Scientists from Google and its health-tech subsidiary Verily have discovered a new way to assess a person’s risk of heart disease using machine learning.

By analyzing scans of the back of a patient’s eye, the company’s software is able to accurately deduce data, including an individual’s age, blood pressure, and whether or not they smoke. This can then be used to predict their risk of suffering a major cardiac event — such as a heart attack — with roughly the same accuracy as current leading methods. The algorithm potentially makes it quicker and easier for doctors to analyze a patient’s cardiovascular risk, as it doesn’t require a blood test. 

The first “this could change everything” AI story of the year comes to us in the form of (yet another) AI that’s supposed to read minds. This time however, there’s no parlor trick. We’re one step closer to being able to broadcast our thoughts to a screen, thanks to artificial intelligence.

Japanese scientists have created AI capable of reading a person’s brainwaves and displaying an image based on what they’re looking at. If a person is staring at a picture of the letter “A” the AI will successfully create an image that resembles a fuzzy version of that. It’s actually reading the person’s mind – sort of. 

Google’s artificial intelligence group, DeepMind, has unveiled the latest incarnation of its Go-playing program, AlphaGo – an AI so powerful that it derived thousands of years of human knowledge of the game before inventing better moves of its own, all in the space of three days.

Named AlphaGo Zero, the AI program has been hailed as a major advance because it mastered the ancient Chinese board game from scratch, and with no human help beyond being told the rules. In games against the 2015 version, which famously beat Lee Sedol, the South Korean grandmaster, in the following year, AlphaGo Zero won 100 to 0. The feat marks a milestone on the road to general-purpose AIs. 

A new video of what would appear to be one of Apple’s “Project Titan” self-driving cars was posted to Twitter last night, and it looks much different than it did the last time we saw it. The car appears to be outfitted with standard third-party sensors and hardware, including (count ‘em) six Velodyne-made LIDAR sensors, several radar units, and a number of cameras — all encased in Apple-esque white plastic.

The video was captured by someone who knows his stuff about autonomous vehicles: MacCallister Higgins, co-founder of self-driving startup Voyage (that just launched its own pilot ride-hailing project in a San Jose retirement community). 

If you’ve seen the TV series "Person of Interest," then you might recall that during the opening narration from Season One, Harold Finch would say, “You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything.”

I was reminded of that when I saw a GIF that appears as if it could be a Chinese version of the show. It is a CCTV clip showing current surveillance in China. Thanks to artificial intelligence, China’s sadly named “Sky Net” system demonstrates just how creepy real-time surveillance can be.

Last week, the credit reporting agency Equifax announced that malicious hackers had leaked the personal information of 143 million people in their system. That’s reason for concern, of course, but if a hacker wants to access your online data by simply guessing your password, you’re probably toast in less than an hour.

Now, there’s more bad news: Scientists have harnessed the power of artificial intelligence to create a program that, combined with existing tools, figured more than a quarter of the passwords from a set of more than 43 million LinkedIn profiles. Yet the researchers say the technology may also be used to beat baddies at their own game. 

A group of AI experts from The University of Nottingham and Kingston University managed to create a new method by which two-dimensional images of faces can be converted into 3D using machine learning.

The researchers trained a convolutional neural-network to perform the task by feeding it tons of data on people’s faces. From there it figured out how to guess what a new face looks like from an previously unseen pic, including parts that it can’t see in the photograph. The 3D computer vision project really has to be seen to be believed, and you can try it out in a nifty demo here. The website doesn’t really do the full technology justice, but it’s bloody cool. 

The CIA is making use of several artificial intelligence programs that access, gather, and retrieve social media intelligence for the agency.

In a statement reported by Futurism, Dawn Meyerriecks, the deputy director for technology development with the CIA said at the Intelligence and National Security Summit that the agency had over 137 AI projects as part of "In-Q-Tel" where a large portion of it is created through collaborations with Silicon Valley firms. With greater ability and power to analyse data, AI programs thus created have reportedly taken to social media platforms and "comb through" all public records –all the stuff that is posted by people using social media.

Elon Musk’s thoughts on artificial intelligence are pretty well known at this point. He famously compared work on AI to “summoning the demon,” and has warned time and time again that the technology poses an existential risk to humanity.

At a gathering of US governors this weekend, he repeated these sentiments, but also stressed something he says is even more important: that governments need to start regulating AI now. “I have exposure to the very cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it,” Musk told attendees at the National Governors Association summer meeting on Saturday. 

Windows Fall Creators Update will come with a hefty serving of security upgrades, made timely by the increasingly rampant cyberattacks targeting the platform these days.

Microsoft has revealed how the upcoming major update will level up Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, a Win 10 enterprise service that flags early signs of infection. Windows enterprise director Rob Lefferts said the upgrade will use data from Redmond's cloud-based services to create an AI anti-virus that will make ATP much better at preventing cyberattacks.