The supposed argument for autonomous vehicles is that they will cut back on fatalities stemming from car crashes by over 90 percent. That cheery-eyed view masks an important point: It'll be a long time before--if ever--that roads will be totally dominated by robot cars. For a while, it'll be a blend of manually-operated and autonomous vehicles. "The research and media attention given to autonomous vehicles often overlooks the safety implications that a mix of driver-operated and autonomous vehicles will bring," said Dr. James Hedlund, a former senior official with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and co-author of the study, in a statement. "Unfortunately, ignoring the driver side of the equation may negate many of the expected safety benefits."

Steve Irvine is the founder and CEO of Toronto-based Integrate.AI I recently made the decision to leave my executive role at Facebook Inc. in Silicon Valley to start a company, Integrate.AI, focused on applied artificial intelligence. Normally, this news would not raise an eyebrow in the valley. In fact, people in positions like mine often leave the comfortable confines of large tech companies to build their own startups in hot new areas, such as AI. However, there was a notable difference in my case – I chose to start my company in Toronto. A lot of people immediately assumed I had made the move strictly for personal reasons, as my wife and I are both Canadian.

Science-fiction visionaries have long promised us all kinds of futuristic transportation options, and while jetpacks and teleportation are still some ways off, the technologies are finally in place to make self-driving cars a reality. It's time for automakers to put the pedal to the metal as they compete with technology companies and other industry disruptors to put partially or fully autonomous vehicles on American roads. The auto industry has a head start: After decades of investments, today's vehicles offer many partially autonomous features like lane departure systems, adaptive cruise control, and emergency braking. Emerging technologies could enable even more vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity, making the leap to fully driverless cars even smaller. In fact, executives from several leading automakers foresee advanced self-driving technology being available by 2021 or even sooner;1 some envision vehicles without steering wheels or pedals to be driven by advanced technology and sensors and not people.

Almost every day, there's news about a massive data leak -- a breach at Yahoo that reveals millions of user accounts, a compromise involving Gmail phishing scams. Security professionals are constantly moving the chess pieces around, but it can be a losing battle. Yet, there is one ally that has emerged in recent years. Artificial intelligence can stay vigilant at all times, looking for patterns in behavior and alerting you to a new threat. While AI is not anywhere close to being perfect, experts tell CSO that machine learning, adaptive intelligence, and massive data models that can spot hacking much faster than any human are here to help.

By 2020, medical data is expected to double every 73 days. With the rapidly growing amount of health data being produced, it is no surprise that medical knowledge is being drowned in the sea of scientific data. To make use of the incredible amounts of medical data, health professionals are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help find patterns in the deluge of data to provide better diagnostics and treatment. And now, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative may speed progress in that area. The philanthropic arm of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan has just purchased a Canadian healthcare startup, Meta, which uses AI to find, review and compile scientific papers. Meta is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's first outright acquisition and will be made free to use for all researchers.

Nato must begin to compete on the cyber-battlefield to counter Russian hacking aimed at undermining democracy in the US and western Europe, the British defence secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, has said. In his most hard-hitting comments yet about Russia, he accused it of targeting the US, France, Germany, Holland, Bulgaria and Montenegro, which is due to become a full Nato member this year. Fallon blamed Russia for helping create the age of fake information. "Today we see a country that, in weaponising misinformation, has created what we might now see as the post-truth age. Part of that is the use of cyber-weaponry to disrupt critical infrastructure and disable democratic machinery," he said.

The UK's revenge porn helpline is set to close next month, according to Labour MP Sarah Champion. The helpline, which launched in February 2015, offers support to men and women affected by revenge porn, where explicit images or videos of them have been shared without their consent. Speaking in the House of Commons today, Ms Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham, asked why the government was cutting funding for the helpline. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

GoPro CEO Nick Woodman introduces the foldable Karma drone during a press event in Olympic Valley, Calif. in September. Six days after the release of GoPro's first-ever drone in October, Brian Warholak was itching to get airborne. As an employee at a Chesapeake, Va.-based government contractor, Warholak, 43, had few opportunities during the workweek to fly his new toy. But on Friday, he left his desk early, unpacked his GoPro Karma from its carrying case and set it on a manicured lawn near the company parking lot. In the video of Warholak's aeronautic excursion, the drone lurches upward, pausing for its master to pan the attached camera.

WikiLeaks has turned its focus to the upcoming French presidential election, revealing that its archives contain thousands of potentially sensitive documents on three candidates. A series of posts on its Twitter account targeted Republican Francois Fillon, far-right leader Marine Le Pen and independent candidate Emmanuel Macron. WikiLeaks claims to have over 3,000 files on Fillon, whose popularity has dropped amid allegations that he paid his wife close to €1 million of public money with little evidence of work. Fillon denies any wrongdoing, but calls for him to drop out of the presidential race are mounting. Le Pen, who is currently leading the polls according to the latest numbers from Elabe, is the subject of a further 1,138 WikiLeaks documents.

An independent report by a group of scientists commissioned by the US Defense Department argues that the increasingly impressive developments in the field of artificial intelligence are in no way a threat to humanity, as some prominent figures have recently suggested. The report's authors say that concern about the development of artificial intelligence comes from excessive media attention by journalists and science fiction writers about the progress of so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or Strong Artificial Intelligence, relating to attempts to create intelligence in machines that can successfully perform any intellectual task carried out by humans. This generalist approach to artificial intelligence, while obviously provocative and highly (if not excessively) visible, is presently restricted, limited in its progress, and the results of which are far from disturbing. The fears it generates in some quarters do not correspond to the facts: at present, the attention devoted to the development of machines capable of making long-term decisions or thinking and acting like human beings is scarce. On the other hand, the development of artificial intelligence, whether relevant to the DoD or in other areas, focuses more on enhancing the abilities of humans and freeing us from certain tasks, rather that substituting us as such.