Robots are rapidly becoming more and more lifelike and unrecognizable from humans. Eerily human-like robots built by China's University of Science and Technology stole the show over at the World Robot Conference in Beijing last week. You may have already seen Jia Jia, a super realistic robot capable of micro facial expressions and basic conversation with humans. Jia Jia can also recognize faces, identify your gender and age, and detect your facial expressions. But a newcomer robot also made a debut: the university unveiled a new male robot that can accurately paint calligraphy.

The US has confirmed the death of a senior al-Qaeda leader targeted by a US drone strike in north eastern Afghanistan last month. Farouq al-Qahtani, the group's leader in the area, was killed two weeks ago in what the Pentagon described as a precision strike. Saudi-born al-Qahtani was placed on a US list of most wanted terrorists in February. He was said to be one of al-Qaeda's senior plotters against the US. Saudi-born al-Qahtani, a Qatari national, was also accused of involvement in plots targeting Europe.

This is the first of a multi-part series explaining the fundamentals of deep learning by long-time tech journalist Michael Copeland. Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true, it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to.

Nonconvex optimization problems such as the ones in training deep neural networks suffer from a phenomenon called saddle point proliferation. This means that there are a vast number of high error saddle points present in the loss function. Second order methods have been tremendously successful and widely adopted in the convex optimization community, while their usefulness in deep learning remains limited. This is due to two problems: computational complexity and the methods being driven towards the high error saddle points. We introduce a novel algorithm specially designed to solve these two issues, providing a crucial first step to take the widely known advantages of Newton's method to the nonconvex optimization community, especially in high dimensional settings.

Back in 2014, a laser gun (the Laser Weapon System, or LaWS), went into service on the warship USS Ponce. Created as a defense system against drones, more laser weapons are making their way to the battlefield. But there's a problem: Their flying targets have begun to defend themselves. It was back in 1973 that an Air Force experimental laser first shot down a drone. Ever since, drone targets have been used to prove that laser weapons can effectively take down airborne objects.

Blizzard Entertainment pioneered e-sports with its "Starcraft" franchise more than a decade ago. Now, with "Overwatch," the Irvine video game maker wants to bring to e-sports the wealth and recognition that sports such as soccer, football and basketball generate. To do so, Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Santa Monica's Activision Blizzard Inc., announced Friday it will adopt hallmarks of traditional sports leagues to form an e-sports league more instantly relatable than others spawned in the last few years. Blizzard envisions professional teams for the shooting game "Overwatch" based in a major cities worldwide. Players would be scouted and signed through free agency and receive guaranteed salaries and benefits.

Artificial intelligence is creeping into our daily lives in unexpected ways. It is not just transforming online services with innovations such as Apple's Siri voice recognition app, which will send emails when you instruct it to, or Microsoft's Skype translation services, which enable you to communicate online with people whose languages you do not speak. Wider applications of artificial intelligence, such as image and pattern recognition (classifying data or objects based on common features), natural language processing (how computers understand and respond to human speech) and machine learning (when software learns something without being programmed to do so) will soon be featuring in many products and services. Pest control In recent years, pest control company Rentokil Initial has been experimenting with rodent traps equipped with sensors and WiFi. These send data to a command centre, which the company has built with partners Google and PA Consulting.

One of Blizzard Entertainment's hottest video games is making the jump into a professional sports league. The studio, a division of video game publisher Activision Blizzard, announced Friday the launch of Overwatch League, a professional video gaming league kicking off its inaugural season during the second half of 2017. Details of the league were revealed during Blizzcon, the studio's annual fan event in Anaheim, Calif. Blizzard says the league will combine competitive video gaming -- better known as eSports -- with hallmarks of professional sports leagues like the National Football League, complete with teams based in various cities worldwide featuring owners who will cultivate team and player development. "Nothing like this has ever really been done before," said Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick during an interview with USA TODAY.

Late-stage production problems with GoPro Inc.'s newest camera briefly caused the company's shares to falter. GoPro's stock dipped from $11.94 at close Thursday to as low as $9.90 Friday before rebounding to $11.15 around 11:30 a.m. "Demand is very strong," said Anthony Bates, GoPro's president. "We just can't catch up to the forecasted demand and that's what you see reflected." The waterproof camera, which costs $399, has voice control and ultra-high definition video quality.

That's what makes it so useful – but it's also what makes it so dangerous. As WhatsApp and other chat apps have grown, they've also picked up their unfair share of scams. They come in many different forms, and are often very convincing. But the advice for steering clear and staying safe is the same as it is everywhere else on the internet, really. Just make sure that you stay vigilant and don't fall for anything that seems too good or too worrying to be true.