Astronauts went spacewalking Friday to provide some necessary focus to the International Space Station's robot arm. The main job for commander Randy Bresnik and teacher-turned-astronaut Joe Acaba was to replace a blurry camera on the new robotic hand that was installed during a spacewalk two weeks ago. The two men were supposed to go spacewalking earlier this week, but NASA needed extra time to rustle up the repair plan. Astronauts went spacewalking Friday to provide some necessary focus to the International Space Station's robot arm. The Deep Space Gateway will orbit Earth and the moon and will open up opportunities for future exploration of deep space, as well as a return to the moon and missions to Mars.

The Union ministry of electronics and information technology has set up an internal committee to advise the government on a policy on artificial intelligence (AI). Top sources said that the expert committee will advise the IT ministry on the most apt technologies for India. The government's main focus is to reduce cyber attacks with AI. The main policy will be drawn up once the committee gives its report. Sources said that the committee is expected to give its report soon.

Amidst the robocar hype, it's easy to forget that for all their powers, computers are still lousy drivers compared to humans. This week, Eric Adams introduced us to the people working to interpret hominid behavior for driving robots. Turns out perception is a remarkable, variegated thing, and cars need to learn how to do all the cool stuff we the fleshy can before performing seamlessly on the road. The same goes for companies. Google parent company Alphabet announced this week it will construct a techified neighborhood in Toronto.

The Confederation of British Industry is calling on the Government to establish a joint commission tasked with examining the impact of Artificial Intelligence on people and jobs across all sectors of the UK economy. Based on research it conducted into the way that technology is changing the way we live and work, the CBI said on Friday that it had identified three technologies -- AI, Blockchain and the Internet of Things – that are set to move from the fringes to the mainstream within the next five years. It also found, however, that only a third of businesses currently have the skills and capabilities needed to adopt AI technologies, and that more therefore needs to be done to help prepare those companies for the future. The aim of the commission, the CBI said, would be to examine the impact of AI on people and jobs, and to subsequently set out plans for action that will "raise productivity, spread prosperity and open up new paths to economic growth". "The UK must lead the way in adopting these technologies but we must also prepare for their impacts," said Josh Hardie, deputy director-general of the CBI.

On May 18th, 2012, attorneys for Oracle and Google were battling over nine lines of code in a hearing before Judge William H. Alsup of the northern district of California. The first jury trial in Oracle v. Google, the fight over whether Google had hijacked code from Oracle for its Android system, was wrapping up. The argument centered on a function called rangeCheck. Of all the lines of code that Oracle had tested -- 15 million in total -- these were the only ones that were "literally" copied. Every keystroke, a perfect duplicate. It was in Oracle's interest to play up the significance of rangeCheck as much as possible, and David Boies, Oracle's lawyer, began to argue that Google had copied rangeCheck so that it could take Android to market more quickly. Judge Alsup was not buying it. "I couldn't have told you the first thing about Java before this trial," said the judge. "But, I have done and still do a lot of programming myself in other languages. I have written blocks of code like ...

Amid an increasingly regulated global business landscape, many financial institutions (FIs) are turning to regulatory technologies (RegTech) to help them cope with greater scrutiny and the potential for hefty fines for non-compliance. As a result of the uptake, RegTech – which according to Harvard Kennedy School is the "application of new technology to regulation-related activities in order to shift them from analog-era to digital and computational models and, thereby, gain dramatic increases in effectiveness, efficiency and scalability" – has risen to a position of relative prominence. Many FIs are utilising the technology to automate compliance tasks and reduce operational risks. The demand for RegTech products – be it machine learning, biometrics, cloud computing, blockchain or distributed ledgers – is particularly timely, with the implementation dates of new and complex regulations, such as the updated Payment Services Directive (PSD2), the revised Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) and the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS) Part 504, on the horizon. Yet despite its burgeoning status as a go-to regulatory compliance option, issues do exist with the adoption and implementation of RegTech.

In May, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, discussed AI applications for digital pathology in his keynote speech to an audience of millions at Google's annual I/O event. Five weeks earlier, the FDA announced it had approved the first whole slide imaging system for primary diagnostic use in pathology. Both events point to the future of pathology and laboratory medicine: Software will soon dominate. Over the past 20 years, software has taken over the world. Retail was dominated by Amazon, Netflix put Blockbuster out of business, and Uber used software to take over the taxi industry.

Discussions around AI cyber defence have traditionally focused on the ability of advanced machine learning to detect the earliest signs of an unfolding attack, including sophisticated, never-seen-before threats. This real-time threat detection overcomes the shortcomings of legacy tools and cuts through the noise in live, complex networks to accurately identify threatening anomalies, including'unknown unknowns'. But while the capability to identify the entire spectrum of threats in their nascent stages before a problem becomes a crisis is incredibly powerful in its own right, it also serves as a fundamental enabler for autonomous response measures, which truly deliver on the promise of artificial intelligence in cyber defense. Before the advent of AI cyber defense, the principal obstacle to achieving autonomous response was determining the exact action that is needed to stop an infection from spreading, while keeping the business operational. By their very nature and definition, traditional approaches to cyber security cannot make the jump from detection to response.

Google-owned YouTube has revealed that it flags more than 80 percent of the extremist videos uploaded on the website. The violent videos were flagged by its new spam-fighting artificial intelligence tools. The Google-owned company began applying machine learning algorithms to its videos in June so that it could quickly spot hateful content and flag it to human reviewers. The company wrote in a blog post, "Always used a mix of human flagging and human review together with technology" to help it spot violent content. The program introduced in June added machine learning to flag violent extremist content, which would then be reviewed by humans."

The CBI (Confederation of British Industry) is asking the government to launch an AI commission in 2018 to examine the effect of artificial intelligence on jobs. The CBI, an organisation that speaks on behalf of 190,000 businesses across the UK, has released a report titled'Disrupting the Future' which highlights how firms and the government must pave the way for the adoption of new technologies. It has called on the government to establish a joint commission in early 2018 involving business, employee representatives, academics and a minister to examine the impact of AI on people and jobs. It also hopes the commission will be able to set out an action plan to outline how to raise productivity, spread prosperity and open up new paths to economic growth. Josh Hardie, CBI deputy director-general, said: "The UK must lead the way in adopting these technologies but we must also prepare for their impacts. That's why we urge the Government to set up a joint commission on Artificial Intelligence in 2018, involving both business and employee representatives, to better understand the impact on people's lives, jobs and our future economic growth." The group said that only a third of businesses say their company has the skills and capabilities needed to adopt AI technologies and that blockchain can be used across sectors and will require regulator co-ordination to set clear standards. Furthermore, the main concern for businesses looking to use the IoT is the security and privacy of the devices involved.