Dean Pomerleau can still remember his first tussle with the black-box problem. The year was 1991, and he was making a pioneering attempt to do something that has now become commonplace in autonomous-vehicle research: teach a computer how to drive. This meant taking the wheel of a specially equipped Humvee military vehicle and guiding it through city streets, says Pomerleau, who was then a robotics graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. With him in the Humvee was a computer that he had programmed to peer through a camera, interpret what was happening out on the road and memorize every move that he made in response. Eventually, Pomerleau hoped, the machine would make enough associations to steer on its own.

Humans have so far failed to keep up with the scale and sophistication of cyber attacks -- so security companies are now starting to put their faith in artificial intelligence to protect networks from hackers. From Apple to Twitter, tech companies are snapping up artificial intelligence start-ups and using the technology to do everything from predicting customer behaviour to interacting with users via virtual personal assistants. For security companies, the growth of more sophisticated artificial intelligence promises the opportunity to catch up with hackers, who experts say have the upper hand. For example, as the industry struggles to find qualified engineers, many companies are turning to artificial intelligence to supplement their workforces. Tomer Weingarten, chief executive at security software provider SentinelOne, says cyber security is one of artificial intelligence's most promising applications. "It can look at all the behaviours and interactions that happen on a given machine, the malware [cyber attack software], what happens when someone is attacking you, to learn what'badness' looks like, how an attacker behaves and what they will do once they try to compromise the device," he says.

Neural attention has been applied successfully to a variety of different applications including natural language processing, vision, and memory. An attractive aspect of these neural models is their ability to extract relevant features from data, with minimal feature engineering.Brian Cheung is a PhD Student at UC Berkeley working with Professor Bruno Olshausen, as well as an Intern at Google Brain. By drawing inspiration from the fields of neuroscience and machine learning, he hopes to create systems which can solve complex vision tasks using attention and memory. At the Deep Learning Summit in Singapore, Brian will share expertise on the fovea as an emergent property of visual attention, ways we can extend this ability to learning interpretable structural features of the attention window itself, and finding conditions where these emergent properties are amplified or eliminated providing clues to their function. I asked him a few questions ahead of the summit to learn more.

Golden parachutes can't seem to stay out of the news. Last year, Jeff Smisek, the former CEO of United Airlines, received a separation payment of 4.875 million in cash along with additional equity awards and other benefits for a total of close to 37 million after being ousted from his company. Can it also transform the nation? Hillary Clinton was campaigning for her husband in January 1992 when she learned of the race's newest flare-up: Gennifer Flowers had just released tapes of phone calls with Bill Clinton to back up her claim they had had an affair. We tend to associate salads most closely with spring and summer, when fresh produce is at its peak and when we're all in the mood for lighter, fresher-tasting meals.

Besides being a major player in the earthquake prediction method discussed here, the ionosphere is important because it's the layer of the atmosphere that reflects electromagnetic waves back to Earth and enables radio communication. There was increased ionization over Japan before the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and a spike in radio wave emissions near Haiti before the 2010 quake there. Enough historical data linking ionospheric activity to earthquakes needs to be collected in order to generate patterns, and the patterns then need to be matched to real-time data. When the Tohoku earthquake hit, Tokyo residents received a one-minute warning via Japan's earthquake early warning system.

Healthcare organizations are struggling to find ways to manage the risks of massive data breaches, which have proven hard to detect, often taking months to discover. In 1996 the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted. The Accountability portion of the law requires that healthcare providers protect the privacy of patient health information and includes security measures that must be followed. Provider success has been mixed and has recently come under intense scrutiny due to the number and size of reportable breaches of health information. There are several major contributors to this increase. The first is the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

With dozens of public satellites in orbit and many more scheduled over the next decade, the size and complexity of geospatial imagery continues to grow. It has become increasingly difficult to manage this flood of data and use it to gain valuable insights. That's why we're excited to announce that we're bringing two of the most important collections of public, cost-free satellite imagery to Google Cloud: Landsat and Sentinel-2. The Landsat mission, developed under a joint program of the USGS and NASA, is the longest continuous space-based record of Earth's land in existence, dating back to 1972 with the Landsat 1 satellite. Landsat imagery sets the standard for Earth observation data due to the length of the mission and the rich data provided by its multispectral sensors.

Financial markets, throughout their evolution, have always been susceptible to manipulations and various unscrupulous activities. The history can be traced back as far as 600 BC when a Greek merchant borrowed money from public to grow corn. The lenders were assured of repayment along with interest when the product was sold. In case of failure to repay on time, the lenders could acquire merchant's cargo along with the boat. The fraud designed by the borrower was to sink the empty boat and keep both the money and corn.

Andre van Rüschen has no memory of the day he lost all feeling in his legs. After a car accident in Germany, he had a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down. When he woke up from a coma in a hospital in Hamburg, the doctors told him he would never walk again. But now, thirteen years later, van Rüschen is back on his feet, and he is training to compete as a pilot in the Powered Exoskeleton race at the Cybathlon in Zurich this month. In a high-rise office building on Leipziger Platz in Berlin, he slides out of his wheelchair onto a black leather pouf where a ReWalk exoskeleton sits folded.