Canada wants to be an artificial-intelligence hotbed.

This article is by Featured Blogger José de la Rubia from his LinkedIn page. With Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and other tech giants joining the ranks, people have given different understandings of AI from their own perspectives – with some of them being off target. There are two things companies need to be careful of, whether they are large or small. The first is to avoid any pursuit of unrealistic products that require futuristic technologies. The second is a misinterpretation of the market demand, or the quasi-demand.

The first day of the next major conflict shouldn't look like war at all according to William Roper, who runs the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, or SCO. Instead, imagine a sort of digital collection blitzkrieg, with data-gathering software and sensors setting of alarms left and right as they vacuum up info for a massive AI. Whoever collects the most data on Day One just might win the war before a single shot is fired. "My prediction for the future is that when we go out to fly planes on the first day of battle, whether they are manned or unmanned, that the purpose of the first day or the second day will not be to go out and destroy enemy aircraft or other systems. It's to go out, collect data, do data reconnaissance, so that our learning system gets smarter than [the enemy's]," Roper said Tuesday at an Air Force Association event on Tuesday.

The federal government is poised to unveil a new artificial intelligence institute, marking a major coordinated effort intended to keep Canada at the forefront of AI research. An announcement regarding the institute, which will have strong ties to the University of Toronto, is expected as early this week, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the plan. Along with federal assistance, the institute will receive funding from Ontario's government as well as leading Canadian companies from a range of industries. All told, the total financial commitment is expected to top $100 million, according to two sources familiar with the announcement. Along with driving more research in the area of AI, the funds are expected to help Canada retain high-priced talent to ensure AI startups succeed.

If you're a drone pilot who doesn't wear an Air Force uniform, chances are your aircraft looks something like a square with four rotors, a battery, and maybe a camera. The classic quadcopter, after all, works just fine. Well, maybe because you want a drone with five rotors. Or you want to mount the camera on top of the drone, not below. Or you want a drone shaped like a rabbit because you quite like rabbits and why the heck not?

Dear Liz: A friend of mine received a 2016 tax refund of over $9,000 even though this person did not pay nearly that amount in taxes over the course of the year. My friend has a fairly low-paying job with no benefits, is a single parent of two young children and receives no support from the children's other parent. Given this scenario, is it possible to get a tax refund in an amount greater than what you paid in taxes? Answer: Absolutely, and these refundable credits keep millions of working Americans out of poverty each year. Refundable credits are tax breaks that don't just offset taxes you owe but also can give you additional money back.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a paper clip. In this scenario, the designers of the world's first artificial superintelligence need a way to test their creation. So they program it to do something simple and non-threatening: make paper clips. They set it in motion and wait for the results -- not knowing they've already doomed us all. Before we get into the details of this galaxy-destroying blunder, it's worth looking at what superintelligent A.I. actually is, and when we might expect it.

My eye was caught by a headline in the Register, an invaluable online source of tech news and opinion. "Clearance sale shows Apple's iPad is over. This was a quotation from a piece by Volker Weber on the latest product announcements from Apple. "iPad is the biggest news," he wrote, "and it says: the iPad is done. Apple is just refining the components, but there isn't much they can do these days to make yet another super-duper Earth-shattering innovation here."

What do you think of when you hear the phrases "Future Tech" or "Science Fiction Technology?" Humanoid robots walking the streets? Today we're looking at science fiction #technology that was once just a fantasy, that is now part of our daily life. We are also going to take a peek at some of our favorite sci-fi tech, and see how close it is to being a reality. "Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all." ("My Own View," The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) Believe it or not, credit cards were first mentioned in science fiction. You might expect that the individual who envisioned the credit card to be a genius businessman or bank executive of some sort, however the person who first developed the idea of the modern credit card system was a Utopian science fiction author Edward Bellamy.

Some of the world's best known brands have invested millions of dollars in information security. Malicious actors are counting on the fact that your defenses are operated mostly by humans who make changes. When you moved into your neighborhood, did you change your locks or do you have the exact same ones as all your neighbors? Think about what could happen if a thief can compromise just one of those shared locks? For some reason the world of information security has a same-lock mentality.