Nasa's best look yet at possible alien planets.

The nonnegative matrix factorization is a widely used, flexible matrix decomposition, finding applications in biology, image and signal processing and information retrieval, among other areas. Here we present a related matrix factorization. A multi-objective optimization problem finds conical combinations of templates that approximate a given data matrix. The templates are chosen so that as far as possible only the initial data set can be represented this way. However, the templates are not required to be nonnegative nor convex combinations of the original data.

Television programming in Spain has undergone a transformation over the past decade - changes driven partly by economics and partly by politics. Ever since the banking crisis of 2008, the country has been in a semi-constant state of political upheaval. A series of corruption scandals, inconclusive general elections and, more recently, Catalonia's run at independence have kept Spaniards glued to their televisions and pundits talking 24/7. That has given rise to a wave of political talk shows that the Spanish call tertulias. These programmes meet two important criteria, they provide political flashpoints that audiences seem to like and they're cheap to produce.

NASA scientists are planning to use artificial intelligence to better manage the increasing communications between its spacecraft and the Earth. NASA spacecraft typically rely on human-controlled radio systems to communicate with Earth. Cognitive radio, the infusion of artificial intelligence into space communications networks, could meet demand and increase efficiency, researchers said. "Modern space communications systems use complex software to support science and exploration missions," said Janette C Briones, from the NASA's Glenn Research Center in the US. "By applying artificial intelligence and machine learning, satellites control these systems seamlessly, making real-time decisions without awaiting instruction," said Briones.

Rather than focus on finding jobs in the gaps left by machines, individuals and organizations would be smart to prepare themselves to adapt to a changing digital business environment. Digital technologies are poised to disrupt how work is done. Consider the popular example of the impending arrival of autonomous vehicles. When self-driving vehicles are mainstream -- within the next decade or two (or less) -- the impact on work in the United States alone will be massive. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.5 million people in the U.S. are commercial truck drivers, 800,000 work as delivery drivers, and another 1 million people make a living as other types of transportation professionals -- including bus drivers, taxi drivers, and Uber drivers.

HYDERABAD: While cyber attacks have been a major cause of concern this year, internet security experts warn that 2018 could bring in more sophisticated attacks using Artificial Intelligence and machine learning. So far, these technologies have been used as mechanisms for protection and detection of threats, but the year ahead could witness a reversal of sorts. "With their ever-increasing technical proficiency, attacks by cyber criminals are expected to become more pronounced in 2018. These attackers will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to launch even more potent threats. More virulent malware and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in comparison to the WannaCry attack are expected. Cyber criminals will be able to use AI to explore victims' networks, which is typically the most labour-intensive part of compromise after an incursion," said Tarun Kaura, director (product management), Symantec.

The end of the year is approaching fast, and now is the perfect time to review your cybersecurity practices, especially if you've bought any new gadgets or if you run your own business. To help you get ahead of the curve, a reputable cybersecurity firm has put together a list of the biggest cybersecurity risks for 2018. The Internet of Things is really starting to take off as a growing number of people buy smart speakers like the Google Home or Amazon Echo and start connecting smart appliances and fixtures to them. Unfortunately though, those very smart devices could end up being the weak point in your cybersecurity, according to Trend Micro researchers. They note that we've already had two examples of how IoT devices could be hacked and then used for nefarious purposes.

MONTREAL - 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.