The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

Monday's edition of the Federal Register contains new property disclosure requirements for mining companies and a review of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence: The Obama administration is looking into artificial intelligence. The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy announced Friday a request for information as it considers the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence. "Like any transformative technology, however, AI carries risks and presents complex policy challenges along a number of different fronts," it added. Finance: The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is proposing new property disclosure requirements for mining companies.

At dawn on 17 March the inhabitants of Los Angeles were woken by a mild tremor. Less than three minutes later the Los Angeles Times website published an initial piece on the subject, at first sight a wire drafted in haste by a press agency: "A shallow magnitude 4.7 earthquake was reported Monday morning five miles [8km] from Westwood, California, according to the US Geological Survey. The temblor occurred at 6.25am Pacific time at a depth of 5.0 miles. According to the USGS, the epicentre was six miles from Beverly Hills, California, seven miles from Universal City, California, seven miles from Santa Monica, California, and 348 miles from Sacramento, California. In the past 10 days, there have been no earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater centred nearby. This information comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service and this post was created by an algorithm written by the author."

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. So the UK has just given itself a national headache. Whether you think the Brexit was the right decision or a dangerous and unmitigated screw-up (as I do), the consequences of the referendum will be non-trivial and take years to complete. But the mechanics of the UK exiting the European Union aside, the question of how people now feel about the Brexit is interesting. Are they awash in jubilation or has buyer's remorse set in?

They are funded by a new four-year, 1.2 million National Science Foundation grant to computer scientist Sridhar Mahadevan, lead principal investigator at UMass Amherst's College of Information and Computer Sciences. His co-investigators are Mario Parente, an expert in analysis of hyperspectral images at UMass Amherst, and Darby Dyar of Mount Holyoke, a specialist in planetary chemistry and geology who serves on the scientific mission team for the Mars rover. As Mahadevan explains, NASA's Curiosity rover, a car-sized robot, has been exploring a crater on Mars since August 2012 and sending back a steady stream of specialized camera images and data on the chemical composition of rocks and dust for analysis. The data range from one-dimensional spectra of rock samples to three-dimensional hyperspectral images of the Martian surface. He advises Ph.D. students Thomas Boucher, CJ Carey, Steve Giguere, Ian Gemp, Francisco Garcia and Ishan Durugkar in the Autonomous Learning Laboratory, who are exploring machine learning methods to show, for the first time, that new deep learning approaches provide a practical and useful new tool for handling large scientific data sets.

The announcement Monday is a new milestone for Chinese supercomputer development and a further erosion of past U.S. dominance of the field. Last year's Chinese winner in the TOP500 ranking maintained by researchers in the United States and Germany slipped to No. 2, followed by a computer at the U.S. government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Also this year, China displaced the United States for the first time as the country with the most supercomputers in the top 500. China had 167 systems and the United States had 165. Japan was a distant No. 3 with 29 systems. Supercomputers are one of a series of technologies targeted by China's ruling Communist Party for development and have received heavy financial support.

I visited my local health-insurance office a few months ago. After entering the building, I was welcomed into a long and dark corridor, full of nervous people carrying bloated folders. The atmosphere was gloomy, and it was obvious that no one wanted to be there. After about 30 minutes I realized why: During that time, the line had barely moved, and it took me the better part of the day to reach a clerk. As a result, I was late for two other errands I had planned.

The doomsday scenarios spun around this theme are so outlandish -- like The Matrix, in which human-created artificial intelligence plugs humans into a simulated reality to harvest energy from their bodies -- it's difficult to visualize them as serious threats. Meanwhile, artificially intelligent systems continue to develop apace. Self-driving cars are beginning to share our roads; pocket-sized devices respond to our queries and manage our schedules in real-time; algorithms beat us at Go; robots become better at getting up when they fall over. It's obvious how developing these technologies will benefit humanity. But, then -- don't all the dystopian sci-fi stories start out this way? One is overly credulous scare-mongering. But the other extreme is equally dangerous -- complacency that we don't need to think about these issues, because humanity-threatening AI is decades or more away.

Today was a day for the history books. The UK has voted to leave the European Union and opened a deep crack in the heart of Europe. As a consequence of this result, Prime Minister David Cameron will step down by October urging for a fresh leadership. At this point nobody knows the repercussions of these results. Will the Brexit hurt the economy of the UK and ignite a new recession?

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. So the UK has just given itself a national headache. Whether you think the Brexit was the right decision or a dangerous and unmitigated screw-up (as I do), the consequences of the referendum will be non-trivial and take years to complete. But the mechanics of the UK exiting the European Union aside, the question of how people now feel about the Brexit is interesting. Are they awash in jubilation or has buyer's remorse set in?