A startup bankrolled by Bill Gates is about to conduct the first public trials of high-speed body scanners powered by artificial intelligence (AI), the Guardian can reveal. According to documents filed with the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Boston-based Evolv Technology is planning to test its system at Union Station in Washington DC, in Los Angeles's Union Station metro and at Denver international airport. Evolv uses the same millimetre-wave radio frequencies as the controversial, and painfully slow, body scanners now found at many airport security checkpoints. However, the new device can complete its scan in a fraction of second, using computer vision and machine learning to spot guns and bombs. Homeland Security: 'be patient' as airport lines reach extreme lengths This means passengers can simply walk through a scanning gate without stopping or even slowing down – like the hi-tech scanners seen in the 1990 sci-fi film Total Recall.

When Watson answered the final question to win "Jeopardy!" in 2011, voice recognition and artificial intelligence software were just making their large consumer debut on mobile devices. At the start, these capabilities were engaging, interesting and even exciting, but sometimes more as a parlor game than a deeply functional application. Yet they've continued to improve at an accelerating rate and now demand our serious attention as productivity tools. We are now half a decade on, and cognitive computing is making its presence felt at a deeply functional business level -- not just at the gateway of the journey on our devices, but deep within the industry-process level. For instance, cognitive computing is having a real impact at the clinical-process level for healthcare, which was featured specifically in a segment on artificial intelligence on "60 Minutes."

I'm not saying that the magic pocket oracle we all carry around isn't great, but I think there is a philosophical disconnect between what it is and what it could be for us. Right now our technology is still trying to improve every tool except the one we use the most, our brain. At first this seems like a preposterous claim. Doesn't Google Maps let me navigate in completely foreign locations with ease? Doesn't Evernote let me off-load complicated knowledge into a magic box somewhere and recall it with photo precision whenever I need to?

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a vast area of Computer Science that is concerned with the interaction between Computers and Human Language[1]. Within NLP many tasks are – or can be reformulated as – classification tasks. In classification tasks we are trying to produce a classification function which can give the correlation between a certain'feature' and a class . This Classifier first has to be trained with a training dataset, and then it can be used to actually classify documents. Training means that we have to determine its model parameters.

Microsoft has launched a new PC, hoping that it can bring back the dying category. The company's new desktop computer, named the Surface Studio, looks something like the iMac. And like Apple's computer, it is meant as an all-in-one solution for people looking for a PC – a big screen that is attached to all the computing parts. Unlike the iMac, the screen itself is touchscreen despite having a keyboard and a mouse. And that display is also the thinnest desktop monitor ever created, the company said.

Most of the Government's online public services were knocked out by a "technical error" on Wednesday, the Cabinet Office has confirmed. The entire GOV.UK website, a flagship project of the Government Digital Service (GDS) went down, taking all government department websites and most services with it. GOV.UK was launched to fanfare 2012 and aims to consolidate all government department websites into a single service – meaning its failure interrupted services ranging from tax self assessment to driving licence applications. Initial speculative fears that the half-hour outage was caused by a cyber attack appear to be unfounded. The outage started at around 3.30pm when users were presented with a so-called "NXDOMAIN" error.

WhatsApp users are receiving messages that look far too good to be true – and are just that. People are being hit by a sinister new hack that sees them offered free money and then actually leads them to have their data stolen. The messages arriving on people's phones look innocent, and appear to come from friends and family. They offer £100 of gift cards for shops like Sainsbury's or Topshop, and usually claim that the sender has already claimed their £100. But the messages are in fact a scam that could see people's phone's hijacked, their personal information stolen and their money being put at risk.

The threats to the streaming TV company might not be Amazon or other streaming services, but instead "pharmacological" ways of entertaining people, Reed Hastings has said. And just as films and TV shows are a supposedly improved version of other entertainments, those same things might eventually become defunct, he said. In the same way that the cinema and TV screen made "the opera and the novel" much smaller, something else might be on the way to do the same thing, the Netflix boss said at a Wall Street Journal event. Amy Rimmer, Research Engineer at Jaguar Land Rover, demonstrates the car manufacturer's Advanced Highway Assist in a Range Rover, which drives the vehicle, overtakes and can detect vehicles in the blind spot, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire Chris Burbridge, Autonomous Driving Software Engineer for Tata Motors European Technical Centre, demonstrates the car manufacturer's GLOSA V2X functionality, which is connected to the traffic lights and shares information with the driver, during the first demonstrations of the UK Autodrive Project at HORIBA MIRA Proving Ground in Nuneaton, Warwickshire In its facilities, JAXA develop satellites and analyse their observation data, train astronauts for utilization in the Japanese Experiment Module'Kibo' of the International Space Station (ISS) and develop launch vehicles The robot developed by Seed Solutions sings and dances to the music during the Japan Robot Week 2016 at Tokyo Big Sight. Aurora Flight Sciences' technicians work on an Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS) device in the firm's Centaur aircraft at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va.

Microsoft has staked its future on a new version of Paint, everyone's favourite drawing application. The company has released an entirely redesigned of the app, named Paint 3D. And as the name suggests, it is built around three dimensional worlds – allowing people to draw things that take up virtual space. It works by letting take a picture of an object and then having their device construct that as a 3D image, for instance. Or it will let people doodle in 2D and then have that automatically changed into a 3D image.

As creepy clowns dominate the headlines and my email inbox fills up with pumpkins and ghouls it can only mean one thing -- this is Halloween. It seems like every retailer out there is trying to jump on the Halloween ghost train, and it's no wonder, with the NRF annual survey predicting spend in 2016 will hit $8.4bn, the highest in the survey's history. Even in the UK, where Halloween has always played second fiddle to the more traditional Bonfire Night, Halloween is the new holiday to back for retailers, now the second biggest party night after New Years Eve (Guardian, October 2015).