Whether you're interested in cognitive computing, artificial intelligence or machine learning, you probably know that the fourth industrial revolution is well underway and accelerating rapidly. The speed of change presents a challenge to developers who want to stay abreast of the latest ideas and approaches. Conferences, workshops and other meetings provide opportunities to learn where the jobs and technology is headed and a chance to learn and practice the skills necessary to keep up. Why you should attend: AI engineers, practitioners, researchers and scientists will discuss the latest developments in the field, while tutorials and workshops will give attendees a chance to hone their skills. Speakers will be drawn from a wide variety of sectors, including Microsoft, MIT, the National Science Foundation and NASA Ames Research Center.

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Last summer Charles Bombardier unveiled the Solar Express--an imagined vehicle that would ferry cargo and passengers from Earth to Mars in less than two days. The radical notion drew a great deal of buzz--most notably from Buzz Aldrin, who praised the idea and reached out to the Canadian innovator with tips for improving the design.

With cyber criminals constantly adapting to industry defenses, creating new ways to commit cybercrimes, the cybersecurity industry is increasingly looking toward machine learning and artificial intelligence to help provide better deterrents, according to a new study from ABI Research. That increased reliance on automatic, intelligent processes for deterring cyber criminals will result in an increase in big data, intelligence and analytics spending, to the tune of $96 billion by 2021, according to the report. "We are in the midst of an artificial intelligence security revolution," says Dimitrios Pavlakis, industry analyst at ABI Research. "This will drive machine learning solutions to soon emerge as the new norm beyond Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and ultimately displace a large portion of traditional AV, heuristics, and signature-based systems within the next five years." User and Entity Behavioral Analytics (UEBA), and "deep learning" algorithm designs are becoming two of the more prominent technologies in cybersecurity solutions, their research found.

In fact, in many countries, the internet, the very thing that was supposed to smash down the walls of authoritarianism like a sledgehammer of liberty, has been instead been co-opted by those very regimes in order to push their own agendas while crushing dissent and opposition. And with the emergence of conversational AI -- the technology at the heart of services like Google's Allo and Jigsaw or Intel's Hack Harassment initiative -- these governments could have a new tool to further censor their citizens. Turkey, Brazil, Egypt, India and Uganda have all shut off internet access when politically beneficial to their ruling parties. Nations like Singapore, Russia and China all exert outsize control over the structure and function of their national networks, often relying on a mix of political, technical and social schemes to control the flow of information within their digital borders. The effects of these policies are self-evident.

Delivery drones still face an uncertain future, but there's at least one scenario where they make a lot of sense: Flying robots can be ideal for bringing small, high value, time-sensitive goods to people in low-infrastructure areas. As specific a situation as that sounds like, it's an enormous opportunity, and has the potential to make a huge difference in rural areas and disaster relief missions with deliveries of food and medical supplies, for example. One challenge with that, however, is that while drones are cheap to operate, the up-front investment is significant, especially if you need to make a lot of deliveries quickly, like right after an earthquake. With this sort of thing in mind, DARPA has funded several companies under its ICARUS (Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems) program to create cheap, disposable drones that are designed to deliver a thing to a place and then be forgotten about. One of the companies receiving DARPA funding is San Francisco research firm Otherlab, which does weird robotics-y stuff with creative materials, among other things, and they've come up with a design for a drone they're calling APSARA: Aerial Platform Supporting Autonomous Resupply/ Actions.

In what would make an excellent sidekick for Batman, scientists have built a fascinating, unconventional flying robot that moves its wings and flies just like a bat. Covered with a thin, silicon skin, the flexible wings of this mechanical creature-- called Bat Bot-- can move like bat wings do, making use of nine different artificial joints (real bats have far more joints). Anyone who's ever seen a bat flap around at dusk knows they are incredible flyers, and Soon-Jo Chung, one of the flying robot's creators, said that he gets "mesmerized" by bats' impressive flight skills, with their quick turns and perching. "Bat flight is the holy grail of aerial robotics," Chung, an associate professor at CalTech and a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said during a conference call with reporters on Tuesday. The flying robotic creation is very different from a typical artificial flying device, like a quadrotor drone that uses spinning propellers.

Islamic State (IS) is now using drones to wreak havoc amongst Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, Iraq according to a report by the Associated Press. Iraqi security forces first reported seeing IS drones in 2015, but the sightings have become more frequent in recent months. Investigators from the AP conducted a search of a warehouse in Mosul earlier this week and uncovered parts of drones, receipts of supplies purchased and reports on IS missions. Islamic State appears to have an open budget, spending thousands of dollars a month on drone materials according to the AP report. It has purchased drones from stores and advanced their technology to fit their requirements or even bought supplies to make their own.

Apoorv Agarwal says his software TextIQ's job is to spot a needle in a haystack – but a costly one. Make a mistake in discovery during litigation, and a company can face sanctions of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, he says. Like other startups, TextIQ's raised funding to solve that problem. Unlike others, TextIQ is profitable. And for its first outside funding, it's taking only about $3 million from top investor Floodgate and a group of veteran legal counsels in a seed round its founders say could be the only money it ever needs.

NHS staff using Google's search engine has triggered one of its cybersecurity defences. NHS Digital confirmed so many NHS staff use the search engine that it had started asking them to take a quiz to verify they were "not a robot". News site the Register reported one NHS Trust had told staff to "use Bing" instead. Google indicated its systems were designed to spot unusual traffic and were working as intended. Detecting suspicious traffic from one network can help defeat potential cyber-attacks, such as attempts to try to overwhelm a website.

As stories of robot teachers (2010), AI game-show winners (2011), Big Data election victories (2012) objects communicating with one another (2013), self-driving cars (2014), robot-run hotels (2015), delivery drones (2016) have become the new normal, the outgoing Obama administration has made policy recommendations premised on a future American economy deeply affected by AI-driven automation, with 47% of US jobs estimated to be at high-risk of computerization in the next 20 years. It's perhaps therefore unsurprising that there is an abundance of words, terminology and concepts floating around the automation and artificial intelligence sphere, often achieving'buzzword' status and cited in isolation – when really they ought to be considered in concert. We can think of automation as being the consolidation of a number of such'concepts', intertwined and often related to one another: this is my take on how some of these fit together and the level of maturity that flows therefrom. We begin by plotting the number and complexity of tasks performed (X-axis) as part of each'concept' against the extent to which the behaviours exhibited are'human-like' (Y-axis). Next we demarcate a zoning of primary "operation modes": concepts relating to direct interaction with humans (mode of interaction in green); gaining and producing knowledge (thinking in purple); and, finally, interaction with other systems (machine-machine interaction in orange).