In a new interview with Quartz, Microsoft founder Bill Gates makes a rather stunning argument--that robots who replace human workers should incur taxes equivalent to that worker's income taxes. "Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed . . . If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you'd think that we'd tax the robot at a similar level." Gates argues that these taxes, paid by a robot's owners or makers, would be used to help fund labor force retraining. Former factory workers, drivers, and cashiers would be transitioned to health services, education, or other fields where human workers will remain vital.

I would like to thank the European Parliament for the invitation to speak at this seminar on a topic which is at the heart of the European Commission's activities, especially those of the Directorate-General I represent, DG Connect. Let me first state that we greatly appreciate and welcome the publication of the report of the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee. Given the great public attention currently devoted to robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) this report is very timely and points at some crucial issues that need to be addressed. It highlights the opportunities robotics and AI offer and points towards the clear need for a coherent European approach and for Europe to have a strong presence and investment in this technology in order to maintain leadership in it. Many aspects of the report are directly in line with the Digitising European Industry strategy we launched in April 2016.

DAILY VIDEO: Verizon negotiates down to $4.55B for Yahoo transaction; Congressional staffers see Russian hacking, FISA vote as priorities; IBM launches machine learning for z System mainframes; and there's more. DAILY VIDEO: White House withholds cyber-security order for further revision; Cortana to help Windows... DAILY VIDEO: Kaspersky discovers new malware designed to stealthily steal data; Microsoft to shield... DAILY VIDEO: Federal court says Google must turn over data in foreign servers; Cisco report: mobile... DAILY VIDEO: Windows 10 Cloud leak points to potential Chrome OS fighter; TiVo's analytics pinpoint... DAILY VIDEO: Google drops hands free mobile payment app; Microsoft Outlook on iOS welcomes Evernote... DAILY VIDEO: Snap Inc. makes it official, will go public next month; Microsoft sharpens Edge browser... DAILY VIDEO: Japan's supreme court backs Google in'right to be forgotten' case; HPE acquires... DAILY VIDEO: Flock adds "fake news" detector to collaboration platform; Google upgrades security... Dell's latest Intel-based PowerEdge servers bring new levels of operational efficiency and... The Dell PowerEdge R630 is a mainstream 2S/1U rack server that delivers incredible density across a... With the introduction of the Dell PowerEdge FM 120x4, Dell and Intel are bringing to market a server... The Dell PowerEdge R730xd, also based on Intel Xeon processors, is one of the world's densest...

Gamalon Inc, emerged from stealth mode this week, announced two machine learning products, based on an in-house technology known as Bayesian Program Synthesis (BPS). The company claims BPS can perform machine learning tasks 100 times faster than conventional deep learning techniques, while providing more accurate results. "We call our way of doing this Bayesian program learning," said Gamalon founder and CEO, Ben Vigoda at a recent TED talk. He believes using Bayesian probabilistic modeling is a much more efficient way, that is, a much less computationally intensive way, to infuse intelligence into machines. Unlike deep learning, which often needs millions of data examples to train a neural network, a Bayesian model can be built with much fewer examples.

A toddler meanders unsteadily through the living room, pausing by a sleek black cylinder in the corner. "Alexa," he says in a high-pitched voice. The cylinder acknowledges the request, despite the muffled pronunciation, and the music starts. Alexa, a cloud-based speech recognition software from Amazon and the brain of its black cylindrical loudspeaker Echo, has been a big hit around the world – except for the younger ones, who take it for granted. Children will grow up alongside it, just as Alexa will evolve, as the AI powering it learns to answer more and more questions, and – perhaps – one day even converses freely with people.

With the evolution of the united payments interface, India's leading HDFC Bank's Aditya Puri, is critical of the future of digital wallets like Paytm and their promise of offering interest rates to consumers on savings post the launch of payment banks. Paytm is expected to launch its Paytm Bank next week. Sharply criticising the Paytm model, the Managing Director of country's second-biggest private lender, said any model that is based on not making money is not viable in the long run. Puri told Entrepreneur that just being a wallet is not going to be viable, and that wallets will have to create a bigger universe."Wallets Now when banks have wallets, why would users use external wallets," asks Puri.

In a new resolution, members of the European Parliament have proposed EU Commission rules governing robotics and artificial intelligence. The proposed rules will focus on issues of liability, the impact of robots on the workforce, a code of ethical conduct for developers, and the establishment of a European Agency for robotics and artificial intelligence. Liability issues are of growing concern, with MEPs pointing specifically to issues surrounding the growing market in self-driving cars. They have called for mandatory insurance and a supplementary fund to ensure compensation for victims of accidents involving autonomous vehicles. In the resolution, MEPs also stated a concern that the growing adoption of robots in the workforce could cause labor market disruption and proposed a'robot tax' on companies adopting robots to replace human workers.

Americans born in the United States are more murderous than undocumented immigrants. After all, that's just what the numbers say. Still, be honest: you wouldn't linger over a story with that headline. Instead, you'll see two dozen reporters flock to a single burning trash can during an Inauguration protest. The aberrant occurrence is the story you'll read and the picture you'll see.

SpaceX began testing its Falcon 9 rocket a few days ago, ahead of the Saturday morning launch that will send an unmanned Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) on a resupply mission. And despite minor glitches that have occurred since the first static test-fire Sunday, the commercial launch for NASA is scheduled to go ahead at its planned time of 10:01 a.m. EST from the historic launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Saturday's mission will be SpaceX's tenth cargo mission to the ISS for NASA, and both the Elon Musk company and the space agency seem excited about. The small problems that cropped up with the Falcon 9 -- a small leak in the upper stage of the rocket -- seem to be all fixed, as Musk pointed out. The Dragon cargo spacecraft will carry about 5,500 pounds of supplies, equipment and scientific experiments to the ISS, which it will take two days to reach.

With the rapid advancement of information discovery techniques, machine learning and data mining continue to play a significant role in cybersecurity. Although several conferences, workshops, and journals focus on the fragmented research topics in this area, there has been no single interdisciplinary resource on past and current works and possible paths for future research in this area. This book fills this need. From basic concepts in machine learning and data mining to advanced problems in the machine learning domain, Data Mining and Machine Learning in Cybersecurity provides a unified reference for specific machine learning solutions to cybersecurity problems. It supplies a foundation in cybersecurity fundamentals and surveys contemporary challenges--detailing cutting-edge machine learning and data mining techniques.