This story was delivered to BI Intelligence IoT Industry Insider subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here. More than half (51%) of professionals in the supply chain and logistics industry believe robotics and automation will provide a competitive advantage in their industry, according to a recently released survey from industry association MHI and Deloitte. That number is up from 39% in a similar survey last year, The Wall Street Journal reported. More of the respondents cited robotics and automation as a competitive advantage than other technologies that are more prevalent in the logistics industry such as sensors, cloud computing, and inventory management tools. Only 35% of the respondents said that their companies had adopted robotics, but 74% said they had plans to do so within the next 10 years.

Relatives and tribal elders in southeastern Afghanistan are demanding an investigation into the killing of 17 people by US drones this week, claiming the air strikes hit civilians - not members of armed groups. US army officials said on Thursday two air strikes in Paktika province, near the Pakistani border, had only targeted fighters, without any evidence of civilian casualties. Afghan officials confirmed to Al Jazeera that 17 people had been killed in Wednesday's strikes in Gomal district, but added they all had links to the Taliban. Yet, local leaders and relatives insisted on Saturday all of those killed were innocent civilians. "We demand an investigation into the brutal killings of these innocent people," Nimatullah Baburi, a deputy of the Paktika provincial council, told Al Jazeera.

VC-backed artificial intelligence startups, which have seen a sevenfold increase in funding since 2010, have also seen corporations take a greater interest. While acquisitions of VC-backed AI startups by major corporations -- including Vocal IQ by Apple, Wit.ai by Facebook, and DeepMind by Google -- have been in the spotlight recently, corporate involvement in investing in these startups has also grown. Deals to AI startups involving corporates saw a 15x increase between 2010 and 2015. Just in the last quarter, companies including H2O.ai (Transamerica Ventures and Capital One Ventures), Gridspace (Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator) and Mobvoi (Google) saw backing from prominent corporates. Our artificial intelligence category covers startups primarily focused on developing AI, across areas including image processing, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, and predictive APIs, among other core applications.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has four seasons: hype, disappointment, funding drought, and renewed interest. I've been involved in AI research for quite some time -- I became a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1993 -- and I've weathered several seasonal cycles. What I'm seeing now, however, is the most puzzling cycle yet; either I'm getting old and addled, or the current cycle is unique in its magnitude. In these Big Data days, the big talk about AI's potential reminds me of what happened at the peak of earlier cycles (see, for example, the recent Wall Street Journal article. Once again, the focus is on a single technical component -- deep learning -- and hopes seem to be building that it can solve many very hard problems easily and more or less magically.

SpaceX has finally managed to safely land its re-usable rocket onto a barge, after previous repeated attempts saw the Falcon 9 kit explode. Successfully landing the booster onto the large "drone ship" is a huge step forward for SpaceX and its found Elon Musk, and for private space travel more generally. The company hopes that the re-usable rockets will make space travel much cheaper in future, since they can be re-filled and then sent back into space rather than re-building from scratch. Mr Musk celebrated the successful landing by referencing the T-Pain song "I'm On A Boat". He later deleted the tweet.

Do you know what is common between San Bernardino's shooting spree and the terrorist attacks in Paris last month? Jillennials, Jihadis who are Millennials. We mine data worldwide, a lot of it, a ton of it, every day and every night, and we do this for a living at PredictifyMe. We have partnership with the United Nations to protect school-goers in Pakistan, Nigeria, Sudan and Lebanon using our proprietary software SecureSim and Soothsayer . When the Paris attacks unfolded, we asked ourselves (and our database), how can we use data sciences to prevent something like this from ever happening again. Can we find out what factors influence an otherwise ordinary citizen to become radicalized?

At its annual F8 developer conference this coming week, Facebook Inc. will feature enhanced tools for commerce over its Messenger app, according to people familiar with the matter. The new offerings will use so-called chatbot technology to help users order goods and services through the app, the people said. This will be the second consecutive year Facebook has highlighted Messenger at F8, a sign of messaging's growing prominence inside the company. Last year, Facebook opened Messenger to outside developers, including makers of photo- and video-editing apps, and businesses such as Everlane and Zulily, which use the app to field customer questions and provide shipping updates. Inc., which sells and delivers flowers and food baskets, as a potential partner for the new Messenger services, according to a person familiar with the conversations. Under one scenario, 1-800-Flowers could contact past customers over Messenger about upcoming holidays such as Mother's Day and highlight promotions.

Although Google is selling Boston Dynamics to distance itself from "terrifying" humanoid robots, there's still plenty of robot projects underway. SCHAFT, a Tokyo-based robotics company run by Google's parent company Alphabet, presented the bipedal robot at the New Economic Summit in Japan. SCHAFT is best know as the winner of the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge that put it on the map. There aren't too many details on the robot yet, except that it can carry up to 132 pounds and can tackle uneven terrain. But it's nice to be in the snow once in a while too.

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Jeffrey Hawkins is the American founder of Palm Computing (where he invented the Palm Pilot) and Handspring (where he invented the Treo). He has since turned to work on neuroscience full-time, founded the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience (formerly the Redwood Neuroscience Institute) in 2002, founded Numenta in 2005 and published On Intelligence describing his memory-prediction framework theory of the brain. In 2003 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering "for the creation of the hand-held computing paradigm and the creation of the first commercially successful example of a hand-held computing device." Hawkins also serves on the Advisory Board of the Secular Coalition for America and offers advice to the coalition on the acceptance and inclusion of nontheism in American life. Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is Chief Scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley.