FILE- In this March 1, 2013 file photo, anti-Syrian President Bashar Assad protesters hold the Jabhat al-Nusra flag, as they shout slogans during a demonstration, at Kafranbel town, in Idlib province, northern Syria. Insurgent groups like Hezbollah and the Islamic State group in Syria have learned how to weaponize surveillance drones and use them against each other, adding a new twist to the country's civil war, a U.S. military official and others say. FILE- In this March 1, 2013 file photo, anti-Syrian President Bashar Assad protesters hold the Jabhat al-Nusra flag, as they shout slogans during a demonstration, at Kafranbel town, in Idlib province, northern Syria. Insurgent groups like Hezbollah and the Islamic State group in Syria have learned how to weaponize surveillance drones and use them against each other, adding a new twist to the country's civil war, a U.S. military official and others say. WASHINGTON (AP) -- Militant groups like Hezbollah and the Islamic State group have learned how to weaponize surveillance drones and use them against each other and coalition forces, adding a new twist to the wars in Iraq and Syria, the Pentagon said Wednesday.

The two covered the ethical implications of machine learning, diversity in tech, neurodiversity, the collapse of funding for basic research, precision medicine, high-speed trading, cybersecurity, robots taking our jobs, internet regulation, space travel, and how Star Trek informed Obama's worldview. OBAMA: I think there's no doubt that developing international norms, protocols, and verification mechanisms around cybersecurity generally, and AI in particular, is in its infancy. Part of what makes this an interesting problem is that the line between offense and defense is pretty blurred. And at a time when there's been a lot of mistrust built up about government, that makes it difficult. When you have countries around the world who see America as the preeminent cyberpower, now is the time for us to say, "We're willing to restrain ourselves if you are willing to restrain yourselves."

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

FILE- In this March 1, 2013 file photo, anti-Syrian President Bashar Assad protesters hold the Jabhat al-Nusra flag, as they shout slogans during a demonstration, at Kafranbel town, in Idlib province, northern Syria. Insurgent groups like Hezbollah and the Islamic State group in Syria have learned how to weaponize surveillance drones and use them against each other, adding a new twist to the country's civil war, a U.S. military official and others say. FILE- In this March 1, 2013 file photo, anti-Syrian President Bashar Assad protesters hold the Jabhat al-Nusra flag, as they shout slogans during a demonstration, at Kafranbel town, in Idlib province, northern Syria. Insurgent groups like Hezbollah and the Islamic State group in Syria have learned how to weaponize surveillance drones and use them against each other, adding a new twist to the country's civil war, a U.S. military official and others say. WASHINGTON (AP) -- Militant groups like Hezbollah and the Islamic State group have learned how to weaponize surveillance drones and use them against each other, adding a new twist to Syria's civil war, a U.S. military official and others say.

Marc Vollenweider is the CEO and co-founder of Evalueserve. As a former partner at McKinsey & Company in Zurich and India, Marc developed a deep interest in the world of data analytics, particularly how human minds and smart machines can successfully complement each other. He saw the potential for companies to enhance productivity, shorten their time-to-market, improve quality, and gain new capabilities by leveraging mind machine. Marc's fascination with innovation has led to the establishment of a series of internal ventures at Evalueserve. He is the co-inventor of the digital model of InsightBee, Evalueserve's new pay-as-you-go research and analytics solution.

In a head-to-head comparison, human doctors with access to the same information about medical history and symptoms as was put into a symptom checker got the diagnosis right 72 percent of the time, compared to 34 percent for the apps. The 23 online symptom checkers, some accessed via websites and others available as apps, included those offered by Web MD and the Mayo Clinic in the U.S. and the Isabel Symptom Checker in the U.K. "The current symptom checkers, I was not surprised do not outperform doctors," said senior author Dr. Ateev Mehrotra of Harvard Medical School in Boston. But in reality computers and human doctors may both be involved in a diagnosis, rather than pitted against each other, Mehrotra told Reuters Health. The researchers used a web platform called Human Dx to distribute 45 clinical vignettes - sets of medical history and symptom information - to 234 physicians. Doctors could not do a physical examination on the hypothetical patient or run tests, they had only the information provided.

Over a decade ago, Stanford roboticists started experimenting with ways of using arrays of very small spines to help climbing robots grip rough surfaces. These microspine grippers have been used on all kinds of research robots since then, and recently, NASA has decided that microspines are the best way for spacecraft to grab onto asteroids. Yesterday at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in South Korea, Shiquan Wang from Stanford presented a new microspine-based palm design for rock-climbing robots. These palms use microspines that can support four times the weight of previous designs, which will be enough to turn JPL's RoboSimian DRC robot into a champion rock climber. And we're not talking just scrambling up slopes: It'll be able to scale vertical rock faces, and even clamber around overhangs.

Thousands of TurtleBots are out in the world right now, providing a (mostly) straightforward and (mostly) affordable way to get started with ROS. They're (mostly) portable and (mostly) extendable, allowing you (with a limited amount of inconvenience) to modify the robot to keep up with your needs. TurtleBot 2 is a great platform (I certainly love mine), but its size and cost usually restrict it to people who already have some ROS experience, and know that a TurtleBot is something worth investing in. For people who want to get started with ROS but aren't prepared to make as much of an investment, there just aren't a lot of options with the same kind of community and support that you get with TurtleBot. At ROSCon this past weekend, the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) and South Korean robot maker ROBOTIS are tackling these problems by announcing a shiny new version of TurtleBot: TurtleBot 3. TB3 is small enough to fit into a backpack, and with a single-board computer instead of a netbook and just two Dynamixel motors driving a pair of wheels, it's both simpler than previous TurtleBots and significantly cheaper.

It turns out Mafia III is the game I worried it might be, just not in the ways I expected. It's hard to see at first, given how long it takes to unpack its slow pyramidal crime climb, or how well and powerfully told its mob-revenge story is. It has many charms, in other words. But as a game (for PC, Mac, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One), it's mired in monotony, and more than a few play-futzing bugs. A stirring cinematic opening that's smartly delivered documentary-style from the vantage of people reflecting on what happened initially obscures this.

Artificial intelligence continues to have its moment in the spotlight, with a surge of interest in startups and efforts from huge tech companies to push the boundaries of how we might best use machine learning, computer vision and other areas of AI in the future. The latest development on that front comes from China's Huawei, which today announced that it would form a research partnership with UC Berkeley focused on AI, and fund it to the initial tune of 1 million. The alliance, between Huawei's Noah's Ark Laboratory and Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), is being billed as a "strategic partnership into basic research", and it will cover areas like deep learning, reinforcement learning, machine learning, natural language processing and computer vision. "The two parties believe that this strategic partnership will fuel the advancement of AI technology and create completely new experiences for people, thus contributing greatly to society at large," Huawei notes. Some of these areas of AI you will have heard a lot about already.