Can a robot be creative? Advances in cloud robotics--machines connected to supercomputers in the cloud--have given self-driving cars, surgical robots, and other "smart" devices tremendous powers of computation. But can a robot, even one supercharged with artificial intelligence, be creative? Ken Goldberg is the ideal person to ask. For one thing, when he was getting his Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Goldberg built a robot that painted. For another, Goldberg, 53, is a computer engineer, roboticist, and artist himself. He grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he forged his creative path.

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction. Ex Machina, a Hollywood blockbuster made on a 15 million budget, tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer, the eccentric billionaire Nathan Bateman who built a fictional search engine called Blue Book, to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence, which essentially determines whether a computer can trick a human into believing she is having a conversation with another human. Everything in our online life is indexed. Every idle tweet, status update, or curious search query feeds the Google database.

CIA Director John Brennan participates in a session at the third annual Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 8, 2016. WASHINGTON -- CIA Director John Brennan warned on Sunday that Russia has "exceptionally capable and sophisticated" computer capabilities and that the U.S. must be on guard. "I think that we have to be very, very wary of what the Russians might be trying to do in terms of collecting information in a cyber realm, as well as what they might want to do with it," he told CBS' "Face the Nation" on the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. On the terrorism threat, Brennan said the U.S. government is much better now at sharing information. He praised Saudi Arabia as "a good example of how foreign intelligence services can work against these terrorist organizations."

Dubai: Dubai Municipality has launched robots to help save lives on public beaches in Dubai, a first such initiative in the Middle East. The robot, which can reach a speed of 35kmph or approximately 12 times the speed of a human lifeguard, works by using remote control technology, said Dubai Municipality. The robot is about 125cm tall and can cover a distance of more than 130km. The robots are designed to withstand the worst climatic conditions. They can be used in the event of high waves or heavy ocean currents that are difficult for the human lifeguard to conduct rescue operations.

Laughter is weird - and we do it a lot. One study found that people laugh seven times for every 10 minutes of conversation. We don't do it when we think we do. It's been found that if you ask people what makes them laugh they'll talk about jokes and humour, but we laugh most frequently when we are with other people - and hardly ever at jokes. It's a social emotion and we use it to make and maintain social bonds.

I don't think the future of VR looks like video games; I don't think it looks like cinematic VR; I think it looks like stories from our real lives. It's the most amazing afternoon you've ever had. For one person, it might be what we call a rom-com, for another it might be an action movie. For another, it might be something we don't have a movie genre preexisting for. It might be just exploring.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but this cliché may not apply when it comes to making decision about friends. Researchers have found that individuals feel it is justified to ostracize others from a group if they appear cold and incompetent - a look deemed'resting b*tch face'. These findings suggest that people with this appearance are perceived as troublemakers or selfish and need to be excluded in order to restore harmony and cohesion in the group. A study has found individuals feel it is justified to ostracize others from a group if they appear cold and incompetent - a look deemed'resting b*tch face'. The University of Basel reveals that humans really do judge a book by its cover.

This is the last part of our special series on Artificial Intelligence (AI). If you are catching it for the first time you can check out our early posts here, here and here where we build on the bigger idea behind AI. In this series, I have seized moments to highlight just how quickly AI is unfolding. The interesting bit is that the developments silently running in the background, like computer processes, for the most part, are away from everyday headlines but it's still a big deal. From my point of view, judging by the number of AI startups that have come up and are being acquired, we are in the middle of an AI gold rush right now which some have characterized as the AI spring . This hurry is also the reason behind key backers and AI enthusiasts such as Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, have been a sounding alarm.

The Department of Justice reportedly gave immunity to a computer expert who deleted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's emails during its investigation into her private email server despite being ordered by Congress to keep them. The New York Times reported Thursday that the Justice Department's immunity deal with Paul Combetta likely means that Republican lawmakers' calls for federal authorities to investigate his deletions will go unheard. The top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, had asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Clinton, her lawyers or Combetta obstructed justice when the emails were deleted in March 2015. The FBI said when Clinton's team called Platte River Networks – the Denver-based IT company where Combetta worked – in March 2015, Combetta said he realized he didn't follow a December 2014 directive from Clinton's lawyers to have the emails deleted. He then used BleachBit to delete the messages in the days after the meeting with her lawyers.