A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox. February is only just gone, and already 2017 is shaping up to be a year full of big ideas and ambitions. The Future of Life Institute, for example, just published the Asilomar AI principles: 23 guidelines to ensure AI developments are beneficial to humanity. They are calling for shared responsibility and caution against an AI arms race.

A trio of university students is giving Indian startups unprecedented access to Silicon Valley. In April 2016, 20-year-old Abhinav Kukreja and two of his fellow freshman students at the University of California, Berkeley, Anish Prabhu, and Aryaman Dalmia, created an incubator called Moonshot that connects Indian startups with experts, funds, and talent from Silicon Valley. Its four-month program gives companies access to over 20 mentors in India and California, exposes them to various venture capitalists and angel investors, and provides interns. The first batch of startups Moonshot incubated last year included student benefits platform Frapp, marketplace ListUP, small-business cash-flow management startup Numberz, home appliance automation company Hombot, online B2B billing solutions portal Pumpcharge, and real estate and rental management service Azuro. For their second round in January 2017, Moonshot zeroed in on startups "advancing science and technology, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and companies that have a positive social impact," Kukreja, a computer science and statistics major, said.

Peter Shulman, an associate history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, was lecturing on the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s when a student asked an odd question: Was President Warren Harding a member of the KKK? He confessed that he was not aware of that allegation, but that Harding had been in favor of anti-lynching legislation, so it seemed unlikely. But then a second student pulled out his phone and announced that yes, Harding had been a Klan member, and so had four other presidents. For most of its history, Google did not answer questions. Users typed in what they were looking for and got a list of web pages that might contain the desired information.

This week's milestones in the history of technology include the invention of the telephone, automating telephone exchanges and textile weaving, and the idea of searching for information through associative links. The first-ever nationally televised awards ceremony devoted to the Internet is broadcast. U.S. patent 174,465 for "Improvement in telegraphy" is issued to 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell. This was the patent for his invention of the telephone, covering "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically ... by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound." E-book publisher Rosetta Books wins the lawsuit brought against it by Random House for acquiring titles directly from authors.

Sending tourists for a trip around the moon is the latest big idea launched by Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley star known for turning his passions into visionary enterprises. Musk has become one of the United States' best-known innovators. He was a founder of payments company PayPal, electric carmaker Tesla Motors and SpaceX, maker and launcher of rockets and spacecraft. SpaceX recently announced that two private citizens have paid money to be sent around the Moon in what would mark the farthest humans have ever traveled to deep space since the 1970s. In a sector where entrepreneurs often speak of "moonshots," Musk is one of the biggest dreamers.

More than two years after a multi-sided civil war erupted inside Yemen that allowed Al Qaeda's local franchise to amass power and seize territory, President Trump has directed the Pentagon to embark on a complicated counter-terrorism campaign. Trump's decision, just six weeks into his presidency, intends to reverse the largely unchecked expansion across southern Yemen of the group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The willingness to expand counter-terrorism operations inside war-torn Yemen was the latest signal that Trump is more willing to defer to military commanders on national security policy than President Obama, who was criticized publicly by three of his four Defense secretaries and privately by uniformed officers for micromanaging the military. Over two days this week, armed drones and warplanes conducted more than 30 airstrikes against suspected Al Qaeda positions in three Yemeni provinces, marking the first U.S. attacks in the country since an ill-fated Navy SEAL raid in January that killed two dozen civilians, including women and children, Al Qaeda militants and Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens. The aerial bombardment is expected to continue into the coming week.

More than two years after a multi-sided civil war erupted inside Yemen that allowed Al Qaeda's local franchise to amass power and seize territory, President Trump has directed the Pentagon to embark on a complicated counter-terrorism campaign. Trump's decision, just six weeks into his presidency, intends to reverse the largely unchecked expansion across southern Yemen of the group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The willingness to expand counter-terrorism operations inside war-torn Yemen was the latest signal that Trump is more willing to defer to military commanders on national security policy than President Obama, who was criticized publicly by three of his four Defense secretaries and privately by uniformed officers for micromanaging the military. Over two days this week, armed drones and warplanes conducted more than 30 airstrikes against suspected Al Qaeda positions in three Yemeni provinces, marking the first U.S. attacks in the country since an ill-fated Navy SEAL raid in January that killed two dozen civilians, including women and children, Al Qaeda militants and Chief Petty Officer William "Ryan" Owens. The aerial bombardment is expected to continue into the coming week.

Sequential quantile estimation refers to incorporating observations into quantile estimates in an incremental fashion thus furnishing an online estimate of one or more quantiles at any given point in time. Sequential quantile estimation is also known as online quantile estimation. This area is relevant to the analysis of data streams and to the one-pass analysis of massive data sets. Applications include network traffic and latency analysis, real time fraud detection and high frequency trading. We introduce new techniques for online quantile estimation based on Hermite series estimators in the settings of static quantile estimation and dynamic quantile estimation. In the static quantile estimation setting we apply the existing Gauss-Hermite expansion in a novel manner. In particular, we exploit the fact that Gauss-Hermite coefficients can be updated in a sequential manner. To treat dynamic quantile estimation we introduce a novel expansion with an exponentially weighted estimator for the Gauss-Hermite coefficients which we term the Exponentially Weighted Gauss-Hermite (EWGH) expansion. These algorithms go beyond existing sequential quantile estimation algorithms in that they allow arbitrary quantiles (as opposed to pre-specified quantiles) to be estimated at any point in time. In doing so we provide a solution to online distribution function and online quantile function estimation on data streams. In particular we derive an analytical expression for the CDF and prove consistency results for the CDF under certain conditions. In addition we analyse the associated quantile estimator. Simulation studies and tests on real data reveal the Gauss-Hermite based algorithms to be competitive with a leading existing algorithm.

With performance falling, investors fleeing and offices closing, hedge funds had a rough 2016. But San Francisco-based Numerai was just getting started. Instead of relying on the genius of a single person or small team, the firm uses encrypted data sets to crowdsource stock market prediction models built with artificial intelligence from 12,000 anonymous data scientists worldwide who compete to win bitcoin. And if that flew over your head, the main takeaways are that this hedge fund has orders of magnitude more data scientists trying to improve its investing strategy than the biggest name hedge funds today, and what makes the firm possible is a confluence of technologies that didn't even exist a few years ago -- primarily in cryptography and artificial intelligence. Now the one-year-old company, founded by 29-year-old South African Richard Craib (a Forbes 30 Under 30 designee) and funded by the likes of Union Square Ventures, is launching its own cryptocurrency, the Numeraire. It is the first virtual currency issued by a hedge fund and one of the first released by a company (rather than a group of developers or a non-profit).

President Donald Trump has ordered the U.S. military to step up in its fight against Islamic terror groups in Africa after various Al Qaeda offshoot groups have increased their militant actions in the massive continent, according to multiple reports. Somalia was named in Trump's executive order on immigration that banned travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries. Adding a metaphorical insult to injury, three Islamic militant groups based in Mali have reportedly pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda this week, bolstering Al Qaeda's growing grip on Africa. While the U.S. government had not immediately addressed the reports of the Al Qaeda merger of sorts, experts in global conflict told the Associated Press that steps were already being taken to quell Al-Shabab's activities in the East African nation of Somalia. "The concern in Washington has been mounting for some time now," Rashid Abdi, an analyst with the International Crisis Grou "The Trump administration is simply reiterating what has been policy, with slight variations. U.S. special forces are already on the ground. Drone attacks have been scaled up."