Data is everywhere – masses of it. And it's helping businesses to make better decisions across departments. Marketing can utilise data to discover the effectiveness of email campaigns, Finance can analyse past trends to make predictions and projections for the future, and Sales can target their follow-up with detailed information on prospective customers. But data is only useful when business tools transform it into valuable information. Data intelligence through algorithms and analytics make business data relatable. The most advanced solutions require enormous amounts of data to be able to offer accurate insight to users.

An explosive-laden drone, sent by the Islamic State group (ISIS), was intercepted and shot by Kurdish forces in Iraq early this month, according to reports Tuesday. However, the drone blew up and killed two Kurdish fighters and injured two French soldiers. The incident reportedly happened on Oct. 2 in Erbil, which serves as the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, where French troops have been fighting along with Kurdish fighters against ISIS, according to the New York Times and French newspaper Le Monde. Neither Iraqi officials nor French authorities have confirmed the incident. About 500 French military personnel have been deployed in Iraq to fight ISIS. They include special forces who are training Kurdish Peshmerga forces in the northern part of the country.

Alexa can already order you an Uber, control your smart home devices, and keep you company. She's about to learn much better DJ skills, save you six bucks a month on streaming music, and possibly even change the way you listen to music in your house. Amazon Music Unlimited, a beefed-up subscription service built to compete with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, launches today. It's cheaper than those big-name services--for many users, at least--and it features clever voice control with the company's Echo speakers. If you're using Music Unlimited on an Amazon Echo, Tap, or Dot, the service only costs 4 a month. To use it on anything else--mobile devices, your computer, a Fire TV stick, or even Sonos speakers--the pricing falls more in line with Spotify or Apple Music.

When someone important to us dies, we feel their loss keenly, and it can be difficult to let go of the pain we feel. People find different ways to cope – religion, focusing on happy memories, sometimes talking aloud to the departed person – even though they will never again receive a reply. But what if you could receive a reply? Eugenia Kuyda, the co-founder and CEO of a Russian artificial intelligence startup called Luka Inc (formerly IO), has developed a chatbot that lets anyone talk to her dearly departed best friend Roman Mazurenko, a fellow tech entrepreneur who died in a car accident in November 2015. Anyone who downloads the iOS mobile app Luka can instantly talk to the bot in either English or Russian by adding @Roman. You can select from the bot's options to learn about Mazurenko's career, or ask him questions to see how the bot responds.

FILE- In this March 1, 2013 file photo, anti-Syrian President Bashar Assad protesters hold the Jabhat al-Nusra flag, as they shout slogans during a demonstration, at Kafranbel town, in Idlib province, northern Syria. Insurgent groups like Hezbollah and the Islamic State group in Syria have learned how to weaponize surveillance drones and use them against each other, adding a new twist to the country's civil war, a U.S. military official and others say.

Recognizing the central role that technology now plays in the global economy, the World Economic Forum is establishing a new center in San Francisco to connect tech companies and policymakers in the heart of the world's technology industry. Building off the Forum's thesis of a "Fourth Industrial Revolution," the new facility will focus on bringing government officials and tech companies together to create frameworks for more productive legislative policies that can be implemented worldwide. "Depending on the collective choices we make -– as consumers, as communities, as business, government, and civil society leaders -– these technological breakthroughs could give us the power to move into a world that is even more prosperous, while being more sustainable and more inclusive," reads an early version of remarks prepared by World Economic Forum founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab. "Alternatively, we could end up in a world where our economic, political and social systems are more rigid, more unequal and more conflicted." Despite their deep roots in government-funded research, the relationship between policymakers and the tech companies that have sprung from the civic-minded seeds they nurtured with financing has always been a thorny or even openly antagonistic one (cf.

It's hard to let go of loved ones, especially when they pass away suddenly. But thanks to rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, you soon may not have to let go. Case in point, Eugenia Kuyda, the co-founder and CEO of a Russian artificial intelligence startup called Luka Inc, who recently brought her best friend back to life as an AI chatbot. Kuyda lost her best friend, fellow tech entrepreneur Roman Mazurenko, in November 2015, but just three months after his tragic car accident, she sent the first text message to his AI personality, Roman. With no grave to visit, because he had been cremated, the young programmer, decided to use every digital memory of him, including photos, news articles and thousands of SMS text messages he had sent to her over the years, and feed them into a neural network to create an AI chatbot that many of those who knew Roman say sounds just like him.

Full Artificial Intelligence does not exist. Also called Super AI or Strong Artificial Intelligence, it refers to the possibility of creating an artificial consciousness. Artificial Intelligence per se, does exist and has great potential to assist and complement the human being in Vision, Speech and Machine Learning. AI is just coming out of laboratories, is involving in business and in a still very shy way, in homes. AI can help in Medicine, Finance and other areas, but it is important to monitor their use.

In July, the Pentagon announced it was putting 20 million towards counter-drone weapons, citing the threat from ISIS. Shortly afterwards, pictures surfaced of an American-made anti-drone rifle in Iraq. Rather than destroying a drone with bullets, the Battelle Drone Defender stops drones by jamming GPS and radio signals, causing it to lose contact with its pilot and, ideally, land. Going further, DARPA wants the United States to have anti-drone lasers by 2020, a goal every part of the military, from the Air Force to the Marine Corps, is independently working towards. Laser weapons are costly to build, but their appeals as an anti-drone weapon is that every shot of directed energy is cheap, so one laser system could shoot down many cheap drones, without spending expensive missiles or lots of bullets to do so. In the meantime, people and police departments are exploring everything from elaborate net-guns to eagles as a way to take down drones.

Scientists studying the effects of radiation in rodents say that astronauts' exposure to galactic cosmic rays could face a host of cognitive problems, including chronic dementia. The UC Irvine-led study, published in Scientific Reports, adds to a growing body of research on the harmful effects humans may reckon with as they venture out longer and deeper into space, whether on trips to Mars or potentially beyond. "The most logical conclusion to draw from these studies is that cosmic radiation exposure poses a real and potentially detrimental neurocognitive risk for prolonged deep space travel," the study authors wrote. "With the growing realization that space is a radioactive environment comes the need to more completely define these risks with more certainty through continued research." It's well-known that radiation can damage neural tissue and hurt cognitive function; cancer patients with brain tumors who need radiotherapy end up with what the study authors called "severe and progressive cognitive deficits."