Over the past several decades, the United States has been an aggressive first mover in a war-fighting regime centered on guided munitions and integrated battle networks. These innovations have allowed U.S. forces to operate relatively uncontested in space, in the air, and on and under the sea, and to dominate conventional force-on-force land combat. For a variety of reasons – the geopolitics of rising powers, the global diffusion of technology and counter-reactions by its adversaries chief among them – the preeminence enjoyed by the United States in this regime is starting to erode. It's an amazing document for which this first sentence barely does justice for what is revealed throughout. So, once again we are given a DARPA press release of sorts that covers a program supposedly in development.

Forget artificial intelligence for board games. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. used artificial intelligence to predict the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV singing competition – and got the winner and finalists all correct. On Friday night, the cloud-computing arm of Alibaba, Aliyun -- or Alibaba Cloud -- used "Ai," its artificial intelligence program, during the four-hour finale of Hunan TV's "I Am a Singer." The program worked to choose winners as the audience of 500 people who served as judges independently deliberated. The Ai predictions were featured live during the finale.

Japan will not impose time and place restrictions on autonomous driving tests on public roads, according to draft guidelines released by the National Police Agency last week. Those hoping to experiment using self-driving cars will be allowed to do so without obtaining permission to use public roads as long as they comply with rules such as having a driver and passenger in the car. In some U.S. states, autonomous driving tests require permission. The government regards autonomous driving as a key item in its growth strategy, aiming to put self-driving cars into practical use before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. As the industry is expanding, the NPA has received many inquiries about what permission is needed for self-driving car tests. Clarifying the guidelines is seen as helping more venture companies enter into the autonomous driving business and support the development of related technologies.

A "new" Rembrandt has been unveiled in Amsterdam, but it's not a long lost dusty relic that was found in someone's loft--it was created by data analysts and computers. The portrait of a man in a black hat is the result of 18 months work by art historians, data scientists, developers, 3-D print technicians, and organizations like Microsoft, Delft University of Technology, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and Amsterdam's Rembrandt House Museum. It consists of more than 148 million pixels, based on 168,263 painting fragments from Rembrandt's output. The initiative is the brainchild of Bas Korsten, executive creative director at ad agency JWT Amsterdam, and was created for Dutch financial services giant ING. Korsten says ING approached the agency with a brief to "find a way to bring their innovative spirit to their sponsorship of Dutch art and culture in a way that would get people thinking."

What if I told you that there was an Internet search company that's been working on self-driving cars since 2013 and its vehicles have logged countless successful autonomous miles? This company uses luxury vehicles for its autonomous car testing, has teamed up with self-driving tech leaders like NVIDIA, and is working with the government to make self-driving automobiles a reality. You might make an educated guess that I'm talking about Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google. But you'd be wrong (sorry about that). Baidu is working to bring self-driving public transportation to China by 2018 and the company is taking huge strides to make it happen.

In a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, a computing system developed by Google researchers in Great Britain has beaten a top human player at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern contest of strategy and intuition that has bedeviled AI experts for decades. Machines have topped the best humans at most games held up as measures of human intellect, including chess, Scrabble, Othello, even Jeopardy!. But with Go--a 2,500-year-old game that's exponentially more complex than chess--human grandmasters have maintained an edge over even the most agile computing systems. Earlier this month, top AI experts outside of Google questioned whether a breakthrough could occur anytime soon, and as recently as last year, many believed another decade would pass before a machine could beat the top humans. But Google has done just that.

Russian entrepreneur and venture capitalist Yuri Milner, founder of investment firm Digital Sky Technologies Ltd (DST Global), has made a new investment in a tech company Horizon Robotics, a China-based startup focused on artificial intelligence (AI). The size of the investment venture was not disclosed. Horizon Robotics will use the latest proceeds on research and development, including team expansion, reported the China Money Network. The startup was established in July 2015 by Dr. Kai YU, the founder and former head of Institute of Deep Learning (IDL) at Baidu. Horizon Robotics previously received seed funding from Hillhouse Capital, Morningside Ventures, GSR Ventures, Sequoia Capital, among others.

Tokyo, April 8, 2016 - Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501) today announced the development of "EMIEW3," a humanoid robot, and its "remote brain"*1 robotics IT platform. EMIEW3, capable of autonomously approaching customers requiring assistance, was developed to provide necessary services and guidance in stores and public facilities. Enhanced by the "remote brain" consisting of a robotics IT platform connected to cloud-based intelligent processing systems and a remote operation system to monitor and control multiple robots at various locations, EMIEW3 is able to provide high quality services. Since the announcement of "EMIEW" in 2005, Hitachi has continued to develop human symbiotic robots that can safely co-exist with humans, providing robot-based services with advanced communication capabilities. Using EMIEW2, first announced in 2007, Hitachi developed functions necessary for customer and guidance services, and demonstrated capabilities which include autonomous mobility at a brisk human walking pace, isolation of human voice from background noise, accessing information from the Web to identify objects and using indoor network cameras as "eyes" to locate objects.

Formal grammars are a popular class of knowledge representation that is traditionally confined to the modeling of natural and computer languages. However, several extensions of grammars have been proposed over time to model other types of data such as images [1, 2, 3] and events [4, 5, 6]. One prominent type of extension is stochastic And-Or grammars (AOG) [2]. A stochastic AOG simultaneously models compositions (i.e., a large pattern is the composition of several small patterns arranged according to a certain configuration) and reconfigurations (i.e., a pattern may have several alternative configurations), and in this way it can compactly represent a probabilistic distribution over a large number of patterns. Stochastic AOGs can be used to parse data samples into their compositional structures, which help solve multiple tasks (such as classification, annotation, and segmentation of the data samples) in a unified manner. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61503248).

As it turns out, we may have to wait a few years before the imminent robot takeover of our workforce, as a few kinks still need to be worked out. Several restaurants in the Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou ditched their robot servers because they were simply too unreliable to actually be worth the hassle. "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again," an employee at one of the restaurants told the Worker's Daily through a translator. The humanoid robots cost approximately cost 7,700 USD each and required constant maintenance and repairs to keep in proper working order, which adds up to more than just a normal server's salary.