More than 1 million Syrians have fled to Lebanon since the start of the conflict and as many as one-fifth of them may be suffering from mental health disorders, according to the World Health Organisation. But Lebanon's mental health services are mostly private and the needs of refugees – who may have lost loved ones, their home, livelihood and community – are mostly going unmet. Hoping to support the efforts of overworked psychologists in the region, the Silicon Valley startup X2AI has created an artificially intelligent chatbot called Karim that can have personalised text message conversations in Arabic to help people with their emotional problems. As the user interacts with Karim, the system uses natural language processing to analyse the person's emotional state and returns appropriate comments, questions and recommendations. Related: How much should we fear the rise of artificial intelligence?

Would you trust a robot to escort you out of a burning building? NPR's Robert Siegel talks with roboticist Paul Robinette, lead author of the Georgia Tech study, "Overtrust of Robots in Emergency Evacuation Scenarios."

Fighting cyber attacks with artificial intelligence The next frontier of anti-virus software is leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to not only predict what threats are out there, but to also actively fight back before they strike. This is according to American-based Cylance's chief marketing officer, Greg Fitzgerald, speaking at the NetEvents Press and Analyst Summit in Rome, Italy.The company says it is "revolutionising cyber security through the use of AI and machine learning to proactively prevent advanced persistent threats and malware". Cylance today announced it is expanding into the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) with the establishment of a London-based team led by Evan Davidson, former enterprise sales director at FireEye. It also established a channel partnership with CoreSec Systems, which supplies cyber security and networking solutions in Sweden and Denmark.

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices. The number of new malware variations that pop up each day runs somewhere between 390,000 (according to AV-TEST Institute) and one million (according to Symantec Corporation). These are new strains of malware that have not been seen in the wild before. Even if we consider just the low end figure, the situation is still dire. Especially when it comes to advanced persistent threats (APTs), which are the most sophisticated mutations of viruses and malware, which are very effective at going completely undetected by many of the cybersecurity technologies in use today.

Save the "Star Wars" franchise? Everyone's favorite "Star Wars" actress, Daisy Ridley, told The Hollywood Reporter at this weekend's Empire Awards that there "have been conversations" about her wielding the storied video game heroine's dual pistols in an upcoming reboot. Conversations, however, don't mean that Ridley's casting is a done deal, as the 23-year-old actress has yet to receive an official offer. "I'm waiting for someone to say'I want you, let's do it,'" she said, explaining that the project doesn't have a script yet. But Ridley is committed to the role, even with her busy "Star Wars" schedule -- she is currently filming the eighth installment in the sci-fi epic. If the opportunity presented itself, Ridley would be happy to make time for "Tomb Raider," telling THR that "I'm trying to fill up my calendar."

With flashy AI technology like IBM's Watson and Google's driverless cars stealing headlines and outperforming their human competitors, it's clear that our economy is bracing for a fundamental shift in how we perform work. What's less obvious, however, is exactly what the workplace of the future will look like. A pair of Oxford researchers recently estimated that 47 percent of the total U.S. employment is at risk of being eliminated. On the other end of the spectrum, Mercedes announced it is trading out some of its production robots for human labor -- the machines could not keep up with the increasing options for customization. While these two camps continue to argue, in this article we'll explore three robotic trends that the prevailing media have missed in their coverage of the future of jobs -- trends that will hold true if we continue this automation trajectory.

Replacing the legacy safeguards that have failed to protect networks and applications, machine learning is at the heart of IT's shift in mindset. It's no longer about preventing attacks or focusing on "known threats," but rather identifying potential threats early enough so that they don't have an opportunity to cause real damage. Without the proper tools, it can take companies months to discover a data breach and even more to resolve it. By failing to detect potential threats early, organizations like Home Depot, J.P. Morgan and Ashley Madison put their finances, reputation and relationship with valued customers at risk.

The industry is far from ready to take humans "out of the loop" on most security operations and let machines run our cyber-defenses autonomously. However, machine learning breakthroughs are already making huge strides in reducing compromises as well as easing the burden of security staff in investigating suspicious events. These under-staffed teams are often overwhelmed with massive volumes of alerts, making it tough to weed out false alarms and identify the subtle signs of more sophisticated attacks. Machine learning anti-malware systems draw on deep knowledge of malware from analyzing millions of malicious samples. Cloud computing horsepower and data science techniques help master the "DNA" and "family trees" of malware, so even completely new malware is accurately detected.

Look at it just sitting there on a wall. South Korea's robots are future-proof. A rescue drone by the Korean Advanced Institute Of Science and Technology is a flying wall-climbing fireproof building inspection machine. Named CAROS, for Climbing Aerial RObot System, looks like a normal quadcopter. It flies to and fro like a quadcopter, then turns perpendicular to the ground and attaches itself to surfaces it needs to inspect.

No longer the exclusive domain of data-reliant businesses like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, machine learning has been making its way into the masses as an essential approach to data. Today, machine learning is understood and accepted by a more mainstream audience, and has become a measurable driver for big business benefits both on and offline. There are three key reasons why machine learning has become one of the top 10 strategic technology trends that will shape digital business opportunities through 2020. First, the volume of data companies now collect is so massive that many companies struggle to make sense of it and fail to take advantage of it. Second, the computing power required to process these exploding data assets, previously exclusive to the Googles of this world, is now widely available to smaller businesses.