Artificial intelligence, and technology in general, will have a crucial role to play in society's progress, that is the view of the UK and American governments anyway. This Thursday President Obama announced at the first White House Frontier Conference that more than $300 million in funding, through partnerships, will be released for tech innovations that will improve healthcare, develop smart cities and enhance America's space ambition. "We may be in a slightly different period now, simply because of the pervasive applicability of AI and other technologies," said President Obama in a video shown at the start of the conference. President Obama believes AI, in particular, will be able to help solve the biggest crises that face the world, such as disease, famine, climate change and economic inequality. Others, like Tesla CEO Elon Musk, suggest AI's rise will be the biggest threat to the survival of the human race.

In October, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and the U.S. president issued a joint report titled "Preparing For The Future of Artificial Intelligence." If you were waiting for a sign to prove that the Fourth Industrial Revolution had begun, a policy statement from the White House on thinking robots definitively fits the bill. The report consists of a state of AI summary and lays out potential applications. It then delves into questions everyone has about what AI will do to society and public policy. It concludes with a strategic plan for federally-funded R&D for practical AI, based on actual request-for-information (RFI) proposals.

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Credit Pulse" newsletter to their offering. A criminal whose name has been added to a sanction list compiled by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is highly unlikely to use that exact name when opening a bank account. I handle the news around here.

Liberia has lost access to the entire internet in apparent preparation for shutting down the entire internet. Repeated attacks are flooding the country's network with requests and taking it down entirely. That has intermittently knocked the entire web offline, meaning that people can't access any websites or web services. The attacks appear to be a way for hackers to test a variety of ways of attacking internet connections and taking offline. In that way they resemble the attacks launched recently, when hackers brought down many of the world's biggest websites.

Before you fall back this weekend, it's time to take a look at Google's Assistant-powered Home device, take a spin with GoPro's drone and find out how Singapore is pushing to be the first "Smart Nation." Also, undecided (or, more likely, firmly decided) voters can peruse Engadget's election guide to see where presidential candidates stand on tech issues. Across this 30-mile-wide island, a network of fiber connections and sensors underpin scientists' efforts to address the problems of urban living. The "Smart Nation" plan is trying to address pain points, like energy usage, health and transportation, while also accumulating data to fill out a detailed model of Virtual Singapore, where planners can test new projects to see their potential impact. Nathan Ingraham says Google Home is a great way to show off just how smart Google is, but it doesn't feel like an essential experience yet.

Do Twitter users who mention Donald Trump swear more than those who mention Hillary Clinton? Let's find out by taking a natural language processing approach (or, NLP for short) to analyzing tweets. This walkthrough will provide a basic introduction to help developers of all background and abilities get started with the NLP microservices available on Algorithmia. We'll show you how to chain them together to perform light analysis on unstructured text. Our gentle introduction to NLP will help you get started.

When Tesla announced recently that it would make "full self-driving capability" available on new S and X models for a mere $3,000 extra, optimists hailed the development as a watershed moment for consumer technology. But embedded in the press release was a little-noted catch: While customers may use the self-driving feature to pick up friends or family members, "doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year." If you want to earn some extra money -- perhaps to help pay off your robot car's $75,000 price tag -- by selling rides to strangers, you won't be allowed to use Uber or Lyft. On its face, this demand may seem ridiculous. For over a century, buying a car meant that as soon as you left the lot, you could drive it wherever and however you liked as long as you obeyed traffic laws.

Developments in the field of artificial intelligence and a recent string of attacks on numerous websites signal a terrifying future of cyber warfare, Elon Musk told his five million Twitter followers on Thursday. His dire warning pertains to a mixture of machine-learning AI and rather "vulnerable" systems that lay the foundation of the internet. Musk said that the future of cyber warfare may not be waged with humans and our weapons, but with AI systems. Just recently, an unknown group of hackers launched a massive "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attack that took down part of the internet in the West. Analysis of the incident confirmed that the hackers used a huge "botnet," or a system of computers, that comprised simple internet of things (IoT) devices to overload the systems of Dynamic Network Services (Dyn), a firm that is part of the internet address system.

The number one goal in United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 is: eliminate poverty. Today, around 1 billion people, that's roughly one seventh of the world's population, live in extreme poverty by earning less than 1.90$ per day. Though studies reveal that global poverty is reducing, we are still a long way from our goal. To eradicate poverty, we first need the poverty distribution across the globe. The following diagram gives a rough estimate.

The dismal science is getting a data boost through a research partnership between a global bank and the U.K.'s national center for data science. The Alan Turing Institute and London-based HSBC Holdings (NYSE: HSBC) said they are launching the multimillion-pound data science research effort to better "understand changes in the U.K. economy." Launched last year, the Turing Institute brings together researchers from top British universities focusing on mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The goal of the economics data research, the partners said, is to "catalyze research into'big data' and algorithms." Also participating in the economic data initiative is the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.