Diplomats from around the world met in Geneva last week for the United Nations' third Informal Expert Meeting on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS), commonly dubbed "killer robots". Their aim was to make progress on deciding how, or if, LAWS should be regulated under international humanitarian law. A range of views were expressed at the meeting, from Pakistan being in favour of a full ban, to the UK favouring no new regulation for LAWS, and several positions in between. Despite the range of views on offer, there was some common ground. It is generally agreed that LAWS are governed by international humanitarian law.

When Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie found out she carried the BRCA1 gene, her doctors told her she had an 87% chance of developing breast cancer. Armed with this knowledge, she chose to undergo a double mastectomy in 2013 to reduce the risk to around 5%. This kind of genetic testing can now be done much faster and at lower cost, giving clinicians the ability to target treatments more effectively. And combining this technological breakthrough with cloud computing and artificial intelligence is giving pharmaceutical companies the tools to develop drugs faster and with greater chance of success. One beneficiary of this new approach is Eric Dishman, founder of tech giant Intel's first health research and innovation laboratory in 1999 and a founding member of its digital health group in 2005.

HEFFNER: I'm Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind. TED Talk curator Chris Anderson joined us recently to consider the danger of artificial intelligence, namely its potential to drive away or make obsolete the moral compass of human beings and civilization as we know it. Of course sometimes, we're our own worst enemy, and we would rather not embrace the present reality. So I've invited today the leading ethicist in the arena of innovation. He's going to help us understand the term techno sapiens as he calls it, with our drones, our supercomputers, our designer babies, and now our 3D printers too. Wendell Wallach is the author of A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology From Slipping Beyond Our Control.

Call me old and grumpy, but there are certain things in life that an artificial intelligence or a robot cannot do for me. If I buy gifts for my family and friends, I love to do the research. I like to read product descriptions and reviews, to compares stores to find the best prices and to weigh the different payment options. All this effort on my part, in the end, provides a sense of satisfaction that simply cannot be achieved through the blunt response of a bot. Also, I love investing my time this way because my family and friends are worth the effort to me.

Cognitive computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning are here to stay and promise to benefit both consumers and the organizations that exploit these advanced technologies. That was the sentiment from "Dawn of the Cognitive Era" panelists representing mostly startups (startup wannabe IBM being the exception) at the annual TiE StartupCon event in Boston this past week. Whereas it wasn't long ago that the public's view of AI was influenced disproportionately by books and movies, an increasing number of real-life cognitive computing applications such as those enabled by IBM Watson have begun to seep into the public's consciousness. In fact, many people are taking advantage of cognitive computing, whether or not they realize it, when they use tools such as Apple's Siri or various bots, said panel moderator and DataXylo CEO Abhi Yadav. Such applications, enabled in large part through the access to relatively cheap computing power via the cloud, have resulted in the technology finally living up to the hype -- and dissuading fears it will lord over us.

The Machine Learning Engineer is responsible for analyzing diverse sets of imperfect data and finding common patterns, theme and trends by using statistical analysis and machine learning. A sound understanding of predictive analytics, predictive modeling and the ability to write data-driven applications based on the analysis is essential. This position will work closely with engineering, product management, and business teams to measure, analyze, and understand Calabrio's users' complex and growing data needs and help them make sense of their ever growing volumes of data. Wrangling data from multiple sources including sales, inventory, product, and customer databases to create integrated views that will be used to drive decision making? Provide actionable insights to our customers derived from machine learning and statistical analysis that go beyond normal dashboards and BI tools.

Driverless car technology has been one of the most anticipated disruptions of a major global industry. With so many companies jostling to be among the first to integrate artificial intelligence into the world's billion-plus automobiles, the speed with which the wider industry is expected to adopt these cutting edge technologies is impressive. By 2021, sales of connected car technologies are predicted to triple to almost 180 billion. It is not difficult to see why the driverless car industry shows such promise.

Driverless car technology has been one of the most anticipated disruptions of a major global industry. Beginning with Google in 2010, the field has expanded to include other tech companies and auto manufacturers, including Uber, Lyft, Tesla, and General Motors. With so many companies jostling to be among the first to integrate artificial intelligence into the world's billion-plus automobiles, the speed with which the wider industry is expected to adopt these cutting edge technologies is impressive. By 2021, sales of connected car technologies are predicted to triple to almost 180 billion. It is not difficult to see why the driverless car industry shows such promise. The anticipated benefits of the technology are numerous, including fewer road accidents, reduced congestion, cheaper public transportation, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

AlchemyLanguage is a collection of APIs that offer text analysis through natural language processing. The AlchemyLanguage APIs can analyze text and help you to understand its sentiment, keywords, entities, high-level concepts and more.

Not every startup CEO can say they were able to grow their business to a point where they were acquired. Even fewer can say they did it twice. But that is exactly the case for AlchemyAPI Founder and CEO Elliot Turner. Turner launched his first startup, MimeStar, a software development company focused on network intrusion detection, while a sophomore in high school. Inc. acquired it by the time he was twenty-one. He quickly saw the shift in the market to the need to democratize artificial intelligence (A.I.), and decided to venture out on his own to start AlchemyAPI.