While AI and machine learning are buzzwords, Symantec's Nick Savvides said, during this year's AusCERT conference they have been a big deal in computing circles since the 1950s. But it was in the 1980s when AI came into mainstream thinking a culture. It was movies like War Games and The Terminator, and TV shows like Knight Rider that took this important technology and moved it into mainstream consciousness. Savvides pointed to KITT, the automotive star of Knight Rider, as an example of what AI might one day deliver. "It had the ability to perceive, to provide constant analysis and make decisions," said Savvides.

This piece was originally published at Scout.ai. "This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

Minority report: An exchange Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press underscores why one option that had been batted around--staying in the deal while explicitly softening the U.S. commitment--was rejected in the internal administration debate. Pruitt argued the wording of the deal only allows nations to make their emissions targets more aggressive, not scale them back. However, this view is not widely held among experts. For instance, E&E News noted Friday that "the vast majority of international legal experts say they can be rescinded and lowered at will." Finessing Trump: Pruitt, joining several other administration officials, declined to say whether President Trump still believes human-induced global warming is a "hoax." Pruitt noted only that Trump has "indicated the climate changes," but declined to address the scientific consensus that human activities are the main driver of the warming trend.

"The year 2017 has arrived and we humans are still in charge. That reassuring proclamation came from a New Year's editorial in the Chicago Tribune. If you haven't been paying attention to the news about artificial intelligence, and particularly its newest iteration called deep learning, then it's probably time you started. This technology is poised to completely revolutionize just about everything in our lives. Experts say Canadian workers could be in for some major upheaval over the next decade as increasingly intelligent software, robotics and artificial intelligence perform more sophisticated tasks in the economy. Today, machines are able to "think" more like humans than most of us, even the scientists who study it, ever imagined. They are moving into our workplaces, homes, cars, hospitals and schools, and they are making decisions for us. Artificial intelligence has enormous potential for good. But its galloping development has also given rise to fears of massive economic ...

USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham gives a sneak peek at what to look for at Apple's 2017 Worldwide Developers Conference as the iPhone turns 10 years old, Apple doesn't have a voice-activated speaker like Amazon Echo's--yet. But it does have wireless Bluetooth speakers from its Beats by Dr. Dre unit. Siri may soon have a say in the future of smart speakers. Amazon's sleeper hit Echo and its challenger Google Home have claimed spots on countertops and nightstands across America. And that poses a competitive threat to Apple.

Anyone who's ever looked into retirement planning must have pondered the two basic questions: at what age does one want to retire and how does one estimate her life expectancy? A few decades ago, there was nothing daunting about those questions. There'd be no reason to doubt the life expectancy statistics or consider possible variations of the retirement age, which was all but assured somewhere around 60-65. Average life expectancy heading for 100, read a sensationalist newspaper headline from 2015. But how sensational was it really, when Scientific American declared a few months ago that "aging is reversible," citing successful lab experiments on mice?

More precisely this papers concerns (snip): evolvable networks of probabilistic and deterministic logic gates, known as Markov Brains [... and] that Markov Brains can evolve to incorporate these feedback gates to improve their adaptability to variable environment.'. This combination provides a computational model the authors prove suitable for studying the evolution of learning.

There is no denying the fact that Artificial Intelligence is the breakthrough technology of recent times. The machines have come a long way from assisting humans in mechanical operations to performing smarter tasks using cognitive intelligence. Every day, we are coming across interesting applications of AI. The ability of Deep Learning algorithms to learn and predict efficiently has opened the doors of possibilities. Nowadays, AI is impacting many other areas as well. In this blog post, we will discuss some niche applications of AI.

Those who mistakenly thought 2016 was an anomaly, a series of unprecedented events, should have few remaining doubts. Marine Le Pen may have stuttered but still picked up almost 11 million votes. Her opponent, the "normal" candidate, was leader of a party only one year old. The ongoing terror attacks, fake news panic, Trump's tweets and James Comey: last year never really ended, it just carried straight on into this one. After decades of exaggerated prediction, the internet is finally transforming politics, but not in the way the digital prophets expected. The 90s, you may recall, were awash with optimism about our online future: limitless information and total connection would make us more informed, less bigoted and kinder citizens. But the internet is an overwhelming mess of competing facts, claims, blogs, data, propaganda, misinformation, investigative journalism, charts, different charts, commentary and reportage.

Who's going to be the next Mobileye? Computer vision is a hot topic for the tech industry, and especially in Israel. It seems like Israeli entrepreneurs are one step ahead when it comes to developing computer vision technology. That's why we're excited to announce that three computer vision experts are going to join us on stage to share their knowledge about this space. First up, Inon Beracha has become a well-known name in Israel.