Passengers embark on the U.S. side of the last hand-pulled ferry at Los Ebanos, Texas on the Mexico-U.S. border in 2008. LOS EBANOS, Texas -- All along the winding Rio Grande, the people who live in this bustling, fertile region where the U.S. border meets the Gulf of Mexico never quite understood how Donald Trump's great wall could ever be much more than campaign rhetoric. Erecting a concrete barrier across the entire 1,954-mile frontier with Mexico, they know, collides head-on with multiple realities: the geology of the river valley, fierce local resistance and the immense cost. An electronically fortified "virtual wall" with surveillance technology that includes night-and-day video cameras, tethered observation balloons and high-flying drones makes a lot more sense to people here. If a 30- to 40-foot concrete wall is a panacea for illegal immigration, as Trump insisted during the campaign, the locals are not convinced.

AI is expected to bring massive shifts in how people perceive and interact with technology, with machines performing a wider range of tasks, in many cases doing a better job than humans. That's the finding of a new report from Tractica which also outlines what the authors say will be the top tend trends in AI implementations next year. The report's authors say, the majority of use cases they studied take existing processes like predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, algorithmic trading, customer service, search engine queries, or cybersecurity threat detection and apply machine learning techniques or other AI techniques that can adapt rules and provide better results than previous static rule techniques. "At the same time, AI is also enabling new capabilities like image classification or natural language understanding, which are being plugged into photo storage solutions, or into virtual digital assistants (VDAs). The majority of the new capabilities around vision and language are new, and are being offered as incremental improvements to consumer products and services using a freemium model, rather than creating new disruptive business models."

Google has agreed a five-year deal with one of the largest NHS trusts to handle the medical records of up to 1.6million people. The tech giant's secretive DeepMind health business will use the data to help develop a mobile app they claim could save 10,000 lives a year. In 2017 it will launch a warning system for acute kidney problems and blood poisoning at three London hospitals, although its'Streams' app will also include test results, medical history and an instant messaging service. But it is hugely controversial because the Royal Free London NHS Trust has agreed that DeepMind needs to be given all patient data to make it work. This is believed to include patients' names, ages, and complete medical histories, including whether they had been diagnosed with HIV, depression, suffered from drug or alcohol addiction, or had an abortion.

Google's DeepMind has announced a five-year agreement with a UK National Health Service (NHS) trust that will give it access to patient data to develop and deploy its healthcare app, Streams. The new partnership follows an earlier agreement, the details of which New Scientist first revealed in April, which generated concerns over the amount and nature of data made available to DeepMind. The Streams app is designed to deliver an alert about a patient's condition to a doctor's or nurse's cellphone in a similar way to getting a news notification. It will initially be used from 2017 to spot people at risk of kidney problems, but is due to be expanded over the five years to include other functions such as detecting blood poisoning and coordinating patient treatment. DeepMind is working on the project with the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust, which oversees Barnet, Chase Farm and Royal Free hospitals.

Would you trust an artificial intelligence to fly an armed combat jet? Software called ALPHA is being used to fly uncrewed jets in simulations and could one day help pilots in real-world missions. ALPHA's developers claim, that unlike many AI systems, its behaviour can be verified at each step, meaning it won't act unpredictably. ALPHA was developed by Psibernetix in Ohio as a training aid for the US air force. It was originally designed to fly aircraft in a virtual air combat simulator, but has now been turned into a friendly co-pilot system that can help human pilots using the simulator.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) and Carnegie Mellon University held the first part of the two-part joint Carnegie Colloquium on Digital Governance and Security in Washington D.C. on Oct. 31. The first part of the colloquium was titled "The Rise of Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Military Operations and Privacy," and the second part, titled "The Future of the Internet: Governance and Conflict," will be held this year in Pittsburgh on Dec. 2. CEIP is a series of foreign policy-based research centers located in Russia, China, Europe, the Middle East, India, and the United States, with headquarters in Washington D.C., that collects itself under the phrase, "The Global Think Tank." It was established in 1960 by Andrew Carnegie and, according to a report by the University of Pennsylvania, is the third most influential think tank in the world. The colloquium, held for the benefit of both Carnegie Mellon and the CEIP, aimed to allow for communication between the academics at Carnegie Mellon and the foreign policy and ethics experts from all the CEIP stations across the world to discuss the implication of artificial intelligence on foreign policy and the challenges posed by it. The second part of the colloquium will focus on cyber-security norms and internet governance. "Designing safe software systems and attempting to create the learning abilities of the human brain are natural progressions towards the two of the modern world's most pressing concerns -- cyber security and privacy," said President Subra Suresh, in the welcome address.

Google and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust have announced a fresh five-year collaboration today, which will see the former's DeepMind AI used to improve patient care across the trust's various hospital sites. The partnership will focus on Streams, a mobile app the pair have been working on since late last year that's been approved as a medical device by the UK's health regulator. DeepMind will analyse blood test results as they come in and flag when patients might be at risk of acute kidney injury, proactively alerting carers through the Streams app. It'll go live across the trust in early 2017, and there are plans to expand the blood analysis to look for signs of sepsis and other causes of organ failure. The pair hope to add messaging and task management features over the course of the collaboration too, and Streams is said to be built on open standards that will allow other developers to easily add new services.

Cognitive systems - in the form of ANN is a technology that High-Tech Bridge is particularly familiar with, because the company's ImmuniWeb web security testing platform is based on machine learning technology. High-Tech Bridge uses artificial neural networks (ANN) and advanced human augmentation to implement intelligent automation of vulnerability scanning, but each scenario needs careful preparation, and unsupervised ANN is not on the menu, as Kolochenko explained: "We continuously aggregate knowledge and skills of humans to feed into the ANN. You have to teach the network to make the decisions. Our intelligence needs to be very specific, so we use supervised learning."

Small drones are already effective weapons for urban warfare--when armed with miniature warheads, these stealthy spies can turn into lethal assassins. So far their biggest limitation is battery life, but Boeing's patent for a drone battle station sets out to overcome that. The aerospace giant's'Vehicle Base Station' resembles Amazon's proposed recharging stations on street lights, but with a different mission. John Vian, a research fellow at Boeing, says the station's main applications are likely to be civil and commercial--used for firefighting and search-and-rescue, for example--but the patent has a decidedly military slant. "The unmanned aerial vehicles may monitor for undesired activity… [which] may be the placement of an improvised explosive device in roadway."

And in the next few years, it will transform every industry. Soon, self-driving cars will reduce congestion and improve road safety. AI travel agents will know your preferences and arrange every detail of your family vacation. And medical instruments will read and understand patient DNA to detect and treat early signs of cancer. Where engines made us stronger and powered the first industrial revolution, AI will make us smarter and power the next. What will make this intelligent industrial revolution possible? A new computing model -- GPU deep learning -- that enables computers to learn from data and write software that is too complex for people to code. 3. NVIDIA -- INVENTOR OF THE GPU The GPU has proven to be unbelievably effective at solving some of the most complex problems in computer science.