Amazon and Google really do want to watch your every move. A series of patents filed by the firms'outline an array of possibilities' for how their smart speakers could be used to better listen in on users. They suggest their always-on Google Home and Amazon Echo devices could know everything from a user's mood to their medical condition, and target advertising based on this data. The development comes amid a growing scandal involving the handling of the private data of 50 million users by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Google has filed a patent application for a system that used its smart speakers and camera to spy on a user's mood or medical condition.

Rufus Thompson, left, is accused of kidnapping and murdering Danny Diaz-Delgado near Trenton, N.J. last month. A New Jersey man has been arrested and accused of kidnapping and murdering a man trying to buy a PlayStation video game console that was advertised online, according to multiple reports. Rufus Thompson, 29, was arrested Saturday morning in Trenton. He is charged with murder, felony murder, robbery, kidnapping and weapons offenses in the death of 20-year-old Danny Diaz-Delgado. The Trentonian reported that Diaz-Delgado's body was found March 24 near the banks of Assunpink Creek in Hamilton Township.

This year, for the first time, the Manhattan, Kan.-based company tapped an artificial-intelligence tool called Xander to analyze responses. Xander can determine whether an employee feels optimistic, confused or angry, and provide insights to help manage teams, the tool's developers at Ultimate Software Group Inc. ULTI 2.55% said. From a block of text, the software analyzes answers to open-ended questions based on language and other data, assigning attitudes or opinions to employees. One top executive at SPS learned from recent survey analysis that he needed to work on his temper. "One of my lowest scoring items was maintaining my composure under stress," he said of the feedback from his direct reports.

Last week, the White House announced plans to levy tariffs on up to $60 billion of Chinese imports. The primary, and legal, rationale hinges on the little-used Section 301 of a 1974 trade law that permits retaliation against countries that infringe US intellectual-property rights. Determined to halt what it perceives as a steady decline relative to an emergent China, the Trump administration and not a few voices in Congress are embracing a tough-on-China approach that they believe will at long last reassert American primacy. It will not; the strategy and the tactics of this trade war are a classic case of fighting not just the last war but fighting it on the adversary's terrain. Zachary Karabell is head of Global Strategies Envestnet and the president of River Twice Research.

Two major UK-based law firms, Allen & Overy (A&O) and Addleshaw Goddard (AG), have both announced new career paths to help them to adapt to legal tech's impact. Both initiatives are a clear indication of the growing importance of legal technology, in terms of showing the need for law firms to have the right skillsets internally and that legal tech capabilities have moved far beyond'operational' needs of just'keeping the lights on' and have now moved front and centre in terms of strategic growth planning for law firms. Machine learning/NLP tools are clearly part of this movement given that they can help in the direct production of legal work, such as via review, but legal tech's impact also includes a whole new wave of technology that connects to risk and compliance analysis, litigation prediction, contracting automation tools, smart contract and blockchain technology, and a range of incremental changes to more well-developed tech such as DMSs and collaboration platforms. In short, there is now so much new legal technology having an impact on how lawyers operate on a day to day basis and most importantly how they actually produce work that the more forward thinking firms are adapting their recruitment and career paths to meet these needs. This is all the more important when one considers that the clients are becoming increasingly savvy to the benefits of this'new means of production', leaving law firms that want to retain market position little option other than to adapt, while this market change is also offering early adopters the chance to compete more effectively against rivals in the legal market.

A team of computer scientists and a lawyer at University of Washington are raising a curious question: Do current US laws cover cutting-edge research that allows people to bend AI to their will? The research, called adversarial machine learning, takes advantage of the way AI looks at the world, tricking the algorithm to make a different decision than it was designed to make. For example, an attacker might trick AI into perceiving a stop sign as a speed limit sign, or poison an automated credit-rating system in order to get a cheaper loan. The issue could affect every tech company using AI today: If this kind of intervention constitutes hacking, are companies now legally required to protect their systems from adversarial machine learning as they do typical hacking? And if this is not hacking under the legal definition, who's responsible if an attacker crashes someone else's car by tricking its AI?

The US Patent and Trademark Office has published an Apple patent application that details a pretty neat VR system. Spotted by Patently Apple, it's meant to be used in vehicles -- including self-driving vehicles -- and Apple pitches it as a way to mitigate motion sickness. But the company also describes a lot of other interesting applications, many of which could be used to turn a standard ride in an autonomous car into a business meeting, a concert or an exciting, zombie-filled adventure. The application says that the system could include a VR headset or a projector that would display the images on interior walls of the vehicle. In regards to motion sickness, the system could include a variety of sensors that could monitor the passenger and determine when they might start feeling ill.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the exceptional capacity to at the same time flabbergast, excite, abandon us wheezing and scare. The potential outcomes of AI are multitudinous and they effortlessly outperform our most aesthetically fruitful creative energies. What all we read in sci-fi books or found in motion pictures like'The Matrix' could some time or another emerge into reality. Bill Gates, the originator of Microsoft, as of late said that'AI can be our companion' and is useful for the general public. From basic leadership to registering to mechanical technology to vehicles and even makeup, AI has left its stamp all over the place and it will introduce the most stupendous social building test ever.

Let's make one thing clear: one year isn't going to fix decades of gender discrimination in computer science and all the problems associated with it. Recent diversity reports show that women still make up only 20 percent of engineers at Google and Facebook, and an even lower proportion at Uber. But after the parade of awful news about the treatment of female engineers in 2017--sexual harassment in Silicon Valley and a Google engineer sending out a memo to his coworkers arguing that women are biologically less adept at programming, just to name a couple--there is actually reason to believe that things are looking up for 2018, especially when it comes to AI. At first glance, AI would seem among least likely areas of programming to be friendly to women. Writing in Fast Company recently, Hanna Wallach, an AI researcher and cofounder of the Women in Machine Learning Conference, said that only 13.5 percent of those working in machine learning are female.

A self-driving car operated by Uber struck and killed a woman last Sunday in Tempe, Ariz. Few details have emerged, but it's reportedly the first fatality involving a self-driving vehicle. In January, a Pittsburgh car crash sent two people to the hospital; the accident involved a self-driving Fusion from Ford-backed Argo AI. The sedan was hit by a truck that ran a red light, and at the last second, the human back-up driver reportedly switched the car out of autonomous mode and took control of the Fusion's wheel. Could these crashes have been avoided?