A full-scale figure of a Terminator "T-800" robot used in the movie "Terminator 2" is displayed at a preview of the Terminator Exhibition in Tokyo on March 18, 2009. UNITED NATIONS -- Technology allowing a pre-programmed robot to shoot to kill, or a tank to fire at a target with no human involvement, is only years away, experts say. A new report called Monday for a ban on such "killer robots." The report by Human Rights Watch and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic was released as the United Nations kicked off a week-long meeting on such weapons in Geneva. The report calls for humans to remain in control over all weapons systems at a time of rapid technological advances.

Researchers at Waseda University in Tokyo have created a way to realistically colorize black-and-white photos without any human intervention for the first time ever. The team's approach is based on convolutional neural networks -- a type of machine learning originally inspired by the visual cortex of a cat. The researchers used artificial intelligence to classify a full image and then identify parts of that image to label its components before filling them in with the appropriate colors. Previous research efforts in automated colorization fell short of being totally automatic. Most required users to provide a reference image that was similar to the black-and-white image in order to colorize it properly.

You're heading to the store to get an Xbox One right now, and need to know which games to get. Or you're at work or in school, daydreaming about what you want to play next. Or maybe you're suiting up for a battle in the console war, cinching on your armor and trying to remember which games will best help you make the argument for Microsoft's new console. We are here to help. In the first year of its life, the selection of games on Xbox One was a bit limited.

In 2007, Stephanie Costello had a boring office job with a lot of downtime that she spent online. She recalls the day she read one of those articles on MSN.com that have become a staple of the Internet: how to make extra money online. These types of articles often appear in the soft-news sections of MSN, Yahoo and other sites, usually with the message that there is money being left on the table. Costello was intrigued at the prospect of cutting through the boredom of her day with the opportunity to pick up a little extra cash. She went to the website, Mechanical Turk, where companies can post tiny tasks and workers can find and perform them online. It was free to register--no call for an "investment" up front, which indicated that it was not on its face a scam. And she began making money immediately. Costello is a trailblazer of sorts. She was one of the early workers to join Mechanical Turk, the first online, crowd-based, micro-labor platform.

The development of artificial intelligence and robotics is not only seen as a key to economic competitiveness, but AI research is also a reflection of different countries' "soft power" influence. For instance, nations such as the U.S., Israel, and India consider AI as key to securing their borders. By contrast, Japan and South Korea expect the "fourth industrial revolution" to benefit their trade positions. Today, China and Russia are trying to predict events. Different approaches to AI are already changing the world.

There are some mistakes that we make habitually. Even as we're doing it, a part of our brain is screaming: "This is absolutely the wrong thing to do." But somehow, before we know it, we've gone ahead done it; we've bought a ticket to see Batman v Superman. Sometimes those things happen in games too. It doesn't matter how experienced you are at Call of Duty, there are moments you think you can take out several incoming players at once by charging at them with your pistol and two bullets in the clip.

Elon Musk's SpaceX plans to land an unmanned spacecraft on Mars as soon as 2018 with the help of NASA, an extraordinary collaboration between the public and private sector in an effort to eventually get humans to the Red Planet. SpaceX made the announcement on Twitter Wednesday, laying out an ambitious timeline for an incredibly difficult mission that only governments have dared try. Landing a spacecraft or a robot that can then operate successfully on the Martian surface is so difficult that the U.S. is the only country to have done it, and many attempts over the years have failed. Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018. Red Dragons will inform overall Mars architecture, details to come pic.twitter.com/u4nbVUNCpA

Learning to code may be almost as important now as learning to read. A new robot makes things more interesting: AntBo, which looks like an ant, is simple enough to program that kids can learn to code while they play with it. "We believe in the philosophy of learning through play … Seeing an ant-shaped robot come to life is definitely more interesting than reading code on a computer screen," says Ricky Ye, CEO of DFRobot, the Shanghai-based DIY robot company that designed the robot. Younger children can use visual programming tools like Scratch to make simple commands, like telling the robot to follow lines on the ground, react to a voice, or even simulate emotions. Once kids are old enough to code traditionally, they can also program the robot with Arduino IDE.

In 2010, a group of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon University in Doha, Qatar, introduced their campus to Hala, the latest in a line of what the school termed "roboceptionists." Consisting of a truncated torso and an LCD screen featuring a blue-skinned female CGI head, Hala was designed to provide students and visitors with instructions, directions, and anecdotes in either formal Arabic or American English. In addition to educating visitors about Qatar, Hala's purpose was to explore human-robot interaction (HRI) in a multicultural setting. The population of Doha is a demographic mosaic; the city is primarily inhabited by expatriates from all over the world (most of whom speak Arabic and/or English). Because of this relative diversity, Hala interacted with visitors from a slew of countries, using features like natural language understanding and facial expressions to conduct, in Carnegie Mellon's words, "culturally appropriate" exchanges.

How big should data be to be called'big'? Big data talk usually centers around those four V's: We say that data is big if it has volume, variety, velocity and veracity. It means a lot and lot of data; much, much more data than what a single server's disk can hold. That means not just numbers (Tendulkar's test and ODI scores), but also text (all that prose and poetry in praise of Tendulkar), video (Tendulkar's straight drive) and audio (Tendulkar exclaiming "Ailaa!"). Data on the trajectory of a launch vehicle, data on the growing spread of the Ebola virus, data about how rapidly some song is going viral on the Internet. Data that is valid, accurate, verifiable, not manipulated and trustworthy. What do you do with all this big data? You use this data to find associations, insights or connections.