“Hong Kong is to be the location for a startup accelerator-style center of innovation from famed tech-focused U.S. university MIT. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (better know as MIT) announced today that it will open its first ever ‘Innovation Node’ in the Asian city-state next summer. The center will be a startup incubator

“Pentagon leaders believe pairing soldiers with machines in combat will give American troops an edge on the battlefield of the future. The ambitious effort is the centerpiece of what the Pentagon is calling the “third offset,” a strategy that seeks to deter countries like Russia and China from waging war against

“Self-driving cars are already cruising the streets. But before they can become widespread, carmakers must solve an impossible ethical dilemma of algorithmic morality.” Source: Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill | MIT Technology Review

“When people who care about technology look back at the year 2015, they will remember October as the month when the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor collapsed. An international legal agreement that has been in place for 15 years was invalidated in a single day. On Oct. 6, the Court of Justice

“President Obama has signed an executive order calling for the US to build the world’s fastest computer by 2025. The supercomputer would be 20 times quicker than the current leading machine, which is in China. It would be capable of making one quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second –

“It’s called the blockchain, the technology that underlies the crypto­currency bitcoin. A blockchain is essentially a transaction ledger, much like the record-keeping systems employed by conventional financial firms, such as banks. Traditional ledgers are owned and maintained by one institution, and access to them is restricted to prevent tampering. A

“China’s military plans to produce nearly 42,000 land-based and sea-based unmanned weapons and sensor platforms as part of its continuing, large-scale military buildup, the Pentagon’s annual report on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) disclosed Friday. China currently operates several armed and unarmed drone aircraft and is developing long-range range unmanned

“Software upgrades and outdated applications that don’t work on new platforms are just a fact of life for people who use computers and other devices. DARPA, however, wants to change that by making software systems that can run for over a century without getting updates from their developers and despite

“A more immediate concern is that a machine doesn’t have to be superintelligent to do a lot of damage, if it is sufficiently empowered. Stock market flash crashes are one example: Hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost in minutes as a result of minor, difficult-to-completely-eliminate bugs. The clear

“The Amazon Machine Learning service is designed to give developers without machine learning background the tools to build smart, data-driven applications that can not only analyze what’s happening in real time or what happened in the past, but also predict what’s going to happen in the future (and that’s what’s most