At BlizzCon on Friday, Google research scientist Oriol Vinyals announced that StarCraft 2 was being opened up to artificial intelligence researchers around the world. The goal: to create better AI opponents for StarCraft 2, and possibly even create AI coaches that could teach humans how to better play the strategy game. Of course, the goal of AI development is not just to match human players but best them, and just as DeepMind's AI program AlphaGo beat human champion Go player Lee Se-dol earlier this year, DeepMind wants its AI to someday take on a human StarCraft 2 champion. There will be more details about DeepMind's interest in StarCraft 2 revealed later during the convention, and we'll update you if we hear anything else.

For more than a decade, Silicon Valley's technology investors and entrepreneurs obsessed over social media and mobile apps that helped people do things like find new friends, fetch a ride home or crowdsource a review of a product or a movie. Now Silicon Valley has found its next shiny new thing. And it does not have a "Like" button. The new era in Silicon Valley centers on artificial intelligence and robots, a transformation that many believe will have a payoff on the scale of the personal computing industry or the commercial internet, two previous generations that spread computing globally. Computers have begun to speak, listen and see, as well as sprout legs, wings and wheels to move unfettered in the world.

More than 250 leading researchers from over 50 countries will gather at the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) in San Francisco next month. Running from 6 – 7 December, this event will focus on the future trends in technology and various experts will explore a plethora of topics such as: artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, security, IoT, robotics. She will speak about cognitive computing and how recent changes in the availability of data have driven rapid advances in analytics, enabling smarter applications, and bringing us to this new era. "We'll see how Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing Ruzena Bajcsy, Professor at the University of California, Berkeley will explore about the development of personalized models of kinematic and dynamics of an individual during physical activities and its applications in improving healthcare. Ella Atkins Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan will describe long-term research in improving safety and robustness through autonomous contingency management with application to manned and unmanned aircraft. Dr. Atkins will also summarize her research on the use of nontraditional databases and real-time data to reduce risk to people and property. Other speakers include James Loudermilk - Senior Level Technologist at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Science and Technology Branch, Bin He - Director of Institute for Engineering in Medicine, University of Minnesota and Arjuna Chala - Sr. Director of Innovation and Emerging Technology at HPCC Systems. In two days, the conference will host a total of six keynotes, five project demonstrations and 190 paper presentations organized into thirty sessions. The conference program also offers various networking opportunities including an evening reception which will give attendees the chance to mingle with other researchers after a day full of speakers, meetings, and thought-provoking topics. FTC 2016 is organized by The Science and Information (SAI) Organization whose mission is to connect global research community through journals, conferences and technical activities. Sponsors and partners for FTC 2016 include HPCC Systems, IEEE, IBM Research, University of Michigan, IBM Watson AI XPrize and Brown University. "We've invited experts from across the globe to attend and offer insights on the future of technology and research.

DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence company that's now a part of Google, stunned the world back in March when its AlphaGo AI defeated world-champion Go player Lee Se-dol to achieve one of the most sought-after feats in computer science. The ancient Chinese board game of Go was considered the most difficult "perfect information" game for computers to crack, as the dizzying complexity produced by its simple rules requires a highly advanced degree of intuition to play at a serious level, but AlphaGo managed it with a revolutionary system built on neural networks and machine learning. Now DeepMind is turning its attention to a game that will pose an even bigger challenge: StarCraft II. Blizzard Entertainment's real-time strategy hit is one of the most fiercely competitive games played professionally around the world, and the company is working together with DeepMind to release it as an AI research environment. The announcement is being made at Blizzard's annual conference, BlizzCon.

Machines equipped with artificial intelligence are ever creeping into the workforce, and for humans, this could soon mean job displacement and a'universal basic income,' according to Elon Musk. The billionaire explained that our options may be limited in the future as automation becomes the norm, and this could even leave people with more time to enjoy their lives. Musk said humans will eventually need to achieve symbiosis with'digital super-intelligence' in order to cope with the advancing world – but, he warns doing this might be the toughest challenge of all. Machines equipped with artificial intelligence are ever creeping into the workforce, and for humans, this could soon mean job displacement and a'universal basic income,' according to Elon Musk (pictured) This past summer, when asked at the Code Conference in southern California if the answer to the question of whether we are in a simulated computer game was'yes', Elon Musk said the answer is'probably'. Musk believes that computer game technology, particularly virtual reality, is already approaching a point that it is indistinguishable from reality.

The development of Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies raises the issue on whether they should also act ethically. On 26 October 2016, I attended the IoT Solutions World Congress, one of the largest events in the world on the Internet of Things, and I had the pleasure of being part of a panel on "Ethical Uses of Data", together with Edy Liongosari from Accenture, Prith Banerjee from Schneider Electric, Derek O'Halloran from the World Economic Forum, Sven Schrecker from Intel and David Blaszkowsky from the Financial Semantics Collaborative. In a few years, we will now own almost anything. Our car, our house and whatever we use during the course of the day will become "as a service". In this context, the sole asset that will belong to individuals is their "digital identity".

As shown in our artificial intelligence heatmap, healthcare is the hottest area of investment within AI. Investors have poured in $1.5B across nearly 190 deals into healthcare-focused AI startups in the last 5 years. To understand where the deals are concentrated within healthcare-focused AI companies, we further drilled down to understand which categories of medical care and life sciences were seeing the most funding for AI-focused companies. Note: the map above only includes equity funding rounds.

Google's Deepmind AI has already learned how to best humans at Go, but now Deepmind's resources will be pointed at an entirely different game: Starcraft II. Blizzard just announced at Blizzcon that it is partnering with Google to open up Starcraft II as a research platform for those building AI programmers. "Blizzard will release an API early next year that will allow researchers and hobbyists around the world to build and train their own AI agents to play Starcraft II," said Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at Google DeepMind. Rather than Google building an unstoppable Starcraft II machine on its own, Blizzard wants to give anyone the change to build their own AI bot using the upcoming API. Essentially, this framework serves as a testing ground for building and training new AIs -- it could lead to better AI in Starcraft II itself, or we could see better AI player coaches, or maybe just an unbeatable AI bot. "There's still a long way to go, but maybe we'll even see an agent take on the BlizzCon champion in a show match," Vinyals said.

Fraud is a big problem in the cellular networking market, and machine learning is one potential solution to the problem. Mathematics-based cyberdefence firm claims Antigena can teach itself to fight off new malicious intrusions -- without human involvement. Fraudulent usage of cellular networks costs the industry an estimated $38 billion a year, according to the 2015 Global Fraud Loss Survey by the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA), an international organization that promotes revenue assurance, loss prevention, and fraud control in the industry. The CFCA says fraudsters use methods including PBX hacking, subscription fraud, dealer fraud, service abuse, and account takeover to steal from service providers. Current fraud detection approaches in the industry rely on static rules with pre-set volume or frequency thresholds, said Ole J. Mengshoel, associate research professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Intelligent and High-Performing Systems Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.