Pakistan's Interior Minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, says authorities will perform DNA tests on the body of a man who was killed in an American drone strike to determine whether the slain man is actually Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansour.

Many people find recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) quite alarming. Indeed, luminaries, ranging from Nobel laureate Stephen Hawking to technology pioneers Elon Musk and Bill Gates, have warned that artificial intelligence technology might be more dangerous to humankind than the atomic bomb. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum has argued that an "intelligence explosion" may lead to the extinction of humanity at the hands of rampant robots. These arguments distract us from the large and more imminent threat -- seismic loss of jobs, surging unemployment, and potentially calamitous social strife. This week, when the White House launches a sequence of workshops studying the future of AI, they should focus on the real dangers, not imaginary ones.

SoftBank's Pepper robot has been gainfully employed in the past, but it's apparently ready for a new career in the food industry. Pizza Hut Asia is partnering with MasterCard on a trial that will use Pepper for orders and information in restaurants by the end of 2016. Once you pair your MasterPass account, you can do everything from paying for your meal to asking about the calorie count. It's not necessarily as quick as ordering directly from your phone, but a demo (below) suggests that it's fairly painless -- it's easy to see the humanoid helper taking some of the load off of Pizza Hut's staff. Let's just hope that it fares well in less-than-ideal conditions.

Support Vector Machine has become an extremely popular algorithm. In this post I try to give a simple explanation for how it works and give a few examples using the the Python Scikits libraries. All code is available on Github. I'll have another post on the details of using Scikits and Sklearn. SVM is a supervised machine learning algorithm which can be used for classification or regression problems.

I was chatting with an old friend yesterday and he reminded me of a conversation we had nearly 50 years ago. I tried to explain to him what I did for living and he was trying to understand why getting computers to understand was more complicated than key word analysis. I explained about concepts underlying sentences and explained that sentences used words but that people really didn't use words in their minds except to get to the underlying ideas and that computers were having a hard time with that. Fifty years later, key words are still dominating the thoughts of people who try to get computers to deal with language. But, this time, the key word people have deceived the general public by making claims that this is thinking, that AI is here, and that, by the way we should be very afraid, or very excited, I forget which.

Domino's may be forward thinking with its smartphone apps, but Pizza Hut is about to let a damn robot take your order. Pizza Hut Asia and MasterCard are partnering to bring Pepper, SoftBank's somewhat creepy humanoid robot to restaurants by the end of 2016. If all goes to plan, Pepper will be able to take and process entire customer orders. This marks the first commerce application for Pepper, according to MasterCard. It starts with an innocent, friendly hello.

Inc.'s 11th annual 30 Under 30 list features the young founders taking on some of the world's biggest challenges. In 2013, a high-frequency trader named Michael Coscia was arrested in New Jersey for an activity called "spoofing"--essentially manipulating the market by flooding trading systems with future orders he had no intention of completing. He was fined 6 million--with the possibility of jail time. It was the first such prosecution under a new set of financial regulations from the 2010 banking reform law called the Dodd-Frank Act. That was an aha! moment for David Widerhorn, 28, and it became his reason for founding Neurensic.

"Excuse me," the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. Outside Gore's New York City office, spring has certainly sprung--early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him.

A Pakistani police officer and paramedics stand beside two dead bodies reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike in the Ahmad Wal area in Baluchistan province, Pakistan, at a hopsital in Quetta, Pakistan, Sunday, May 22, 2016. A senior commander of the Afghan Taliban confirmed on Sunday that the extremist group's leader, Mullah Mohammad Akhtar Mansour, had been killed in the strike.

Squse Inc., a maker of robotic hands that can handle food, plans an initial public offering in Tokyo as early as next year to fund overseas expansion, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Kyoto-based Squse, partly owned by state-backed Innovation Network Corp. of Japan, is considering seeking a valuation of at least 50 billion ( 455 million), the people said, asking not to be identified because the information is private. INCJ, set up in 2009 to help make Japan's technology industry more competitive, agreed in 2014 to spend as much as 500 million to buy a minority stake in Squse, data compiled by Bloomberg show. The IPO and expansion plans coincide with a rapid increase in demand globally for industrial robotics technology. Chinese appliance maker Midea Group Co. said last week it was seeking to increase its stake in German industrial robot maker Kuka AG.