Ben Dickson is a software engineer and the founder of TechTalks. More posts by this contributor: Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence How to facilitate the path to brownfield IoT development Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence How to facilitate the path to brownfield IoT development Why it's so hard to create unbiased artificial intelligence The transportation industry is associated with high maintenance costs, disasters, accidents, injuries and loss of life. Hundreds of thousands of people across the world are losing their lives to car accidents and road disasters every year. According to the National Safety Council, 38,300 people were killed and 4.4 million injured on U.S. roads alone in 2015. The related costs -- including medical expenses, wage and productivity losses and property damage -- were estimated at $152 billion.

Defined as a way to provide computers with the ability to learn without the need for programming, the term Machine Learning seems to be this year's big buzzword. In fact today you'd be hard-pressed to find a security vendor that doesn't claim to incorporate some form of machine learning or AI technology into their threat prevention solution. So how much is true and how much is smoke and mirrors? Despite being a concept first envisioned back in the 1950s by Alan Turing, the lack of computing power has held research teams from making any significant jump towards realising the technology. Nowadays we all rely on machine learning without even knowing it – Google's search engine is powered by machine learning APIs, as is Facebook's personalised news feed.

Weather conditions this week will impact the progress of the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB), said Wednesday. The underwater operation to locate the missing plane had already been pushed to end in January 2017 in accordance with the weather forecast. ATSB, which is leading the search for the Boeing 777-200, said in its operational update that weather conditions are unsuitable for both Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) operations periodically during the week. This week, search vessel Fugro Equator continued underwater search operations in the north of the search area, which is in a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, using AUV. During the past week, Fugro Equator has undertaken five missions, each one taking an average of 21 hours.

UNITED NATIONS – U.N. member states on Tuesday condemned widespread human rights violations in North Korea and expressed concerns that funds needed to ease the dire humanitarian crisis are spent on Pyongyang's missile and nuclear arms programs. A resolution drafted by Japan and the European Union was adopted by a consensus vote in the General Assembly's committee on humanitarian affairs. Following the vote, diplomats from China, Pyongyang's ally, Russia, Syria, Iran and Cuba took the floor to state they were disassociating themselves from the outcome. The full General Assembly is expected to vote on the measure next month. North Korea has conducted two nuclear tests this year and test-fired a series of missiles, even as 18 million North Koreans out of a total population of 25 million are facing food shortages, Japan's ambassador said. "The authorities of the DPRK (North Korea), without regard to the plight of their own citizens, divert their limited resources to develop weapons of mass destruction," said Ambassador Koro Bessho.

Nataliia Dmytriievska was 15 years old and enveloped by flames when she first heard the call of outer space. A year earlier her boyfriend had taught her the basics of poi, a Maori dance in which performers swing flaming, tethered weights to describe bright geometric shapes in the dark. Despite the burns and bruises she earned, Dmytriievska was a determined pupil. She would practice for hours each day, drawing flowers and other outlines around her body using dummy weights, before attempting the same perilous tricks using fire. Although money was never the primary motivation – "I simply love the fire; there is something magical when you feel like it's in your control," she said – after a few years Dmytriievska turned semi-professional. She joined a circus troupe in her home city of Kiev, Ukraine to help support her university studies. In June 2007, the troupe began rehearsals for an interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's poem, The Raven. As the backing music sounded out for the first time – a pipe organ, played rhythmically, as if calling people to worship, soon joined by galloping guitars and a furious drumbeat – Dmytriievska took to the stage. But her mind was not on the performance. As soon as she finished the routine she left the stage, walked up to her friend on the mixing desk and asked: "Where is that music from?" Eve Online: how a virtual world went to the edge of apocalypse and back. The track, he said, came from Eve Online, a science-fiction video game. It is, he explained, a game set in a vast galaxy comprised of tens of thousands of stars and planets, and inhabited by half a million or so people from around the world, who explore and do battle together daily via the internet.

The Amazon Echo was one of the most popular items during last year's Black Friday, and it's back this year for an even lower price. This model is Amazon-certified refurbished, and carries a one-year warranty – the same as a brand new one. It has been thoroughly tested, and it's certified to work and look like new. The built-in Alexa voice assistant will play songs, set reminders or alarms, order you an Uber, and even control your smart home. The Amazon Echo is the home gadget of the future, and word on the street is that if you use Alexa to buy items on Amazon, they'll offer you exclusive deals to make it worth your while.

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.

President-elect Donald Trump will be able to employ deadly drone strikes largely at his discretion if current guidelines remain in place. And President Barack Obama has no plans to change those rules before he leaves office, the Guardian reported Tuesday. The next president will inherit the so-called drones "playbook" created by the Obama administration in 2013 that dictated policy on drone strikes, the president's main way of striking against terrorism. Since drone usage began under the administration of President George W. Bush, thousands of people have been killed through the targeted strikes from unmanned aircraft and many nations across the globe consider the standards the U.S. applies for drone strikes to be too secretive. "Maybe on the left no one would believe that Trump has a steady hand, but Obama has normalized the idea that presidents get to have secret large-scale killing programs at their disposal," Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA told the Guardian.

IBM captured our imaginations when it unveiled Watson, the artificial intelligence computer capable of playing--and winning--the "Jeopardy" game show. Since then, Big Blue has been introducing Watson's analytics and learning capabilities across various industries, including health care and information security. Cognitive security technology such as Watson for Cybersecurity can change how information security professionals defend against attacks by helping them digest vast amounts of data. IBM Security is currently in the middle of a year-long research project working with eight universities to help train Watson to tackle cybercrime. Watson has to learn the "language of cybersecurity" to understand what a threat is, what it does, and what indicators are related.

As artificial intelligence (AI) has progressed at quite a pace in recent years, it is inevitable that governments have tried to get a handle on things and better understand how it might influence society. For instance, I wrote recently about a report by the British government's Science & Technology Select Committee into AI, which looked at a number of topics, from ethics to employment. Hot on the heels of this is another British government report, this time from the office of the Chief Scientific Advisor. It examines the increasingly blurred lines between big data and AI, and particularly the benefits of this for the state. For instance, it highlights that governments could secure enormous savings by utilizing both to reduce tax fraud and minimize errors in tax collection.