Could adding AI techniques to machine learning help deal with the high volume of data that most security teams have to prioritize? Or is it a step closer to Skynet? Some companies are adding in AI techniques as a way to reduce the noise that traditional security products produce.

At first glance, the letter from the Delhi police commissioner's desk could have easily been dismissed as another routine laundry list of his department's "achievements" in the previous year. A closer look at the letter, written a little over two years ago, would have sprung a pleasant surprise in the context of the city police's technology prowess. The Delhi Police, according to the letter, had partnered with the Indian Space Research Organisation to implement CMAPS--Crime Mapping, Analytics and Predictive System--under the "Effective use of Space Technology-based Tools for Internal Security Scheme" initiated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014. CMAPS generates crime-reporting queries and has the capacity to identify crime hotspots by auto sweep on the Dial 100 database every 1-3 minutes, replacing a Delhi Police crime-mapping tool that involved manual gathering of data every 15 days. It performs trend analysis, compiles crime and criminal profiles and analyses the behaviour of suspected offenders--all with accompanying graphics.

Apple wants to stop mining for rare Earth metals and other components that help its technologies work. The company announced this through its recently-released 2016 environmental responsibility report, and via a nice little rollout with the help of Vice. Everything Apple builds, they say, will one day be made from recyclable materials such as copper, aluminum, and tin. SEE ALSO: New drone footage gives us the best look at Apple's spaceship campus yet But Apple has no public timeline to complete this goal. Lisa Jackson, the company's vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives, told Vice that company officials are a bit "nervous" because they don't have a plan, either.

Don't bet on humans finding aliens just walking around on another Earth-like planet -- they'll more likely be swimming. That's the assertion of one scientist, who predicts most of the exoplanets we find in habitable zones around their stars are almost entirely covered in water. Earth itself is about 70 percent water on its surface, but the alien planets are likely "dominated by oceans spanning over 90 percent of their surface area," a study in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society speculated. Author Fergus Simpson of the University of Barcelona's Institute of Cosmos Sciences writes that such extensive water coverage would explain why some exoplanets that astronomers have discovered have not been as dense as expected. As experts search for planets that may harbor extraterrestrial life, they are usually looking for planets that are within a certain distance of their host star, called the habitable zone.

Agencies that want to incorporate artificial intelligence into their apps can take advantage of the five different categories of Cognitive Services now available on Microsoft's Azure Government Cloud. With the application programming interfaces and software development kits in Microsoft Cognitive Services, agencies can add emotion and video detection; facial, speech and vision recognition; and speech and language understanding to applications. To help agencies serve constituents with hearing disabilities, for example, an API can convert speech to text, help identify speakers and understand the intent in the tone of their voices. Language apps can provide multilingual services that help governments respond interactively to citizen requests, and knowledge and search apps can be used by bots or virtual assistants to access data from the web to answer questions. Chatbots or virtual assistants have piqued the interest of agencies that want to use them to respond to constituent requests 24 hours a day, lessening the burden on call centers that answer many of the same questions.

What are the primary issues that machine learning is trying to solve in attack detection?

Facebook has revealed its secret "Building 8" where it is crafting technology to read people's minds. As well as its brain-computer interface, the company is working on a wide range of secret projects that use technology in ways never before imagined. Those include special ways of making people sense touch and re-wiring people's brains. The company showed off some of the secretive unit's plans during a speech at its F8 conference. Until now, the team's work has been kept entirely quiet – only leaking out in job ads and other publications.

Facebook concluded its two-day F8 annual conference Wednesday where it announced its plan over the next 10 years. The Menlo Park-based company will be investing in a number of foundational technologies including connectivity, artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented reality. But what is most interesting is Facebook's investment into building a brain-computer interface that will let users type using their mind. Once developed, brain-computer interfaces could let people control augmented reality and virtual reality experiences with their mind instead of a screen. "We are working on a system that will let people type with their brains. Specifically, we have a goal of creating a silent speech system capable of typing 100 words per minute straight from your brain – that's five times faster than you can type on a smartphone today," Facebook said on its official blog Wednesday.

As American soldiers were being maimed by roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military was working feverishly on a solution. One problem: It wasted nearly a decade developing one that was available off the shelf in Israel, a staunch U.S. ally. "That's just one anecdote of the kind of parochialism that's been the case at the Pentagon. That mentality, that mindset needs to change," said Ken Weinstein, president and CEO of the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank on international affairs and technology. More collaboration with foreign partners is needed, but that might be easier said than done, Dr. Weinstein said during a trip to Atlanta to speak at the annual AmCham Germany Business Day event organized by BridgehouseLaw at the Porsche Experience Center.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is in the process of spinning up a new research program to develop ways to teach machines to learn while they are operating -- and apply their knowledge to new situations "the way biological systems do." The agency is now accepting research proposals for the program's first funding opportunity via a Broad Agency Announcement, published last week. Dubbed the Lifelong Learning Machines program or L2M, DARPA plans through the four-year program to fund the development of "substantially more capable systems that are continually improving and updating from experience." Artificial intelligence systems today can't adapt to situations for which they were not already trained or programmed, as DARPA notes in its Broad Agency Announcement released last week. And so applying AI systems for military uses in areas like "supply chain, logistics and visual recognition" is difficult to do today, because many of those applications involve details that aren't defined in advance, according to DARPA. When systems run into something they didn't see in training, they have to be taken offline and reprogrammed, DARPA says, a process that is "expensive and time-consuming," and potentially disruptive to a mission.