The militant extremist group has suffered recent military setbacks and lost territory in both Iraq and Syria, says Brett McGurk, presidential adviser for the anti-ISIS coalition. Unlike most leaders in his party, the presumptive Republican nominee opposes any changes to Social Security and says he is open to the idea of a higher minimum wage. Michel Temer, who leads the South American country in the wake of Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, must deal with an ongoing economic recession, the Zika virus, a distrustful populace and the upcoming Rio Summer Olympics. Self-driving cars, which could be motoring on more American streets within a decade, may prove so convenient that their use might soar and cause more traffic jams. An "incredibly lifelike" but fake bomb forced police to evacuate Old Trafford stadium on the final day of the English Premier League soccer season.

Very soon – by the end of the year, probably – you won't need to be on Facebook in order to talk to your friends on Facebook. Your Facebook avatar will dutifully wish people happy birthday, congratulate them on the new job, accept invitations, and send them jolly texts punctuated by your favourite emojis – all while you're asleep, or shopping, or undergoing major surgery. At an event called the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon held last weekend in New York, software developer Irene Chang unveiled a prototype artificial intelligence (AI) program called The Chat Bot Club, designed to take over all your Facebook Messenger communications when you can't be arsed dealing with them yourself. Chang's proof-of-concept is much more than a simple automated response system. Using IBM's powerful Watson natural language processing platform, The Chat Bot Club learns to imitate its user.

Getting to the root of the problem has never looked quite like this, medically speaking. Thanks to the latest innovation from the minds at MIT, there is now a tiny origami robot capable of performing internal surgery after being swallowed by a patient. As the MIT News Office reported, a collaboration amongst researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology gave way to this minuscule device, ingested by way of a capsule and steered by external magnetic fields, that can "crawl across the stomach wall to remove a swallowed button battery or patch a wound." "It's really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care," said Daniela Rus, lead researcher on the study and director of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system. It's really difficult to control and place a robot inside the body if the robot is attached to a tether."

While in Hollywood films hi-tech robots are portrayed as a threat, Chinese engineers might be able to change your mind. We take a closer look at the role artificial intelligence might play in the future RT LIVE http://rt.com/on-air Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/RT_com Follow us on Google http://plus.google.com/ RT (Russia Today) is a global news network broadcasting from Moscow and Washington studios.

The Defense Department of the United States is reportedly seeking entrepreneurial Silicon Valley bigwigs to build out the future of defense with the help of artificial intelligence technology. Can artificial intelligence (AI) be used as a defense armor? Well, the Defense Department of the United States is reportedly seeking entrepreneurial Silicon Valley bigwigs to build out the future of defense with the help of AI technology. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, Washington has sought the expertise of Silicon Valley's technology leaders. In fact, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter visited the Valley for the fourth time to talk about the importance of incorporating artificial intelligence in America's warfare weapons, New York Times notes.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your dance-challenged 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. SNUMAX is a "multi-functional soft robot" developed by Seoul National University's Biorobotics Laboratory, which won the RoboSoft Grand Challenge this year. "Boomf is the noise a marshmallow makes when it falls through your letterbox and lands on your doormat."

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to the latest research study released by Technavio, the global industrial robotics market in the rubber and plastic industry is expected to record a CAGR of over 18% until 2020. This research report titled'Global Industrial Robotics Market in the Rubber and Plastic Industry 2016-2020', provides an in-depth analysis of market growth in terms of revenue and emerging market trends. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated primarily through the sales and services of various industrial robotics such as cartesian, articulated, and others for different applications in the rubber and plastic industry. "China accounted for about 25% of the overall production of plastics, followed by European countries that accounted for 20%. Key findings of this report show that the demand for plastics is anticipated to grow during the forecast period, and positively impact the market. Significant improvements in gripper technology, such as the development of Versaball by Empire Robotics for handling materials of any shape and size, is also slated to play a critical role in the expansion of robots in the rubber and plastic industry," said Bharath Kanniappan, one of Technavio's lead analysts for robotics research.

A Silicon Valley tech company has done away with the role of HR Director, instead implementing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program which has been developed to handle the role. According to reports, it is showing signs of self-awareness having passed the infamous Turing test, and has been been described by commentators as "the homo sapien to Siri's neanderthal." The software was developed in China and is intended to interact directly with staff, with automated emails programmed to "touch base" and send personalised thank-you notes in a bid to encourage a culture of recognition and to ensure high levels of staff engagement. The program also keeps tally of how many emails certain staff members receive, and sends automated score boards out in a bid to ensure public recognition of staff and encourage friendly competition amongst peers. Bi-weekly, it also conducts a presentation for the entire company, with staff rewards chosen by the AI.

Let's skip to the chase: Self-driving cars are going to be The Next Big Thing (tm). Here's how you can make big money from this revolution, no matter which carmaker or technology platform comes out on top. Since Alphabet started leading this futuristic idea out into the mainstream, the car industry itself has turned in that direction. Name a carmaker, and I bet the company has developed at least the embryo of a self-driving platform. You can already find traces of this upcoming revolution inside current cars, powering automatic parallel-parking systems or highway-speed autopilots.

It's a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari's office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. "It's from 2010," he says, "and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!" Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer -- a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future. Instead of continuing to develop new materials the old-fashioned way -- stumbling across them by luck, then painstakingly measuring their properties in the laboratory -- Marzari and like-minded researchers are using computer modelling and machine-learning techniques to generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands.