Fueled by the exponential growth in mobile messaging, chatbots -- interactive messaging bots that harness recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning -- are the hottest new technology going right now. Facebook opened up its Messenger platform to bot developers earlier this year; messaging app Telegram is offering developers up to $1 million in prizes to develop bots that are fast, useful, and work in inline mode; and over 20 million people chat with the Xiaoice bot on the Chinese micro-blogging service Weibo. Even the White House has gotten into the act with its Obama Facebook chatbot. Chatbot technology is still in its infancy, but it's quickly being embraced by businesses because of its vast potential for sales, marketing, and customer service. Chatbots stand to help organizations build deeper relationships with their customers and improve service quality, while at the same time save money by automating certain administrative tasks.

Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx recently released a 116-page policy document that aims to guide automakers and technologists on best-practices when it comes to the manufacturing and deployment of autonomous vehicle features. Apple, which has been rumored to be building a car, recently laid off employees of its automotive project and pivoted from making a car to creating autonomous software, according to reports. Another aftermarket self-driving tech company recently completed a successful 120-mile beer delivery without anyone at the wheel. A big rig cab equipped with sensors made by Otto, a startup bought by Uber recently for $670 million, made the delivery of Budweiser beer while its driver rested in the sleeper berth during most of the trip down Colorado's Interstate 25.

George "Geohot" Hotz, PlayStation and iPhone hacker extraordinaire, has canceled production on Comma One, a $1,000 aftermarket add-on that he said would allow some cars to operate semi-autonomously. He claimed the tech was "about on par" with Tesla's Autopilot and it used cars' video feeds to navigate the roads. It was due to start rolling out at the end of this year. But, after receiving a special order from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration today, Geohot decided Comma One wasn't worth the paperwork. Geohot said on Twitter that the special order opened "with threats" rather than an attempt at dialogue.

If you're inclined to think of cybersecurity as lending itself to clean, elegant, better-than-human, extremely secure solutions, you probably don't work in the field. But one bias held by many in information security is that much of the mess is because humans -- not hackers, shoddy software or poorly-built devices -- are the source of the vast majority of our digital vulnerabilities. Why extend the time and energy to hack into a heavily-guarded system, security experts might opine, if you can simply trick a user into clicking a link laden with malware? If businesses didn't have to deal with the "end user" (that is, you and I), this reasoning goes, all our problems would be solved. This represents a quiet bias against users in nearly every conversation about cybersecurity.

Talking about the relationship between cyber security and machine learning, we need to first identify a concept change. In the past, cyber security focuses on blocking the intruders from outside of our network, but today, we have to believe that intruders are among us. They have invaded our systems and they are doing or going to do damages to us. Whatever the compromised device or machine is doing, it's acting abnormally. So, cyber security means anomaly detection.

While spending on programmatic advertising continues to rise, studies show that advertisers still worry about ad fraud, wherein algorithms mistakenly deliver ad impressions to fake websites without real human traffic. According to the Association of National Advertisers, bot traffic will amount to more than $7 billion in wasted investments globally this year. That has brands thinking twice about going all in with automated advertising.

Higher education for the AI age: Let's think about it before the machines do it for us Karbonn's Fashion Eye uses artificial intelligence to boost e-commerce Sure, A.I. Is Powerful--But Can We Make It Accountable? I Just Had A Conversation With An AI Lawyer... Stay up-to-date on the topics you care about. We'll send you an email alert whenever a news article matches your alert term. It's free, and you can add new alerts at any time.

This decrease was mainly due to the Note 7 issue, despite the increase of sales in the memory and OLED businesses. The gross profit for the quarter was KRW18.4 trillion, about KRW1.7 trillion year-on-year decrease. But the gross profit margin as a percent of sale held steady due to higher gross profits from the sales expansion of premium products in the OLED and consumer electronics businesses. Our SG&A expenditures increased Y-on-Y, mainly due to the recall cost related to Note 7. The operating profit decreased by KRW2.2 trillion, year on year to KRW5.2 trillion, and the operating profit margin declined by 3.4 percentage points to 10.9%. The earnings of the component business decreased marginally year on year due to price correction of DRAM during the first half of this year. However, on Q-on-Q basis, this operating profit increased due to sales expansion of high-end products such as SSD, flexible OLED under the stabilized ASP environment. In the set business, earnings declined in the IM division due to the loss resulting from the Note 7 issue, but the consumer electronics business continued to grow year on year, driven by the sales growth of SUHD TVs and premium home appliance products. In this quarter's strengthening of the Korean won against the major currencies such as U.S. dollar and euro had a negative impact on the operating profit quarter on quarter. We figured it's approximately KRW700 billion effect, mostly on the component business. The non-operating profit was KRW540 billion, mainly from the sales of various investments including investments in ASML. Now I would like to address the business outlook. In the fourth quarter we expect the overall earnings to improve year on year. The mobile business is expected to recover its earnings to the similar level as 4Q last year through solid S7 sales, while earnings in the component business is projected to improve year on year. For the semiconductor business, we expect the earnings to improve due to the sales expansion of the V-NAND-based SSD. For the display business, we expect the earnings to improve also from LCD business recovery year on year.

A cyber attack on the Internet infrastructure company Dyn on October 21 hindered internet browsing for hours while the company scrambled to restore service. The as-yet unidentified attackers were helped by a millions-strong army of Internet of Things devices, including enterprise webcams and DVRs, that were quietly conscripted into a botnet to launch the denial-of-service attack. The incident is the latest reminder that many IoT devices aren't adequately secured. These types of attacks will continue as long as a large enough number of vulnerable devices exists. So the question facing the security industry is how to shrink that number.

On June 14, 2016, four researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were preparing to ship a waist-high, ape-like robot named RoboSimian off-site. They had built the bot to rescue people from dangerous situations that human rescuers can't hack. The scientists swapped one lithium-ion battery for a fresh one, then left for lunch to let the new power supply charge. Left alone in the lab, RoboSimian's battery did what such batteries famously do: went boom. Plumes of smoke vented from the robot's exposed torso, followed by a burst of flame.