Following the Arkansas hot tub murder case that has reignited the debate around privacy rights issues, activists are advocating the need to set protocols for technology providers to deter mass surveillance by the government and law enforcement agencies. In the Arkansas hot tub murder case, James Andrew Bates is currently on trial. Bates is accused of murdering his friend Victor Collins, who was found dead in a hot tub in Bates' home in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2015. Local authorities issued a warrant as they sought assistance from Amazon to release any audio or records from an Amazon Echo device that Bates owned. Following the footsteps of Apple, who similarly resisted handing over private user data to the FBI when the agency asked the company to unlock the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters, Amazon also reportedly declined to give authorities the Echo data logged on its servers.

At the end of the exchange, the app will advise a patient on how to proceed, an alternative to the advice of 111 call-handlers who are able to send ambulances, book an out-of-hours doctor or suggest other treatment. The trial is seen as a potential solution to the strain on the 111 service. Interactions with the app are significantly cheaper and quicker than speaking over the phone. It is hoped that the database of medical information that Babylon has could mean more effective advice than the 111 staff who are not medical professionals, although many users may have misgivings about the effectiveness of medical advice from a chatbot.

When Donald Trump met with technology leaders in December to tell them he wanted them to create jobs in the US, their heads probably tilted to the side, as if you tried to explain physics to your dog and she just watched your lips moving and wondered when, among all those unfamiliar sounds, she was going to hear the word "treat". They're in business to help us do more with less. They like innovation and disruption and software eating the world but people – er, not so much. In his own Chance-the-gardener way, the President-elect might be on to something. His victory was a middle-finger salute from those who feeling left out by technology and globalisation.

Delivery driver jobs would be at less risk, CEA forecast says. The proliferation of self-driving, or autonomous, tractor-trailers threaten the jobs of nearly 1.7 million commercial truck drivers, according to a study published late last month by the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The study, released Dec. 20, said the jobs of between 1.34 million and 1.67 million truck drivers would be at risk due to the growing utilization of heavy-duty vehicles operated via artificial intelligence. That would equal 80 to 100 percent of all driver jobs listed in the CEA report, which is based on May 2015 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a unit of the Department of Labor. There are about 3.4 million commercial truck drivers currently operating in the U.S., according to various estimates.

NASA missions come packaged two ways. They're either deep explorations of the familiar--STEREO's focus on the sun, the International Space Station's study of what microgravity does to the human body--or a trip to some crazy place no one has ever seen before. But still, any strange, distant object the agency targets will likely hold some clue about the origins of life. Humans are spacefaring narcissists that way. NASA's newly announced Lucy and Psyche missions fall squarely into the second category.

The problem of outlier detection is extremely challenging in many domains such as text, in which the attribute values are typically non-negative, and most values are zero. In such cases, it often becomes difficult to separate the outliers from the natural variations in the patterns in the underlying data. In this paper, we present a matrix factorization method, which is naturally able to distinguish the anomalies with the use of low rank approximations of the underlying data. Our iterative algorithm TONMF is based on block coordinate descent (BCD) framework. We define blocks over the term-document matrix such that the function becomes solvable. Given most recently updated values of other matrix blocks, we always update one block at a time to its optimal. Our approach has significant advantages over traditional methods for text outlier detection. Finally, we present experimental results illustrating the effectiveness of our method over competing methods.

The UK's National Health Service will soon begin a trial testing whether or not a chatbot can effectively replace a call center for non-emergency medical triage, according to a report from the Financial Times. Babylon, a UK-based telemedicine startup, will power the six-month trial in north-central London, which will include 1.2 million covered citizens. Babylon is a major telemedicine provider in its native England. The company's direct-to-consumer offering starts with an AI-powered chatbot which can escalate up to a video visit if necessary. Triage via Babylon requires about 12 text messages and takes about a minute and a half.

According to a set of intelligent humans interviewed for this story, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are going to help drive the tech economy in 2017. When CIO.com posted a query on Help a Reporter Out, a site designed to help journalists connect with sources, asking about startup trends to watch in 2017, the overwhelming majority of respondents pointed to AI. This coming year and beyond, AI will help companies "disrupt sectors that haven't been fully disrupted," says Anthony Glomski, principal of AG Asset Advisory, a financial advisory firm. "AI is in its beginning stages with massive potential impact." Here are eight startup categories and trends experts believe will be big in 2017.

Finally a new year is here after the most politically divisive 12 months in a very long time. In the UK, Brexit shattered dreams and friendships. In the US, the polarisation was already huge, but a bitter election campaign made the divisions even deeper. A researcher from King's College London explains how we start with fairly small opinions about an issue to being fully entrenched, as many may not have been for one side during Brexit but were completely sure their opinions were in fact right How is it possible that people come to hold such widely different views of reality? And what can we do (if anything) to break out of the cycle of increasingly hostile feelings towards people who seem to be on'the other side' from us?

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to launch a test soon to determine whether artificial intelligence can help bureaucrats write draft answers for questions made to Cabinet ministers and others during deliberations in the Diet. The ministry is considering using AI to draw up challenges and debate points for policy issues -- using Diet proceedings in the past five years as a guide -- in the hopes of improving work efficiency. The ministry, which has promoted what it calls the "fourth industrial revolution" that utilizes AI and the internet of things, is looking to set an example that would spread the use of AI in other government agencies and ministries. Bureaucrats often spend long hours drafting answers to Diet questions, with the work often continuing until dawn on the day they are used. In the Kasumigaseki government district in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward, close attention is being paid to whether the industry ministry's AI-related initiative will help reduce these long work hours.