A burger-flipping robot invasion is headed to the Bay Area. A few years ago, startup Momentum Machines unveiled a robot that could churn out 400 burgers an hour, and now, Tech Insider reports, the company is creating a restaurant concept around it. The robot can slice toppings, grill a patty, assemble, and bag the burger without any help from humans. A Craigslist job ad says the restaurant will open at 680 Folsom St. in the SoMa (South of Market) neighborhood; the ad doesn't specifically mention robots, instead reading, "This location will feature the world-premiere of our proprietary and remarkable new advances in technology that enable the automatic creation of impossibly delicious burgers at prices everyone can afford." The restaurant will still need to employ a human for tasks such as payroll and taking out the trash, however.

United States President Barack Obama's administration said Friday that up to 116 civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries where America is not at war. Obama's goal for the release of the numbers is reportedly to create greater transparency about the actions of the U.S. military and CIA in counterterrorism measures against militants plotting attacks against the United States. The announcement covered strikes from the day Obama took office in January 2009 through Dec. 31, 2015. The report by National Intelligence Director James Clapper said the U.S. conducted 473 counterterror strikes, including those by unmanned drones, in this period. Even though the report does not mention the countries where the attacks were carried out, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the Defense Department and CIA have pursued targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.

The legal media has lately had a mania for tech headlines. Many commentators claim that tech, especially artificial intelligence (AI), will do something to Big Law. Tech more likely will do something in it: incremental change. I start with the case against disruption, then look at four headline-grabbing technologies: AI, Bots, Big Data, and Blockchain. By the late 1980s, a few law firms had most of their lawyers using PCs.

WASHINGTON – The United States on Friday lifted the lid on one of the most controversial tactics of President Barack Obama's secretive counterterrorism campaign, detailing for the first time the number killed in airstrikes in countries like Pakistan and Libya. The White House also released an executive order outlining the steps that should be taken to reduce civilian casualties in America's battle against violent extremism. In a much-anticipated report, National Intelligence Director James Clapper provided fatality estimates for the 473 strikes between 2009 and 2015 that were conducted outside America's principal war zones in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He said between 64 and 116 civilians were killed, and up to 2,581 combatants. Such attacks are typically conducted via drones, though manned warplanes and missiles have also been used.

The World Economic Forum has put together a list of the top 10 emerging technologies that will change our lives. The list includes nanosensors that will circulate through the human body, a battery that will be able to power an entire town and socially aware artificial intelligence that will track our finances and health. These are not far-flung visions, according to the forum. They are technologies that are on the cusp of having a meaningful impact. "Horizon scanning for emerging technologies is crucial to staying abreast of developments that can radically transform our world, enabling timely expert analysis in preparation for these disruptors," said Bernard Meyerson, chairman of the World Economic Forum council that compiled the list of the top 10 emerging technologies in 2016.

This letter presents the sparse vector signal detection from one bit compressed sensing measurements, in contrast to the previous works which deal with scalar signal detection. In this letter, available results are extended to the vector case and the GLRT detector and the optimal quantizer design are obtained. Also, a double-detector scheme is introduced in which a sensor level threshold detector is integrated into network level GLRT to improve the performance. The detection criteria of oracle and clairvoyant detectors are also derived. Simulation results show that with careful design of the threshold detector, the overall detection performance of double-detector scheme would be better than the sign-GLRT proposed in [1] and close to oracle and clairvoyant detectors. Also, the proposed detector is applied to spectrum sensing and the results are near the well known energy detector which uses the real valued data while the proposed detector only uses the sign of the data.

Industrial robots used to be dumb, somewhat inflexible, and mostly blind - but also fast, precise and very efficient. As the cost of components, sensors and vision systems has been dropping, vision-enabled robots are becoming more prevalent and capable, and the industry is dramatically changing. Those changes can be seen in recent trends in China, investments in and acquisitions of robotic companies, by an analysis of recent startup companies, new and widening application areas for robot use, and technological developments. For the past 50 years industrial robots have picked the low-hanging fruit of manufacturing by handling the dull, dirty and dangerous tasks. But today, as consumers want more personalized products, and want them faster, and as costs have dropped and executives have pushed for greater productivity through automation, mobile and vision-enabled robots are emerging and being deployed in many new application areas, particularly for SMEs and in logistics, but also in government, agriculture, surveying, construction and healthcare.

After escalating one of the most lethal covert operations in U.S. history, President Obama finally made a public estimate of the civilian cost of the nation's secret drone program, which has targeted Islamic militants in remote corners of the globe. Human rights groups immediately challenged the estimate and the amount of transparency from the administration, saying both were too limited. The White House said that 64 to 116 civilians had been wrongly killed in 473 strikes launched by the U.S. government from the time Obama was inaugurated and the end of last year. The vast majority of the attacks were launched by drones, officials said, but the estimate also covers some strikes using manned aircraft. Monitoring organizations estimate the number of civilians killed in U.S. strikes ranges from 200 to more than 1,000.

Robots that slice, grill, assemble and bag 400 burgers in one hour are set to invade California. Momentum Machines unveiled its autonomous grill master in 2012 and recently announced it will be opening a robot-powered burger bar in San Francisco's South of Market. Although this machine can do the work of three humans, the startup is still hiring people to perform other tasks such as payroll and taking out the garbage. According to Momentum Machines job posting on Craigslists, the startup plans to open its restaurant at 680 Folsom street in San Francisco California. According to Momentum Machines job posting on Craigslists, the startup plans to open its restaurant at 680 Folsom street in San Francisco California.

Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) artificial intelligence Alexa can now place orders on Amazon, making it even easier for shoppers to use the service with more frequency. Alexa is the digital voice assistant inside the company's Echo Bluetooth speakers. It previously could only re-order items that had already been purchased, but now it can order anything that is available to Amazon Prime members, with some exceptions. Users simply ask Alexa for a product available with Prime, she makes a suggestion, reports the price and a simple "yes" buys it. There are millions of items now available for ordering through Alexa and quite a few that are not, including Amazon Fresh, Amazon Prime Pantry and Amazon Prime Now items.