Just coming off a great week at Web Summit and Techonomy, where Artificial Intelligence was one of the major topics of discussion and debate. Tonight, I'm excited to kick off and host our 7th annual CIO and Innovation Forum, and we will have a variety of top leaders speaking on AI and related topics. Advances in AI continue to power forward at an unprecedented pace as businesses and organizations reimagine their futures. At Accenture we believe that AI is the most disruptive technology since the industrial revolution and holds vast potential to help people do things differently and do different things. We're just beginning to understand the potential of AI technologies like computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, knowledge representation, expert systems, biometrics and video analytics to drive once unimaginable change.

For all the finger-pointing at fake news on Facebook, voter turnout at a 20-year low, and angry American balloters, Donald Trump was elected US president for the same reason as Bill Clinton in 1992: He talked about jobs a lot more than his opponent. Back then, Clinton only won his party's nomination because none of its leaders relished a run against George H. W. Bush's 89% approval rating. But, the 1990-91 recession eventually caught up with Bush. It had a severe impact on US jobs and Bush was perceived by voters as being blasé about it, while Clinton made it the center of his campaign. "It's the economy, stupid" was famously coined during that election cycle by Clinton campaign strategist James Carville.

Of the vast wealth of information unlocked by the Internet, most is plain text. The data necessary to answer myriad questions--about, say, the correlations between the industrial use of certain chemicals and incidents of disease, or between patterns of news coverage and voter-poll results--may all be online. But extracting it from plain text and organizing it for quantitative analysis may be prohibitively time consuming. Information extraction--or automatically classifying data items stored as plain text--is thus a major topic of artificial-intelligence research. Last week, at the Association for Computational Linguistics' Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing, researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory won a best-paper award for a new approach to information extraction that turns conventional machine learning on its head.

MOSUL, Iraq--Clashes between advancing Iraqi forces and ISIS militants in Mosul's Intisar and Aden neighborhoods continued on Sunday as the troops carried out a house-to-house search for remaining militants and explosives in liberated quarters. Nobody noticed the heist at the time, but they were caught – after the event. Myerson reckons intelligent agents could have prevented it happening in the first place. Glesni Holland reports from World of Watson 2016 in Las Vegas, where IBM executives unveiled the latest innovations in cognitive computing and demonstrated the impact that Watson can have – and is already having – on some of the world's most important industries. Following the successful launch of Elder Scroll 5: Skyrim Special Edition a few weeks ago, fans are too eager to stop speculating about what to expect from the upcoming game, The Elder Scroll 6.

There are many good reasons why traditional security practices are becoming less effective at protecting against cyberattacks. There is too much security-related data flooding the network from an increasing number of users and devices. There is a lack of skilled personnel to watch over and analyze this data. And the security staff you have likely wastes too much time chasing down false positives. Valuable minutes -- or even hours -- can tick by before analysts and incident responders are aware of a threat.

For millennia, we surpassed the other intelligent species with which we share our planet--dolphins, porpoises, orangutans, and the like--in almost all skills, bar swimming and tree-climbing. In recent years, though, our species has created new forms of intelligence, able to outperform us in other ways. One of the most famous of these artificial intelligences (AIs) is AlphaGo, developed by Deepmind. In just a few years, it has learned to play the 4,000-year-old strategy game, Go, beating two of the world's strongest players. Other software developed by Deepmind has learned to play classic eight-bit video games, notably Breakout, in which players must use a bat to hit a ball at a wall, knocking bricks out of it.

This is the text version of a talk I gave on November 11, 2016, at the Direction conference in Sydney. When John Allsopp invited me here, I told him how excited I was discuss a topic that's been heavy on my mind: accountability in automated systems. But then John explained that in order for the economics to work, and for it to make sense to fly me to Australia, there needed to actually be an audience. Let's start with the most obvious answer--the military. This is the Predator, the forerunner of today's aerial drones. Those things under its wing are Hellfire missiles. These two weapons are the chocolate and peanut butter of robot warfare. In 2001, CIA agents got tired of looking at Osama Bin Laden through the camera of a surveillance drone, and figured out they could strap some missiles to the thing. And now we can't build these things fast enough. We're now several generations in to this technology, and soldiers now have smaller, portable UAVs they can throw like a paper airplane. You launch them in the field, and they buzz around and give you a safe way to do reconaissance. There are also portable UAVs with explosives in their nose, so you can fire them out of a tube and then direct them against a target--a group of soldiers, an orphanage, or a bunker–and make them perform a kamikaze attack. The Army has been developing unmanned vehicles that work on land, little tanks that roll around with a gun on top, with a wire attached for control, like the cheap remote-controlled toys you used to get at Christmas. Here you see a demo of a valiant robot dragging a wounded soldier to safety. The Russians have their own versions of these things, of course. I imagine it asking you who you are in a heavy Slavic accent before firing its many weapons into your fleeing body. Not all these robots are intended as weapons. The Army is trying to automate transportation, sometimes in weird-looking ways like this robotic dog monster.

A consortium of experts last week issued an updated Roadmap For Robotics report. The first Roadmap report was issued in 2009 and led to the Obama administration to set up the National Robotics Initiative in 2011, which allocated $70 million to research for robotics. Weighing in at over 100 pages, the report is full of guidelines and recommendations that experts believe require funding and attention from Congress moving forward, as well as providing policymakers enough information to more accurately determine optimal allocation of resources. Since the first report (and a 2013 revision) drones, driverless cars, and all sorts of assistive robots have taken centre stage due to their accelerating development. Integrating these systems into daily life is seen as one of the primary goals, and to that end, the importance of STEM education is highlighted.

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY: China Used Crispr to Fight Cancer in a Real, Live Human Megan Molteni Wired "The FDA, for better and for worse, is a historically cautious gatekeeper, unconcerned with international spitting contests. Clinical trials cost millions, and last for years. But George Church, Harvard University geneticist and co-founder of Editas Medicine believes it's a necessary step to ensure new technologies like Crispr-based gene therapies really work. Even when they hold you up from making history." VIRTUAL REALITY: I Hung out With My Past Self in Virtual Reality Ben Popper The Verge "I met the crew from AltspaceVR inside a virtual space station. We chatted briefly, moving around the room...Then I moved off to the side, and watched as my avatar reappeared at our starting location...I watched as beta-Ben repeated the last five minutes of my life."

General Electric builds jet engines and wind turbines and medical gear. But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It's fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.