The U.S. unveiled the prototype of an autonomous, experimental warship Thursday that would drastically reduce the cost of operations at sea and mark progress in the move toward robotic warfare. It comes as the military has increasingly aimed to boost unmanned technology to counter Chinese and Russian investments. "This is an inflection point," Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Work told Reuters in an interview. "This is the first time we've ever had a totally robotic, trans-oceanic-capable ship." Work said he hoped unmanned ships would be stationed in the western Pacific within as few as five years.

The Swedish startup company eEducation Albert is now launching an artificial intelligence application with focus on helping pupils with their homework in math during the last years of primary school. The startup-company intend to expand to other education-levels as well as the international market during the coming years. At the moment AI Albert is filled all available answers to questions to make good work with the pupils and the next week a paid version of the application is being launched to 65 schools in Sweden. "We have created a digital person that we have feeded with advanced logic and knowledge on how you teach the textbook the pupil is sitting with", says one of the founders Arta Mandegari in an interview with di.se. He and the other founder Salman Eskandari is graduates from the Chalmers, technological university of Gothenburg.

Gone are the days when archaeology was just a whole load of sand, dust and bones. These days the real explorers are all about the robotics. As technology has progressed, archaeological tools have become more sophisticated, including the potential to undertake scientific investigation with zero disturbances of the surrounding material. With the use of "non-invasive archeology" amazing discoveries can be made, such as the recent ground penetrating survey that appeared to indicate Shakespeare's skull might not be in his tomb. While these developments are all very useful, non-invasive technologies cannot, and never will, provide perfect resolution of the features within hidden spaces.

Social networks are awash with information. Relief agencies such the Kenyan chapter of the Red Cross are already leveraging information from Twitter to track and respond to emergencies. The innumerable amount of information generated within a crisis requires faster processing to extract actionable information. At iHub Research, we studied the flow of information on social media during the March 2013 Kenyan general election and developed a framework looking at the '3Vs of crowdsourcing,' a functional approach to validating, verifying and checking viability of crowdsourced information. As part of the research, machine learning techniques were deployed to sift through 2.6 million tweets and remove non-pertinent data, which narrowed down to 12,000 useful tweets.

An Iranian-born video-game designer wants players to relive history with a new game that gives users a first-person perspective on the 1979 Iranian revolution. "1979 Revolution: Black Friday" lets gamers experience the tumultuous events through the eyes of a photojournalist who is watching his country unravel. Released Tuesday by indie game designer iNK Stories, the game has garned acclaim for its accurate depiction of the revolution. The lead on the project, Navid Khonsari -- a former Rockstar Games designer who helped developed the popular "Grand Theft Auto" series – says he wanted to create a game that is not only historically accurate but could also lead to a new genre of video games. The game offers multiple scenarios based on the revolution, but does not include the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

It took just two tweets for an internet troll going by the name of Ryan Poole to get Tay to become antisemitic. Tay was a "chatbot" set up by Microsoft on 23 March, a computer-generated personality to simulate the online ramblings of a teenage girl. Poole suggested to Tay: "The Jews prolly did 9/11. I don't really know but it seems likely." Shortly thereafter Tay tweeted "Jews did 9/11" and called for a race war. In the 24 hours it took Microsoft to shut her down, Tay had abused President Obama, suggested Hitler was right, called feminism a disease and delivered a stream of online hate.

An exotic stranger needs help, and you're the only one able to provide it. On any given day, a handful of those pleas still file into your email's spam folder. And if you replace "collect an inheritance" with "find true love," they're an increasing menace for dating apps and services. But they are an increasingly important front for criminals, who in turn use increasingly sophisticated methods to snare their marks, and take them for whatever they can. A recently released list, by a fraud-busting company called Scamalytics, of the top lines and photos used in profiles by online dating grifters shows that while the range of sophistication may vary, the end goal is always the same: To fleece romance-seekers out of their money.

Learning machines are capable of working ever more autonomously on ever more complex tasks. In this article, I explore whether it would it be smart for humankind to develop an'intelligent gun'. There are an estimated 875 million civilian, law-enforcement, and military firearms in the world, of which 650 million are in the hands of civilians, either legally or illegally[1]. Given the plethora of high-profile gun attacks in recent months and years – particularly in the US but also in France, Norway, Pakistan and Tunisia to name but a few – it is disturbingly easy to imagine gunmen on the loose in a school or at a public event, shooting indiscriminately and leaving casualties in their wake. Imagine how different things could be if a gun had artificial intelligence built in to it, turning it into an intelligent gun.

Virtual reality promises immersive experiences that sound like sweepstakes prizes. For one group of designers, though, VR shouldn't give you heaven, but hardship. After researching neuroscience studies on "embodiment," the cognitive illusion of being someone else, design collective BeAnother Lab set out to give people a taste of adversity. A performer wears a vest with a first-person camera, which streams their perspective to a user's Oculus Rift, along with a voiceover about their experience. As users interact with what they see in their headset, the performer mimics their movements, and the participants can witness in a very real way what it's like to be the person whose story they're listening to.

The dawn of drones is ushering in a fundamental shift in how we do things--it's affecting everything from lifestyle to privacy, logistics to entertainment. Yet one obvious (but largely untapped) potential use for unmanned aerial vehicles is its capacity to aid emergency services. While not completely unheard of (there have been talks of using drone technology for search and rescue missions or combat poaching), this is the first time that its capability is actually going to be tested. And according to a recent announcement, Rwanda is going to be the first country that will make use of delivery drones to ferry medical supplies around the country. Zipline, a drone startup, is behind the initiative, working in partnership with the Rwandan government.