In a world of smart machines that can drive cars, beat humans at chess, advise on medical diagnoses and perform a host of other tasks, imagine the next likely step as a smart machine as a people manager. As business investment in smart machines grows, "robobosses" will increasingly make workplace decisions that previously could only have been made by human managers. By 2018, more than three million workers globally will be supervised by robobosses, according to Frances Karamouzis, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. These smart machine managers will look at data derived from worker performance in new ways because of their ability to dispassionately discover previously undetected relationships and correlations, test their hypotheses, and then elevate them to production status. "Supervisor duties are increasingly shifting toward monitoring worker accomplishments through measurements of performance that are directly tied to output and customer evaluation," explained Ms. Karamouzis.

It's probably years away from being used in West Virginia, but computer-based artificial intelligence appears to be helping law enforcement officers find wildlife poachers. Researchers are combining AI with something called "game theory" to plan patrols based on the topography, game movements and past instances of illegal activity in a given area. "In most parks, ranger patrols are poorly planned, reactive rather than pro-active, and habitual," said Fei Fang, a Ph.D. candidate in the computer science department at the University of Southern California. In other words, the horse is usually out of the barn by the time the law arrives -- and if the law does happen to arrive before law breakers do their thing, officers execute their patrols so predictably the bad guys often are able to avoid them. The National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office are supporting research into using AI to put patrols on the ground before poachers have a chance to poach.

Conversations about basic income, a government-funded salary given to every citizen, used to take place in the dingy offices of extremist left-wing politicians, or in the campus dorm rooms of idealistic students determined to fix the problems of the previous generation. The conversation was about social responsibility. It wasn't an economic case, it was a moral one. A sharp uptake in technology designed to automate jobs and replace human workers is bringing new voices to this old debate. Today's society could be disastrously affected by artificial intelligence and growing automation, and scientists and technologists are looking for ways to stop that damage before it happens.

A California-based start-up is building drones to drop medical supplies in some of the most remote areas of Rwanda, putting the emerging technology where it can do some real good. Here's the challenge, according to Zipline International, a Silicon Valley robotics start-up that is developing and building the drones: somewhere in the neighborhood of two billion people lack adequate access to essential medical products because they live in inaccessible areas. As a result, almost 3 million children under age five die every year. Initially, the company's drone service is slated to deliver blood to 21 transfusion clinics across the western half of Rwanda, one of the poorest nations in the world. Then it will expand service to the remainder of the country in early 2017, Justin Hamilton, a company spokesperson, said.

Dung beetles record a mental image of the positions of the Sun, the Moon and the stars and use the snapshot to navigate, according to researchers. Scientists in Sweden found that the beetles capture the picture of the sky while dancing on a ball of manure. As they roll away with their malodorous prize, the beetles compare the stored image with their current location. The beetles' navigational skills could aid the development of driverless vehicles, the researchers suggest. Previous studies have shown that dung beetles have an amazing ability to navigate by the light of the Milky Way.

Let's say that the average lifespan of a human being is L 70 years. The probability of dying this year, at any given age y, is p(y). Let's assume that the number of people that are y years old is M(y), and that p(y) is a monotonic decreasing function of age. If we have 7 billion human beings on Earth today, given these assumptions, how many will die this year? Now the question is: what is the lower and upper bounds for N (number of people who will die this year), regardless of the functions M() and p(), provided p() is monotonic decreasing, and that average age at death is L 70 years.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an emotionally loaded term that strikes fascination into some and fear into others. But if we strip it of fantasy and ignore cyborgs and apocalypse, there is a near-term, practical side of AI that is already unfolding. Most humans can recognise a chair because they have learnt what a chair is – they can identify thousands of examples of chairs even if they have never seen that chair before. Instead of memorising every image of what a chair could be, humans learn what a chair is and then apply that to new images and examples of chairs. But how does a computer learn what a chair is?

WASHINGTON – U.S. special operations forces working with African partners called in an airstrike against the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabaab group in Somalia on Thursday, killing five, the Pentagon said. Jeff Davis said U.S. troops were advising and assisting Ugandan troops from the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) in southern Somalia, west of Mogadishu. The AMISOM troops were raiding an illegal Shabaab roadblock where the jihadis were extorting payments from drivers. "They came under fire from the al-Shabaab militants, and we called in an airstrike in their defense," Davis said. A U.S. defense official said the strike was conducted by drone.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a trend as a "current movement in a particular direction," however, VLAB keynote speaker and Venture Capitalist Ann Winblad likes to say "wave" instead. The companies her firm Hummer Winblad Venture Partners (HWVP) invests in are typically riding enterprise software waves. "Waves form far out into the ocean and can go very deep," said Winblad comparing nature's waves to what's happening in the software industry. Big data is a term for data sets that are so large and complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate to handle them. An example of a company riding this wave is MuleSoft, an HWVP investment. They make it easy to connect applications, data and devices.

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, that number has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this steep decline. Humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction, whether for their skins, medicine or for trophy hunting. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live. Human patrols serve as the most direct form of protection of endangered animals, especially in large national parks.