In brief: Ray Kurzweil, chief engineer for Google and famous futurist, spoke in a discussion held at the Council on Foreign Relations on Friday. He emphasized how AI would enhance humankind, despite the possibility of "difficult episodes." Amidst all the talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) is threatening society with great harm--beginning with taking over human-held jobs and then, eventually, becoming more intelligent and taking over the entire world--some experts believe that AI shouldn't be feared. Foremost among these experts is Google's director of engineering and notable "future teller" Ray Kurzweil, who has said time and again that the technological singularity won't necessarily go down as expected. Kurzweil discussed the future of AI at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, D.C. on Friday.

Experts are looking at ways to create AI which will ultimately benefit humanity and Google's director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, backs up that theory. However, he insists mankind will have to endure "difficult episodes" on the way to achieving machine learning which falls in line with our goals. Mr Kurzweil said at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC, that technology is a "double-edged sword" which has helped and hindered humans, and he expects the same of AI. The 69-year old said: "Technology has always been a double-edged sword. Fire kept us warm, cooked our food and burned down our houses.

With the adoption of new technology for conducting work in the digital world, it is only normal for new technology to start coming out as possible solutions to cyber threats. One such area that has been in the spotlight lately is artificial intelligence (AI) and how it can help businesses to improve cybersecurity and protect against recent growing threats that come from ransomware and phishing. One recent organization that has talked about such benefits, particularly for the healthcare industry in combatting ransomware, is the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT) in their paper, "How to Crush the Health Sector's Ransomware Pandemic: The Machine Learning Based Artificial Intelligence Revolution Starts Now!" ICIT talks about how machine learning based AI throughout the Internet of Things (IoT) microcosm could help to detect, respond to, and predict cyber threats. ICIT finds that if the healthcare industry adopts sophisticated algorithmic defenses such as machine learning (ML) or AI solutions it will give them an edge against the average attacker and finally put them a step ahead of their risks. Since healthcare organizations are already using cognitive and AI solutions for big data analytics and clinical apps, all they need to do now is to adopt similar solutions but with cybersecurity in mind.

The cybersecurity threat landscape is ever-changing and augmenting SIEM systems offers federal agencies much-needed agility to deliver 24/7 insight. Leveraging a next generation advanced analytics and machine learning platform alongside a SIEM provides a strong future-proofed infrastructure that can empower agencies as they undergo efforts to beef up cybersecurity by optimizing SIEM deployments, opening up the possibilities for machine learning and analytic use cases. Significantly reducing the cost of storing and ingesting data with open source technology can allow agencies to expand their enterprise visibility, break vendor lock-in and provide the analytics they require to stay safe.

Many countries are suffering from severe air pollution. Understanding how different air pollutants accumulate and propagate is critical to making relevant public policies. In this paper, we use urban big data (air quality data and meteorological data) to identify the \emph{spatiotemporal (ST) causal pathways} for air pollutants. This problem is challenging because: (1) there are numerous noisy and low-pollution periods in the raw air quality data, which may lead to unreliable causality analysis, (2) for large-scale data in the ST space, the computational complexity of constructing a causal structure is very high, and (3) the \emph{ST causal pathways} are complex due to the interactions of multiple pollutants and the influence of environmental factors. Therefore, we present \emph{p-Causality}, a novel pattern-aided causality analysis approach that combines the strengths of \emph{pattern mining} and \emph{Bayesian learning} to efficiently and faithfully identify the \emph{ST causal pathways}. First, \emph{Pattern mining} helps suppress the noise by capturing frequent evolving patterns (FEPs) of each monitoring sensor, and greatly reduce the complexity by selecting the pattern-matched sensors as "causers". Then, \emph{Bayesian learning} carefully encodes the local and ST causal relations with a Gaussian Bayesian network (GBN)-based graphical model, which also integrates environmental influences to minimize biases in the final results. We evaluate our approach with three real-world data sets containing 982 air quality sensors, in three regions of China from 01-Jun-2013 to 19-Dec-2015. Results show that our approach outperforms the traditional causal structure learning methods in time efficiency, inference accuracy and interpretability.

Russia has boasted its robot tank outperformed manned vehicles in recent tests paving the way for Vladimir Putin to expand his droid army. Two unmanned tanks, one of which is designed as a kamikaze device, have been subjected to testing outside Moscow for almost a year. The tanks, called Nehreta, have undergone more rigorous testing in recent weeks and today it emerged they have performed better than the manned versions. The Russian'Nerehta' ground robot has aced its latest tests, it has been revealed. It can carry a 12.7mm or 7.62mm machine gun or an AG-30M grenade launcher.

In this image taken from video, a sheep indicates recognition of former US president Barack Obama, right, displayed on a computer screen during research carried out by scientists at Cambridge University with their results published Wednesday Nov. 8, 2017, in Royal Society: Open Science. The new study shows that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities comparable to those of humans and monkeys, according to Professor Jenny Morton, and the university hope their research assists research into Huntington's disease and other human brain disorders that affect mental processing.(Cambridge

If you are a data scientist, a software developer, or in the social and human sciences with interest in digital humanities, then you're no stranger to the ongoing discussions on how algorithms embed biases, and discrimination and the call for critical and ethical engagement. I have keenly been following such discussion for a while and this post is an attempt to put together the articles, books, book reviews, videos, interviews, twitter threads and so on., that I've come across in one place so it can be used as a resource. This list is by no means exhaustive and as more and more awareness is being raised, there are more pieces/articles/journal papers being written on a daily basis. I plan to update these lists regularly. Also, if you think there are relevant material that I have not included, please leave them as a comment and I will add them.

Seamgen LLC, a software development and design agency, has launched its Artificial Intelligence service, their newest way to help organizations, from enterprises to well-funded startups, maximize the value they bring to their customers. With a collection of the world's leading AI scientists, Seamgen is now able to help their clients effectively utilize their business data to more efficiently serve their customers. This comes at a time when Artificial Intelligence services are in high demand with businesses trying to find new ways to enhance their digital strategies. "Artificial Intelligence is one of the fastest growing sectors of the technology industry right now as companies large and small try to find new ways to inject AI into their digital strategy. Finding AI experts is not an easy task, but that's where we step in. Our AI as a Service can discover unique ways to transform data into viable business solutions," stated Marc Alringer, Seamgen's CEO and founder.

NEXT week, a meeting at UN headquarters in Geneva will discuss autonomous armed robots. Unlike existing military drones, which are controlled remotely, these new machines would identify and attack targets without human intervention. Groups including the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots hope the meeting will lead to an international ban. But while fiction is littered with cautionary tales of what happens when you put guns in the cold, metallic hands of a machine, the situation may not be as simple as "human good, robots bad". To understand why, we should look at what people are saying about the ethics of driverless cars, which advocates see as a way of reducing accidents.