Could the armies of lawyers needed to close billion-dollar deals soon be a thing of the past? That's what Invoke Capital, the London-based venture firm run by former Autonomy Plc Chief Executive Officer Mike Lynch, is betting with its latest project financing. Invoke said Wednesday that it's making an investment in Luminance, a U.K. startup using artificial intelligence to process legal documents and automate due diligence in mergers and acquisitions. While the amount of the investment was not disclosed, Lynch said in an interview that the figure was "in the low millions." Luminance says its software can read and understand hundreds of pages of legal documents a minute, enabling lawyers to carry out due diligence far faster than previously.

Dmitry Malioutov can't say much about what he built. As a research scientist at IBM, Malioutov spends part of his time building machine learning systems that solve difficult problems faced by IBM's corporate clients. One such program was meant for a large insurance corporation. It was a challenging assignment, requiring a sophisticated algorithm. When it came time to describe the results to his client, though, there was a wrinkle. "We couldn't explain the model to them because they didn't have the training in machine learning." In fact, it may not have helped even if they were machine learning experts.

The new industrial revolution is a cyber-physical systems revolution. The Internet of Things (IoT) forms a foundation for this cyber-physical systems revolution. It is driving the biggest shift in business and technology since World War II. "Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are physical and engineered systems whose operations are monitored, coordinated, controlled and integrated by a computing and communication core. Just as the internet transformed how humans interact with one another, cyber-physical systems will transform how we interact with the physical world around us."1

Conventional air traffic might be tightly controlled and monitored, but even with the new FAA regulations, drones and other unmanned aerial systems are mostly operating without any government oversight. And that doesn't sit well with the folks at the Pentagon, who fear that easy access to affordable drones could make them easily adaptable for terrorist or military purposes. To combat this potential threat, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, announced this week an "Aerial Dragnet" program that aims to map all small drone activity in urban settings. "Commercial websites currently exist that display in real time the tracks of relatively high and fast aircraft--from small general aviation planes to large airliners--all overlaid on geographical maps as they fly around the country and the world," DARPA's program manager Jeff Krolik said. "We want a similar capability for identifying and tracking slower, low-flying unmanned aerial systems, particularly in urban environments."

The agency has been in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing a portion of the space station for medical studies, including cancer research. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) collaborated with the City of Hope, a center for cancer research and treatment in California, to explore carbon nanotubes for the treatment of brain tumor. Last Sep. 6, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which is part of NIH, renewed their research partnership through 2021. "From a NASA standpoint, there are significant opportunities to develop new data science capabilities that can support both the mission of exploring space and cancer research using common methodological approaches," said Dan Crichton, head of JPL's Center for Data Science and Technology.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has invested billions of dollars in space exploration. This investment has come back to Earth to benefit the medical community. NASA's complex machine learning algorithms used to analyze the astrophysical similarities among galaxies such as NGC 3718 and NGC 3729 are now used for studying cancer. The algorithms improve the extraction of patterns from complex data sets and help in the analysis of cancer. NASA's involvement in cancer research is not new, though.

President Obama may be urged to split the joint leadership of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command in favor of two distinct forces for cyberespionage and cyberwarfare as NSA officials announce that artificial intelligence will be a future part of U.S. cyber strategy. The potential move will be urged by the Pentagon and intelligence community and is driven by a sense that the two missions are fundamentally different as military hackers and cyberspies shouldn't compete to use the same networks and the job of leading both missions is too big for one person, according to the Washington Post. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper are both reportedly pressing for the split, with Carter seeking to build Cyber Command into a full-fledged fighting force that has its own network accesses to conduct attacks, the post said while Clapper supports the idea in hopes that it will reduce tension over which force gets to use the networks . Last week, NSA leader Admiral Michael Rogers told an audience at the Intelligence & National Security Summit that ''he believes the two organizations should remain aligned but separate. In other news, earlier this week, Rogers told Congress that artificial intelligence will play a large role in the U.S. cyberspace strategy.

It might surprise some of you to know that artificial intelligence (AI) is already in use and a routine part of our daily lives, but we leverage this technology when we use our smartphones or other devices to ask Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google Now, or Amazon's Alexa a question to get the facts or data we are looking for. Using your voice, you can say, "Where's the nearest gas station?" or "What's on my calendar today?", and the intelligent personal assistant (IPA) will respond by finding information and relaying it from your phone or sending commands to other apps. However, AI is not only being used in the context of a personal assistant. Self-driving cars are moving closer to reality, retailers are using anticipatory shipping in the hopes to send you items before you need them, and banks are using AI to detect fraud to monitor accounts and alert the owners when questionable transactions occur. So it is here, but what is AI? AI is an intelligent system's ability to improve predictions, accelerate problem solving, and automate administrative tasks, ushering in an era of automation.

America's research and development department wants the ability to know where drones are, even when they can't see them. Darpa's latest program, Aerial Dragnet, is set to track all unmanned aerial systems (UAS) operating below 1,000 feet in large cities. Using sensors, these systems would'see' over and between buildings in order to trail these vehicles with the goal of combating'UAS-enabled terrorist threats' in urban environments. DARPA's program, Aerial Dragnet, will track all unmanned aerial systems (UAS) flying below 1,000 feet in large cities. Using sensors, these systems would see over and between buildings in order to trail these vehicles with the goal of combating'UAS-enabled terrorist threats' Darpa has announced a new program that will track all unmanned aerial systems (UAS) operating below 1,000 feet in large cities in order to combat UAS-enabled terrorist threats.

Earth is not prepared for the possibility of a cataclysmic asteroid collision, according to the White House's top science advisor. At a discussion on Wednesday at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center regarding the agency's 1.4 billion Asteroid Redirect Mission, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren warned that an impact could'do a lot of damage to the Earth.' The expert noted two catastrophic events in recent history that took the world by surprise – the Chelyabinsk strike in 2013, and the Tunguska fireball in 1908. While it may sound alarming, Holdren says we are'on a trajectory' toward mitigating the risks, as Nasa's radical mission has recently been given the green light to move forward, and could provide a platform for the testing of crucial deflection methods. At a discussion yesterday at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy John Holdren warned that an asteroid impact could'do a lot of damage to the Earth.'