The saying goes: 'Never judge a book by its cover,' but that's exactly what new AI technology has been designed to do. A controversial paper has been released, which investigates whether a computer can detect if a human could be a criminal, by analysing their facial features. The results suggest that it is bad news for people with smaller mouths, curvier upper lips and closer-set eyes, as apparently these features suggest you could be a crook. The paper investigates whether a computer can detect if a human could be a criminal, by analysing their facial features. The researchers singled out three features that they suggest can tell whether someone will be a criminal or not – lip curvature, eye inner corner distance, and the angle from the tip of the nose to the corners of the mouth.

General Electric builds jet engines and wind turbines and medical gear. But the 124-year-old industrial giant is also transforming itself for the digital age. It's fashioning software that pulls data from all this hardware, hoping to gain an insight into industrial operations that was never possible in the past. The problem is that analyzing all this data is difficult, and the talent needed to make it happen is scarce. So GE is going shopping.

The U.S. State Department generates some two billion e-mails every year. A significant fraction of these contain sensitive or secret information and so have to be classified, a process that is time-consuming and costly. In 2015 alone, it spent $16 billion to protect classified information. But the reliability of this process of classification is unclear. Nobody knows whether the rules for classifying information are applied consistently and reliably.

While reading about the City of L.A.'s Security Operations Center's use of artificial intelligence, I became intrigued by the beneficial analogs that sales organizations can derive by implementing chatbots. The ComputerWorld article that I reference is not directly sales and marketing related. However, it does demonstrate the value of having artificial intelligence ala chatbots when trying to meet customer demand at scale for your sales, support, and customer service inquiries. That seems like an overwhelmingly large number, especially when you read that their command center is staffed with only eight cyber threat analysts per shift in their around the clock operations to handle threats in realtime. While they don't go into detail about their A.I. system, I can appreciate the huge uplift that A.I. gives to their threat assessment and response in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

Autonomous AI agents have begun to take over entire tasks start to finish. And this is just the beginning. We expect to see a plethora of such agents in the next half decade, and these will take on all sorts of tasks that humans currently perform, if unhappily. In many ways the machines will be better at these tasks than we are. Self-driving cars have superhuman sensors, reaction time and true multitasking, and they will always apply their full attention to the task at hand, driving!

A country's dexterity with artificial intelligence technology might be the next strong source of national pride and international power. Knowing it would lay the foundation for the future of medicine, IBM captured the world's imagination in 2011 with Watson, a supercomputer that not only won Jeopardy!, but beat trivia superstar Ken Jennings in the process. The novel cognitive computing technology was quickly adapted to "read" the thousands of medical research papers published weekly in order to diagnose cancer patients more accurately than human doctors seemingly could. It's a banner technology for IBM, a company that remains no slouch in its 105 years of operation Now five years after Watson's debut, Japanese researchers at Kyoto University and Fujitsu are collaborating to build their own computing technology that's fairly characterized as a response to Watson. Skipping the game shows and going straight to medical applications, the Japanese system aims to close the gap in understanding how our genes determine our health by accounting for a patient's genetic code in its computer-generated diagnoses.

Bogdan Botezatu discusses how defenders are using machine learning algorithms to help beat the malware and give themselves the best possible chance of evading and protecting against APTs. While some predict that particular activities could be replaced almost entirely (78 percent) by machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms, they mostly refer to physical and predictable activities, such as operating machinery or assembly line working. When it comes to machines completely taking over our jobs and lives, rest assured, we still have a long way to go. As for cyber-security, with more than 300,000 unique malware samples emerging each month, using flesh-and-blood security researchers to manually go through that much data is unrealistic and counterproductive. To that end, modern internet security companies have started developing and training machine learning algorithms to take over a great deal of the daily automation involving malware detection and analysis, with the same accuracy as a highly skilled and experienced security researcher.

You might be impatient for a self-driving car that can roll you from the bar to your house when you're too buzzed to drive, but autonomous vehicles have bigger problems to worry about. Since 2000, the fire season has grown longer, and the damage more severe. The US spent more than $2 billion fighting the flames last year--and it lost six firefighters doing it. The solution, according to Lockheed Martin, is taking the human out of the battle. In a series of demonstration flights last week, the defense contractor showed off four unmanned aircraft that join forces to beat back the flames.

A study shows that almost 60% of people are willing to ride in a self-driving car, but that might be because we still fail to realize the real implications of putting our lives and the lives of others in the hands of an autonomous vehicle. You're in a self-driving car, cruising down the highway, when something goes wrong. Should the car save you or the people crossing the street? Should a self-driving car slam into a wall to save women, children, and the elderly? What if it's to save a couple of criminals instead?

The former F-16 and Air Force Thunderbirds pilot took over as commander of the unit in July 2015 and continues to fly drone missions himself from Creech on the MQ-9, more commonly known as the Reaper. His tenure comes at a time of unprecedented demand for the aircraft he commands – the percentage of missions in which Reapers fire their weapons has increased fivefold since 2011, he says. Now, roughly 15 percent of all the airstrikes in the war against the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria are conducted by drones.