By Amit Nath Cyber security is a crucial challenge in today's world, as government agencies, corporations and even individuals are increasingly becoming victims of cyber-attacks. It is a well-known fact that businesses are turning more and more to the cloud and mobile applications as a way to stay competitive in the market. However, cloud storage, IoT and mobile applications escalate security risks for all enterprises. When smaller organizations invest in security measures they frequently look for the most cost-efficient options. It should be considered that cyber-attacks are not only frequent, but frequently creative and innovative.

WASHINGTON/PESHAWAR, PAKISTAN – The leader of the Islamic State group's branch in Afghanistan and Pakistan was killed in a U.S. drone strike on July 26, a Pentagon spokesman said on Friday after the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan announced the news to Reuters. The death of Hafiz Saeed Khan is a blow to efforts by the Islamic State -- also known as ISIS or Daesh -- to expand from its heartlands in Syria and Iraq into Afghanistan and Pakistan, which already are crowded with jihadi movements, including the Taliban and al-Qaida. It is the second U.S. killing of a prominent militant in the region in months. In May, a U.S. drone killed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a strike in Pakistan. Despite that, Afghanistan's 15-year-old war grinds on with no clear victory in sight.

JUDY WOODRUFF: In the day's other news: The Pentagon confirms tonight that a U.S. drone attack has killed a top Islamic State leader in Afghanistan. Hafiz Saeed Khan died in a strike on July 26. The State Department designated him a global terrorist last year. Bombings rocked across towns in Southern Thailand today, killing at least four people and wounding dozens more. Coordinated attacks hit six sites, including the popular island of Phuket.

U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton speaks at Futuramic Tool & Engineering in Warren, Michigan August 11, 2016. WASHINGTON -- Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spelled out their economic visions in high-profile speeches in Michigan this week. They delved into taxes and regulations, trade deals and job growth. Mostly unmentioned were major challenges that have slowed the U.S. economy and made good-paying jobs harder to find, particularly in struggling pockets of the country. Automation and increasingly high-skilled jobs that require technological know-how that many people lack. They are problems that analysts say require a transformative vision.

Every time we come back from a robotics conference thinking, "Okay, that's it, people are out of ideas, there are no more unique ways of getting robots to move," someone comes along and proves us wrong with something completely unexpected and cool. More than once, that someone has been David Zarrouk, who came up with the world's fastest inchworm robot and this robot, which can drive forward and steer left and right using just one motor. In a paper recently published in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, Zarrouk describes his latest innovative robot: SAW, or Single Actuator Wave-like robot, "a novel bioinspired robot which can move forward or backward by producing a continuously advancing wave." As far as I can tell, real worms don't actually get around by doing the worm. The worm (the dance move, that is) is a large-amplitude continuously advancing sine wave, which is also how SAW moves.

Whether or not it's a realistic or practical or good idea, urban commercial drone delivery is grinding remorselessly toward a thing that is going to happen. For many companies, "grind" is the right word, especially if they're trying to do research and development in the United States, where regulations tend to be overly cumbersome and inflexible. To help move things along a bit, Amazon has decided to take its next phase of delivery drone testing to the United Kingdom. Here's the stuff worth caring about from the press release, which amounts to about a third of the press release. In other words, it's relatively informative, as press releases go: Amazon has today announced a partnership with the UK Government to explore the steps needed to make the delivery of parcels by small drones a reality, allowing Amazon to trial new methods of testing its delivery systems.

After a chatbot pretending to be a 13-year-old named Eugene Goostman "passed" a Turing test a few years ago, experts in artificial intelligence got together and decided that a traditional Turing test might not be all that effective in measuring the intelligence of a computer program after all. Instead, they came up with (among many other things) the Winograd Schema Challenge, which is intended to determine how well an artificial intelligence system handles commonsense reasoning: understanding the basics about how the world works, and implementing that knowledge in useful and accurate ways. A few weeks ago, the very first Winograd Schema Challenge took place at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in New York City. We spoke with Charlie Ortiz, director of the Laboratory for AI and Natural Language Processing at Nuance Communications and one of the organizers of the Winograd Schema Challenge, about how things went, why the challenge is important, and what it means for the future of AI. The Winograd Schema Challenge tasks computer programs with answering a specific type of simple, commonsense question called a pronoun disambiguation problem (PDP).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your laser-focused Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Near Earth Autonomy, a Pittsburgh-based robotics and aerospace company (and CMU spin-off), has discovered the secret to flying a drone autonomously around obstacles without GPS: use a massive hexcopter that can haul around a Velodyne lidar. R1 is a new "personal humanoid" platform from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your baby-loving Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We got a teaser about the Omnicopter during Raff D'Andrea's most recent TED Talk, but this dedicated video shows it off much better: Like all the coolest robots, the things it can do look like CGI, right? On July 27, 2016, Michigan-based Vayu, Inc., in collaboration with the Stony Brook University Global Health Institute completed the first ever series of long-range, fully autonomous drone delivery flights with blood and stool samples, setting records in the process.

I was going to start this column with some new productivity figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I realized that at least half of the readers would quit right there. Productivity is one of those subjects that fascinates economists and bores, or mystifies, almost everyone else. Instead, let's start with a little story. Imagine that it's 1890 and you and a friend have bought a donkey and cart and started a moving company that transports heavy objects, such as sofas and beds. If you work hard, you can manage two deliveries a day, for each of which you charge a price that, if adjusted for inflation, would amount to fifty-five dollars today. Let's say overhead, such as advertising and food for the donkey, comes to ten dollars a day.