The Terminator isn't arriving anytime soon, but concern is growing that artificial intelligence is already so pervasive in society--and getting more so all the time--that there needs to be more focus on how it's being used and potentially misused (even if by accident). Aside from futuristic killer robots, there are already real dangers ranging from faulty autonomous cars to algorithms used in hiring or recruiting that have an inadvertent bias against women or ethnic groups. The giants of artificial intelligence, especially as it affects consumers and businesses, have just joined together to form a nonprofit called the Partnership on AI, with founding members Amazon, DeepMind/Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft. It's the latest effort to keep a collective eye on how AI is developed and used.OpenAI, founded in December 2015, has a similar goal of conducing research and conferences to promote responsible use of AI. "This partnership will provide consumer and industrial users of cognitive systems a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century," reads part of a statement from IBM's AI ethics researcher, Francesca Rossi. The Partnership on AI announcementlays out an ambitious agenda for research to be conducted or funded by members, in partnership with academics, user group advocates, and industry experts.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Salesforce.com Inc. CRM 0.18 % 's annual Dreamforce customer conference, set to blanket downtown San Francisco next week, will be an unusual blend of business, technology, entertainment, philanthropy and personal empowerment. The conference, which is the world's largest tech get-together sponsored by a single company, will be an expression of the business-software provider's socially conscious corporate culture and the idiosyncratic character of its Chief Executive Marc Benioff. The event, which is expected to draw 170,000 attendees--17% more than last year--comes as Salesforce, whose public profile to date has been confined largely to salespeople and marketers, is stepping onto a larger stage. The company on Thursday vowed to block Microsoft Corp. MSFT 0.35 % 's 26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn Corp. LNKD 0.13 %, after failing in its own effort to buy the online network of 450 million mostly professional members. Meanwhile, Salesforce is considering a bid for the consumer-focused messaging service Twitter.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Google will this week launch the first smartphones that carry its own brand and design, as part of a batch of new devices aimed at competing in markets with Apple and Amazon. The new gadgets, which will include a voice-responsive "smart speaker" modeled on Amazon's Echo, are the first products of a new hardware division set up earlier this year. Google has in the past mainly developed hardware to show off its software and services and to encourage other consumer tech companies to create a mass market for the technology. But like Microsoft, whose Surface has become the leading product in a new category of tablet/laptop hybrids, Google has been drawn deeper into developing its own distinctive products. The new devices are about Google "owning more of the hardware category", said Jan Dawson, senior analyst at Jackdaw Research, though the main impetus will still be "about showing partners the way forward".

Automakers and regulators have proclaimed that self-driving vehicles could revolutionize mobility for the elderly. President Obama wrote in a September Op-Ed, "Right now, for too many senior citizens and Americans with disabilities, driving isn't an option. Automated vehicles could change their lives." Older folks aren't exactly known for embracing new technology, but self-driving vehicles just might be an exception to the rule. Dutch police train eagles to attack drones, but here's why it won't happen in the US Police eagles are just as awesome as they sound, but are they really a practical solution for drone defense?

A new robot for lonely people made by Toyota Motor Corp. can do little other than chatter in a high-pitched voice. The 39,800, 10-cm-tall, doll-like Kirobo Mini -- whose name comes from kibo (hope) and robot -- supposedly has the smarts of a 5-year-old. Its value, according to general manager in charge of the project Fuminori Kataoka, is chiefly emotional. It comes equipped with a camera, microphone and Bluetooth, and connects to smartphones installed with a certain app. Ideally, it will turn its head toward the speaker, though that function sometimes fails because its voice recognition ability is far from perfect.

Five years of owning smartphones has conditioned my thumbs to navigate tiny virtual keyboards with speed and precision. I imagine many feel the same way, given smartphone owners worldwide are spending between 50 and 200 minutes every week using messaging apps. Yet an increasing number of voice dictation apps are making it easier than ever to communicate not with our thumbs, but with our voices. The latest example of such an app is TalkType, an Android keyboard created by Baidu Research and launching Monday. What separates TalkType from the myriad other smartphone keyboards out there is that its users aren't greeted with a QWERTY typing pad, but rather a round microphone icon.

In 2008, international financial and banking markets were hit by the economic crisis, which was the result of bursting the so called credit bubble. The title "Decision Tree" is a mechanism, which was for many years, successfully used for determining creditworthiness. The movie tells the story of a group of specialists who notice that banks stopped acting according to the procedures, and are giving out loans to people, who have no chance of paying them back. "Do you have a loan?" and "Did you have any problems in paying the loan installments in the last 12 months?"

When a different analytic model is used in training versus deployment, results can be disastrous. Here's how to avoid the anti-pattern. I recently stumbled over a great slide deck presented by Netflix engineers about "Design Patterns for Real World Machine Learning Systems." The presentation warns of a dangerous "anti-pattern" when applying analytic models to production systems. The anti-pattern, aka the "Phantom Menace," basically involves using different platforms, tools and technologies to develop and deploy an analytic model.