In his many years as an artificial intelligence researcher, Eric Horvitz has worked on everything from systems that help determine what's funny or surprising to those that know when to help us remember what we need to do at work. On Wednesday, Horvitz, a technical fellow and managing director of Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, research lab, received the ACM – AAAI Allen Newell Award for groundbreaking contributions in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. The award honors Horvitz's substantial theoretical efforts and as well as his persistent focus on using those discoveries as the basis for practical applications that make our lives easier and more productive. Harry Shum, the executive vice president of Microsoft's technology and research group, said Horvitz epitomizes a style of research that is unique to places like Microsoft because it is focused on having an impact in both the research and industry domains. "People talk about basic research and applied research. What we are doing here is Microsoft research," Shum said.

Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to land an unmanned spacecraft on Mars as soon as 2018 with the help of NASA, an extraordinary collaboration between the public and private sector in an effort to eventually get humans to the Red Planet. SpaceX made the announcement on Twitter Wednesday, laying out an ambitious timeline for an incredibly difficult mission that only governments have dared try. Landing a spacecraft or a robot that can then operate successfully on the Martian surface is so difficult that the U.S. is the only country to have done it, and many attempts over the years have failed. Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come pic.twitter.com/u4nbVUNCpA

A recurring claim at security conferences is that'security is a big data / machine learning (ML) / artificial intelligence (AI) problem'. This is unfortunately wildly optimistic, and wrong in general. While certain security problems can be addressed by ML/AI algorithms, in general the problem of detecting a malicious actor amidst the vast trove of information collected by most organisations, is not one of them. Our faith in AI is based on personal experience ('everything cloud is big data and good') and the memes of the consumerisation era. It is tempting to project this optimism into an enterprise context: the idea that it ought to be possible to sift through large amounts of data to find signs of an attack of breach is intuitively reasonable.

A panel comprised of government tech leaders and healthcare experts is set to scrutinise the work of Google DeepMind's healthcare team at an upcoming meeting, which could be held within the next month. DeepMind, a British AI startup acquired by Google in 2014 for 400 million, is processing NHS data through a new division called DeepMind Health. The London-based AI lab says its technology has the potential to improve the way patients are diagnosed and treated but it acknowledges that working in healthcare requires regular and independent oversight. As a result, it set up a reviewer board for DeepMind Health when it launched the unit in February. DeepMind states on its website that the board will meet four times a year but Business Insider understands that an official meeting between the nine individuals on the board is yet to take place.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

If you want a journalistic recounting of Edward Snowden's paradigm-altering PRISM leak, you should definitely check out last year's documentary, Citizenfour. If you want Oliver Stone's more, er, colorful version, here is a trailer for Snowden. It's always hard to dramatize what often amounts to a lot of very fast typing, and based on this brief look, Snowden hasn't discovered a non-awkward way to do so. And there's clearly a heaping helping of artistic license at play; as entertaining as the trailer's Rubik's Cube caper seems to be, Snowden (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, taking his voice down a register here) snuck his secrets out on a boring ol' thumb drive. Fortunately, the real story is packed with enough drama that Stone should have plenty of chances to hew close to it after all.

BRUSSELS--Getty Images Inc., the world's largest photo agency, said Wednesday it has lodged an official complaint with the European Union's antitrust watchdog over Alphabet Inc.'s Google, accusing the U.S. technology giant of abusing its dominance in search to display copied images without compensation. The fresh complaint comes after the European Commission filed a new set of formal charges against Google last week for abusing its dominance with its Android mobile operating system to protect its search engine.

Every time 3-year-old Seif wears his new prosthetic legs, the toddler puts up a fight. He has already made peace with walking on his stumps, but there is no dodging his daily rehabilitation session at a prosthetic clinic in southern Turkey. In a small clinic in the dusty border town of Reyhanli, dozens of wounded Syrians stream per month come to be fitted with prosthetic limbs, their best shot at restoring a semblance of a normal life. Treatment at the clinic is free and only for Syrian civilians and fighters who have lost body parts in the Syrian conflict. Workers at the clinic manufacture prosthetic body parts while patients are in therapy.

The European Space Agency's plans to build a village on the moon are part of a much wider scheme to explore the far-flung regions of our solar system. Speaking at a recent conference, Esa boss Jan Woerner said: 'I think we should go first to the moon and then further on.' He added that Mars should not be our ultimate goal and said he is'quite sure humans will go further.' The European Space Agency's plans to build a village on the moon (concept pictured) are part of a much wider scheme to explore the far-flung regions of our solar system. Speaking at a recent conference, Esa boss Jan Woerner said: 'I think we should go first to the moon and then further on' Woerner said the project could allow exploration of the far side of the moon.

Austin-based SparkCognition, a startup applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to the cybersecurity market, has raised 6M in a Series B funding round. The funding came from CME Ventures, Verizon Ventures, The Entrepreneurs' Fund (TEF), and Alameda Ventures. The startup--led by Amir Husain--said the Series B was oversusbcribed. SparkCognition says it has developed machine learning technology which it is applying to both Internet-of-Things (IoT) and cyber security, to automatically detect and identify attacks in IoT infrastructure.