The Cambridge Centre for Risk Studies in collaboration with the United Nations programme on Journalism and Public Information (UNICRI) present a workshop on the Risks and Benefits of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. From sensing, finance, medicine, transportation and security, a technological revolution is taking place. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a feature of science fiction for almost a century, but it is only in more recent years that the prospect of autonomous robotics and artificially intelligent systems has really become viable. While this will potentially provide great opportunities, these developments are likely to have significant impacts upon the very functioning of society, posing practical, ethical, legal and security challenges – much of which is as of yet not fully appreciated or understood. The media and other sources of public information are central in ensuring that citizens and institutions have a realistic and balanced understanding of such technologies.

The year 2016 was supposed to be when the tech bubble finally burst. Instead the world blew up. Amid Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and the increasingly catastrophic consequences of climate change, the dominance of a handful of technology companies over society became increasingly obvious – from Facebook's troubling impact on democracy to Elon Musk's plan to colonize a new planet before we destroy this one. Still, if there's one thing we can learn from this year in technology, it's that no matter how bad things get, someone in Silicon Valley will make money off it. The social network continued its relentless campaign to swallow the internet whole, racking up almost $6bn in profit in the first three quarters of the year and soaring to 1.79 billion monthly active users.

Beijing has returned a U.S. underwater drone seized last week in the South China Sea by a Chinese Navy vessel after "friendly" talks between the two countries, China's Defense Ministry said in a short statement posted to its website Tuesday. "After friendly consultations between the Chinese and U.S. sides, the handover work for the U.S. underwater drone was smoothly completed in relevant waters in the South China Sea at midday on Dec. 20," the statement said. The Pentagon confirmed the handover, but criticized the Chinese Navy over the move. "The incident was inconsistent with both international law and standards of professionalism for conduct between navies at sea," Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement. "The U.S. has addressed those facts with the Chinese through appropriate military channels, and have called on Chinese authorities to comply with their obligations under international law."

Since cyberattacks on hospital EHR systems have become a topic of nightly newscasts, no longer is anyone shocked by their scope and veracity. What is shocking is the financial damage the attacks are predicted to cause. During this past June, more than 11 million patient EHRs were breached, making it the year's worst incident according to a study by DataBreaches.net For comparison, May had less than 700,000 records breached, and records breached in March topped out at slightly more than 2.5 million. While traditional security filters like firewalls and reputation lists are good practice, they are no longer enough.

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon says China has returned the unmanned underwater drone the Chinese Navy seized last week. In a statement issued late Monday, Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook says the Chinese Navy vessel that had seized the drone returned it near the location where it had been taken. The incident occurred in the South China Sea near the Philippines. Cook says the U.S. will continue to investigate the incident. Earlier Monday he had said U.S. and Chinese officials, including military leaders, were working out logistical details for the return.

The Reinventing Energy Summit, hosted by New Scientist and Re.Work, occurred on November 25th in London, UK. Good Faith Energy president and founder, Mohammed Abdalla, was in attendance at the conference to gain insights on the future of renewable energy and new technologies. The event's goal was to together energy thought-leaders, policy experts, innovative startups, utility companies, and world-class academics, to explore the advancement of technologies impacting renewable energy. A record £15.2bn was invested in UK clean energy in 2015. Favorable incentives and subsidies have led to this enormous growth.

Facebook Inc is working on automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams, building on a growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, said Joaquin Candela, the company's director of applied machine learning. The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site. Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company "community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company. Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material.

Since the earliest days of the Internet, most government agencies have eagerly explored how to use technology to better deliver services to citizens, businesses and other public-sector organizations. Early on, observers recognized that these efforts often varied widely in their implementation, and so researchers developed various frameworks to describe the different stages of growth and development of e-government. While each model is different, they all identify the same general progression from the informational, for example websites that make government facts available online, to the interactive, such as two-way communication between government officials and users, to the transactional, like applications that allow users to access government services completely online. However, we will soon see a new stage of e-government: the perceptive. The defining feature of the perceptive stage will be that the work involved in interacting with government will be significantly reduced and automated for all parties involved.

BlackBerry has announced the opening of its $100 million innovation centre aimed at developing software for autonomous and connected vehicles, a move that will also see the company more than double staff at its Ottawa, Ontario headquarters where the centre is located. The BlackBerry QNX Autonomous Vehicle Innovation Centre, launched on Monday by BlackBerry CEO John Chen and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is part of the company's strategy to make itself a player in the autonomous vehicles industry before it gains mainstream appeal. The 5 biggest tech trends of 2016: ZDNet editors sound off Five ways to make your digital strategy a success in 2017 Inside Amazon's clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI Inside Amazon's clickworker platform: How half a million people are being paid pennies to train AI "50 percent of all cars will connect to the cloud by 2020 ... in the coming hyper-connected world, cars will soon carry one of the highest concentrations of Internet of Things edge nodes and sensors, generating a vast amount of valuable and actionable data," the company said in an announcement. "Anticipating this shift, BlackBerry is investing in key technologies and building a product portfolio that will provide the embedded intelligence that powers the core electronics of connected and autonomous cars." As part of the initiative, BlackBerry QNX will be recruiting local software engineers to work on ongoing and emerging engineering projects for autonomous and connected vehicles both independently and in partnership with public and private sector organisations.

Montreal is one of the pioneers in Deep Learning thanks to the work of computer and cognitive scientists like Yoshua Bengio from Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, which is hosted at Université de Montréal. They're spearheading research on neural networks, amongst other things, which is highly effective in recognizing complex patterns like vision and speech. Founded by Jean-François Gagné and Yoshua Bengio, Element AI is an amazing A.I. incubation initiative that brings research and business together to create the most cutting edge services to disrupt industries. They are shortening the time it takes for new technologies and research to be integrated with great products and companies. This lab is pioneering in some amazing research on deep learning and the next generation of A.I. technology. Ivado is the multidisciplinary hub for a massive network of scientists researching statistics, business intelligence, deep learning, applied mathematics, data-mining and cybersecurity.