Rather than leading to the violent downfall of humankind, artificial intelligence is helping people around the world do their jobs, including doctors who diagnose sepsis in patients and scientists who track endangered animals in the wild, experts said Thursday (Oct. Advancements in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) haven't always been met with enthusiasm. Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned on several occasions that a fully developed AI could destroy the human race, and Hollywood sci-fi movies are rife with fierce robots battling humans for control. But at yesterday's conference -- attended by the country's leading researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs and students -- scientists explained how newly developed AI is accelerating research and improving lives. Here is a look at five AI inventions that are already redefining technology.

There are many good reasons why traditional security practices are becoming less effective at protecting against cyberattacks. There is too much security-related data flooding the network from an increasing number of users and devices. There is a lack of skilled personnel to watch over and analyze this data. And the security staff you have likely wastes too much time chasing down false positives. Valuable minutes -- or even hours -- can tick by before analysts and incident responders are aware of a threat.

Last month, President Barack Obama sat down with WIRED's Editor-in-Chief and MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito to discuss the government's role in the ongoing artificial intelligence revolution. While President Obama is sure that Washington has a critical part to play -- particularly in regulating AI to protect the American labor force -- it is equally important that its involvement doesn't stymie the development and implementation of the technology, he says. When it comes to regulating AI, the president believes that government involvement should be limited, especially during its earlier stages of research and development. "The way I've been thinking about the regulatory structure as AI emerges is that, early in a technology, a thousand flowers should bloom," Obama tells WIRED. "The government should add a relatively light touch, investing heavily in research and making sure there's a conversation between basic research and applied research."

A Barbie doll that uses artificial intelligence to communicate interactively. Oren Etzioni, a well-known AI researcher, complains about news coverage of potential long-term risks arising from future success in AI research (see "No, Experts Don't Think Superintelligent AI is a Threat to Humanity"). After pointing the finger squarely at Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom and his recent book, Superintelligence, Etzioni complains that Bostrom's "main source of data on the advent of human-level intelligence" consists of surveys on the opinions of AI researchers. He then surveys the opinions of AI researchers, arguing that his results refute Bostrom's. It's important to understand that Etzioni is not even addressing the reason Superintelligence has had the impact he decries: its clear explanation of why superintelligent AI may have arbitrarily negative consequences and why it's important to begin addressing the issue well in advance. Bostrom does not base his case on predictions that superhuman AI systems are imminent.

Machines contain the breadth of human knowledge, yet they have the common sense of a newborn. The problem is that computers don't act enough like toddlers. Yann LeCun, director of artificial intelligence research at Facebook, demonstrates this by standing a pen on the table and then holding his phone in front of it. He performs a sleight of hand, and when he picks the phone up--ta-da! It's a trick that'll elicit a gasp from any one-year-old child, but today's cutting-edge artificial intelligence software--and most months-old babies--can't appreciate that the disappearing act isn't normal.

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the technology world that the rate of cyber attacks, the development of malware, and the exploitation of zero-day flaws makes is very difficult for IT teams and security specialists to keep up with let alone get ahead of cyber threats. Research from Symantec noted that nearly one million new malware threats emerge daily, and while there are many tools to make detecting rogue code an easier process, dealing with such an enormous amount of new threats appears to be an almost insurmountable task even for the best security teams and anti-virus systems. The answer to this, and the potential future of cyber security, looks to be the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to apply clever computers and smart software to a problem that leaves humans on the back foot in the fight against hackers. Rather than sift through data harvested from across IT networks, machine learning algorithms can be trained to detect certain malware and threat signatures and proactively sniff out threats, bypassing the need for cyber security experts to disappear into a warren of file paths and scripts to find tell-tale signs of malware. Webroot is one such cyber security company applying machine learning techniques to power its threat intelligence service without requiring resource sapping and time-consuming manual processes.

In this article, we take a look at the growing use of artificial intelligence in cyber security as security professionals try to stay a step ahead of the constant barrage of threats and cyber-attacks. Evolving technologies and the growing numbers of "always on", "always connected" devices, tools and commodities are giving the instigators of cyber-threats increased opportunities for access and interference. With statistics suggesting that assaults on individuals, corporations, and government bodies account for almost $400 billion in lost revenue annually, and some 90% of companies admitting to having been victim to some kind of attack – figures that translate to 18 individuals per second being affected by cyber-crime – countering these threats is a real and ongoing concern, for enterprises. Security personnel are finding themselves overwhelmed by the multiplicity of attack vectors and tools available to the cyber-criminals, and are increasingly looking to a new ally, in the quest for cyber security: AI. AI is a sub-division of computer science dealing with the development of systems and software capable of acting intelligently, and doing things that would normally be done by people – equally as well, or sometimes better.

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Liberia has lost access to the entire internet in apparent preparation for shutting down the entire internet. Repeated attacks are flooding the country's network with requests and taking it down entirely. That has intermittently knocked the entire web offline, meaning that people can't access any websites or web services. The attacks appear to be a way for hackers to test a variety of ways of attacking internet connections and taking offline. In that way they resemble the attacks launched recently, when hackers brought down many of the world's biggest websites.

Cybersecurity companies are increasingly looking to artificial intelligence tech to improve defense systems and create the next generation of cyber protection. These trends are driving demand for automated cybersecurity, i.e. AI-driven software that can use machine learning and other technologies to differentiate benign or harmful activity on a system or network. We used CB Insights data to understand when artificial intelligence began to be linked to cybersecurity, and we identify 13 companies to watch at the intersection of AI and security. To inform our analysis in the charts below, we used the Trends tool on the CB Insights Platform, which analyzes millions of media articles to track technology trends.