The Pentagon's once-secret submarine drones programme is being discussed in the open, with US defence secretary Ashton Carter hinting at their potential use in the disputed South China Sea. Surveillance is the initial function of these unmanned, undersea vehicles, which can operate in shallow water'where manned submarines cannot'. There are also plans to create a'Russian doll' or'mother' sub, which could release a number of far smaller drones to be mines, trackers or missile launchers, reports the Financial Times. The US military hopes the drone development would deter China from dominating the South China Sea. The countries of the South China Sea have long claimed rights to disputed international waters, but as its economic strength has grown, an increasingly confident China has built military bases on artificial islands and militarized one of the disputed Paracel Islands.

Chinese robotics researchers have created a humanoid robot named Jia Jia, who can move her arms, make different facial expressions, and respond to human conversation. Jia Jia, the product of three years' work by a team at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, greeted the assembled audience at her unveiling by saying: "Hello everyone, I'm Jia Jia. Jia Jia's limited motion and stilted speech shouldn't leave anyone in any doubt she's a robot. However, she looks fairly realistic, with a flexible plastic face, long flowing brown hair, and an eye-catching gold dress. According to the team's director, Chen Xiaoping, particular attention was paid to her eye movements and lip synchronisation.

It's an alt-history sci-fi game (designed from the ground up for virtual reality) where Kennedy was never assassinated and NASA and Russia established a permanent moon base before expanding to the outer reaches of our solar system.

Gaza City - Majd Oweida arrived at the Erez crossing on February 23, en route to the occupied West Bank, in the hope of fulfilling a lifelong dream to organise a programme that introduces talented Palestinians to the world. This was to be the first time that Majd, a 23-year-old electrical engineer, would set foot in a part of Palestine outside the electrified fence surrounding the besieged Gaza Strip. Excited, he posted a selfie to Facebook, in which he held up his Israeli-issued entry permit. But as soon as he entered the Israeli zone of the Erez crossing terminal, Majd's trip took an unexpected turn. His colleagues, including his brother Amjad, lost contact with him for hours.

Humans have always had a complicated relationship with new "technologies." From awe to fear, centuries ago, Plato even worried that writing would adversely affect people's memories. Modernity has had a particular curiosity regarding artificial intelligence (AI). From Terminator-style killer robots to emotive humanoids, the mention of AI brings to mind the many silver screen renderings of some future civilization. More likely than any of these, however, is the reality that AI will probably turn out to be another commonplace technology that, while novel at first, will end up integrated into our everyday lives.

Aliyun, the cloud computing unit of Alibaba Group Holding, on Wednesday officially introduced an artificial intelligence (AI) robot named Ai that's meant to compete with overseas AI players. The Ai system was developed on the basis of neural networks and social computing, according to a press release Alibaba sent to the Global Times on Wednesday. The Ai system is good at predicting and understanding human emotions, the company said. Neural networks are based on animals' central nervous systems, and they are used to mimic functions involving many inputs. Social computing can be defined as the intersection of social behavior and computing systems.

The threat from such machines is real enough for 100 states to come together and debate the matter of their ban for three consecutive years now. The use of autonomous machines could potentially change the vocabulary of warfare, just like gun powder and nuclear arsenal upon their entry into the battlefield. In April 2013, NGOs associated with successful efforts to ban landmines and cluster munitions got together in London and issued a call to governments urging the negotiation of a treaty preventing the development, deployment and use of what are known as'Killer Robots' in popular parlance. In July 2015, some of the world's leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) scientists including Apple co-founder Steven Wozniak, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallin and Professor Stephen Hawking signed a letter with nearly 21,000 signatures asking for an outright ban on these autonomous weapons systems (AWS). "Autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow," states the letter.

TOKYO--Japanese industrial robot maker Fanuc Corp. said Monday it has developed technology to connect robots to networks that it hopes will give it an edge as it races to build the factory of the future. The technology is meant to enable factory owners to easily customize their robots and systems by downloading any needed applications, much like a consumer downloads smartphone apps on iOS or Android platforms.

Customer temporal behavioral data was represented as images in order to perform churn prediction by leveraging deep learning architectures prominent in image classification. Supervised learning was performed on labeled data of over 6 million customers using deep convolutional neural networks, which achieved an AUC of 0.743 on the test dataset using no more than 12 temporal features for each customer. Unsupervised learning was conducted using autoencoders to better understand the reasons for customer churn. Images that maximally activate the hidden units of an autoencoder trained with churned customers reveal ample opportunities for action to be taken to prevent churn among strong data, no voice users.