The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) requires large quantities of data, collected from a variety of sources, in order to complete investigations. Since its creation in 1947, intel has typically been gathered by hand. The advent of computers has improved the process, but even more modern methods can still be painstakingly slow. Ultimately, these methods only retrieve minuscule amounts of data when compared what artificial intelligence (AI) can gather. According to information revealed by Dawn Meyerriecks, the deputy director for technology development with the CIA, the agency currently has 137 different AI projects underway.

China's government has announced a goal of becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence in just over a decade, putting political muscle behind growing investment by Chinese companies in developing self-driving cars and other advances. Communist leaders see AI as key to making China an "economic power," said a Cabinet statement on Thursday. It calls for developing skills and research and educational resources to achieve "major breakthroughs" by 2025 and make China a world leader by 2030. It might not be long before machines begin thinking for themselves -- creatively, independently, and sometimes with better judgment than a human.... Artificial intelligence is one of the emerging fields along with renewable energy, robotics and electric cars where communist leaders hope to take an early lead and help transform China from a nation of factory workers and farmers into a technology pioneer. They have issued a series of development plans over the past decade, some of which have prompted complaints Beijing improperly subsidizes its technology developers and shields them from competition in violation of its free-trade commitments.

There's an action movie cliché in which a cop inspects the body of a felled assassin or foot soldier and discovers a curious tattoo that ultimately leads to a rogue black-ops squadron, a secret religious sect, or an underground drug trafficking ring. The trope isn't entirely Hollywood fantasy, but the reality of emerging tattoo recognition technology is closer to a dystopian tech thriller. Soon, we may see police departments using algorithms to scrape tattoos from surveillance video or cops in the field using mobile apps to analyze tattoos during stops. Depending on the tattoo, such technology could be used to instantly reveal personal information, such as your religious beliefs or political affiliations. For years, law enforcement has used tattoos to identify criminal suspects as well as unidentified victims.

Yemen's al Qaeda branch, known as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has taken advantage of a more than two-year-old civil war between the Iran-aligned Houthi group and President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi's Saudi-backed government to strengthen its position in the impoverished country.

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Valentino Zocca graduated with a PhD in mathematics from the University of Maryland, USA, with a dissertation in symplectic geometry, after having graduated with a laurea in mathematics from the University of Rome. He spent a semester at the University of Warwick. After a post-doc in Paris, Valentino started working on hightech projects in the Washington, D.C. area and played a central role in the design, development, and realization of an advanced stereo 3D Earth visualization software with head tracking at Autometric, a company later bought by Boeing. At Boeing, he developed many mathematical algorithms and predictive models, and using Hadoop, he has also automated several satellite-imagery visualization programs. He has since become an expert on machine learning and deep learning and has worked at the U.S. Census Bureau and as an independent consultant both in the US and in Italy.

When Microsoft co-founder (now billionaire philanthropist) Bill Gates spoke about a robot tax, San Francisco city supervisor Jane Kim heard him -- or, at least, she read about it. Now, Kim has been pushing for a robot tax in the home state of Silicon Valley, and she's been up and about talking to the leaders of the tech industry, various labor groups throughout the state, and to public policy makers figuring out how best to implement a robot tax. But what does it mean to tax robots? For the ordinary worker, the tax one pays the government gets spent on various programs that (ideally) ends up servicing the tax-paying individual -- be it as an infrastructural project, through social services, or even as salary for public servants. Instead, it would benefit the ordinary human worker whose job was taken over by an intelligent machine.

First, Symantec revealed that hackers--probably based in Russia, although the security firm didn't go so far as to name names--had hacked more than 20 power companies in North America and Europe, and in a handful of cases, had direct access to their control systems. And then Equifax confessed it had been the target of a breach that stole 143 million Americans' data, one of the worst data spills ever, and one that raises questions about data centralization, particularly for Social Security Numbers. Megabreaches aside, Facebook admitted that a Russian troll farm had spent $100,000 on influence ads during last year's election. Google patched a flaw in Android that would allow a nasty "toast overlay" attack to take control of devices. WIRED dug into the long-running series of scams and theft plaguing new currencies in the cryptocoin economy.

The legislation contains rules such as saving humans before animals and property, saving lives without discrimination and that self-driving software should contain safeguards against malicious hacking. Germany has taken a novel approach, rather than concentrating on self-driven cars, it concentrates on self-driving software -- most self-driving legislation concentrates on self-driven cars and consequences of putting them on roads and literally in charge of human lives. The German legislation concentrates on the root of self-driving, the computers, and software used to run self-driven cars. This makes it essential that decisions be taken when programming the software of conditionally and highly automated driving systems."

Recently we wrote about the development of AI and neural nets beyond the second generation Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Nets (CNNs / RNNs) which have come on so strong and dominate the current conversation about deep learning. The original charge by DARPA's SyNAPSE program has spread the work among many of these labs including Sandia, Oak Ridge, and Lawrence Livermore. "Neuromorphic computing is still in its beginning stages," says Dr. Catherine Schuman, a researcher working on such architectures at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. State of the art on the hardware side appears to still belong to IBM which recently delivered a supercomputing platform based on TrueNorth to Lawrence Livermore Lab with the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses.