The Department of Defense announced in early February, in an address to the Economic Club of Washington by Defense Scretary Ashton Carter, that its Strategic Capabilities Office was innovating "new roles and game-changing capabilities to confound potential enemies." The Washington Post's Dan Lamothe wrote an exclusive piece on the SCO, a hitherto unknown agency within the DoD, on March 8. In that piece, Lamothe explained that the future of war is now- and the future is the SCO's artificial intelligence. The SCO's drone program, Perdix, originated at MIT in 2010- 2011. They fit easily in the hand and are surprisingly light-weight.

In August 2001, I was a telecoms analyst visiting investors in Tokyo. In one of these meetings, a portfolio manager at a Very Large Fund asked me what would happen now that GPRS meant that all mobile voice calls would be packet-switched and that therefore mobile operators' voice revenue would disappear within the next 18 months or so. This was a surprisingly hard question to answer well. It was nonsense, but to explain why it was nonsense you had to work out quite which things the person asking it didn't know, and what completely incorrect narrative he'd arrived at to think that this was going to happen. He'd heard'packet' and'mobile' and added 2 2 to get 22.

I recently finished reading "The Second Machine Age", which was recommended to me by one of our board advisors. The authors Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make a convincing argument that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift every bit as transformative as the industrial revolution. While the industrial revolution was about harnessing physical power, this new machine age is about harnessing cognitive power. The authors identify the steam engine as the key catalyst for change in the industrial revolution. Between 1765 and 1776, James Watt, in partnership with Matthew Bolton, made fundamental improvements to the efficiency of the existing steam engine that would see its widespread adoption across a range of industries.

These are just a few of the phrases among dozens that were created as rebranding efforts to cut down on the fear and hesitation that artificial intelligence has inspired in the past. Regardless, AI is back and here to stay. Companies are clamoring for predictive and prescriptive analytics engines. And a day doesn't go by without news of another learning or advanced reasoning system that is executing on a task better than humans. The emergence of these intelligent systems and the ever-increasing hype around them has led to companies trying to figure out their own "AI strategy."

Although computers are getting smarter and intelligent due to the advancement of artificial intelligence but these man-made machines will not overtake the humans in coming few years, says IBM Research Director Arvind Krishna. Krishna is also the Senior Vice-President of IBM and heads the arm that developed award-winning cognitive computing system named Watson that is currently being used in several complex tasks including treatment of cancer. Krishna said that a machine does what it is taught by humans and it just follows the given instructions. A machine cannot overtake humans until it starts doing things on its own and that day will not come at least in'our living lifetimes'. Greatest living Physicist Stephen Hawking and Engineer-entrepreneur Elon Musk have claimed the artificial intelligence as a demon that will bite us back someday in future.

So called predictive policing has long been thought of as a possibility, whether it was the Orwellian thought police or the technical wizardry highlighted in Hollywood films like Minority Report. Such capabilities are increasingly possible however. Last year I wrote about the ATHENA project that is being run by West Yorkshire police. The project is aiming to bring the public into policing a lot more than is currently the case by using social and mobile tools as a force for good. The project team concede that the public are usually first on the scene of an incident, and are often therefore well placed to relay crucial information to officials.

HUNTING MALWARE in the vast virtual planes of the internet and amid the thousands of files on even the most basic PC is a challenge for the best cyber security boffins. Threat researchers can usually be found at cyber security companies sifting through data, analysing files and tracing the origins of malware down rabbit warrens of scripts, file paths and rogue code hiding behind seemingly harmless executable files. Once malware is found it can be squashed and measures can be put into place to protect other systems from similar attacks. This'threat intelligence' is an important part of protecting individuals and organisations against software vulnerabilities, viruses and hackers. "These services prioritise vulnerabilities and predict threats, enabling security teams to rapidly take action. More advanced services also integrate vulnerability alerting with real-world threat intelligence covering geopolitical and business intelligence," said the UK Computer Emergency Response Team.

During President Obama's 2016 State of the Union Address, Vice President Joe Biden was called to lead a new, national "Moonshot" initiative to eliminate cancer. Last month, the White House announced a new 1 billion initiative to jumpstart this effort. Moonshot's most valuable asset, and greatest challenge, is the volume and variety of "big cancer data". According to Vice President Biden, the biggest challenge impeding the cancer research progress is the siloed nature of clinical data. In response, Tamr has offered a solution to these challenges.

MeaningCloud is an easy, powerful and affordable way to extract the meaning of any kind of unstructured content, from social conversations to internal files. It leverages a mix of natural language processing and machine learning technologies to provide APIs for information extraction, text classification and clustering, sentiment analysis, POS tagging… and other high-level functions like user profiling. These APIs can be totally customized to your domain using graphical tools and without the need to code, providing an unparalleled accuracy. And it features an add-in for Excel, so that you can do text analytics in your spreadsheet and a generous Free plan..

As a species, we humans are awfully obsessed with the future. We love to speculate about where our evolution is taking us. We try to imagine what our technology will be like decades or centuries from now. And we fantasise about encountering intelligent aliens – generally, ones who are far more advanced than we are. Lately those strands have begun to merge. From the evolution side, a number of futurists are predicting the singularity: a time when computers will soon become powerful enough to simulate human consciousness, or absorb it entirely. In parallel, some visionaries propose that any intelligent life we encounter in the rest of the Universe is more likely to be machine-based, rather than humanoid meat-bags such as ourselves.