They will be "weapons of terror, used by terrorists and rogue states against civilian populations. Unlike human soldiers, they will follow any orders however evil," says Toby Walsh, professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales, Australia. "These will be weapons of mass destruction. One programmer and a 3D printer can do what previously took an army of people. They will industrialise war, changing the speed and duration of how we can fight. They will be able to kill 24-7 and they will kill faster than humans can act to defend themselves."

Leap Motion is a company most famous for building a gesture-recognition doodad for PCs that wound up integrated into keyboards. Since then, however, it has built ever-smarter sensors that can bring hand gestures to VR without the use of dedicated controllers. Now, the outfit is taking its biggest ever, er, jump by announcing Project North Star, a proposed augmented reality headset it plans to open-source next week. In a blog post, co-founder David Holz explains that the advent of AR is, at some point, going to become a pretty big deal. Consequently, the company has developed its own Hololens-esque device, albeit with a tasty-looking spreadsheet.

Wars of the future will be carried out largely by robots. In a step towards that scenario, machines have been used to in place of people during a joint UK-US military breaching exercise. Human soldiers watched unmanned tanks clear an area for landmines and bridge a gap over obstacles in an exercise with remote controlled tanks. It's the first time robots have been used for this purpose. Human soldiers watched unmanned tanks clear an area for landmines and bridge a gap over obstacles.

Over the weekend, experts on military artificial intelligence from more than 80 world governments converged on the U.N. offices in Geneva for the start of a week's talks on autonomous weapons systems. Many of them fear that after gunpowder and nuclear weapons, we are now on the brink of a "third revolution in warfare," heralded by killer robots--the fully autonomous weapons that could decide who to target and kill without human input. With autonomous technology already in development in several countries, the talks mark a crucial point for governments and activists who believe the U.N. should play a key role in regulating the technology. The meeting comes at a critical juncture. In July, Kalashnikov, the main defense contractor of the Russian government, announced it was developing a weapon that uses neural networks to make "shoot-no shoot" decisions.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Facebook suspended two companies from its platform over the weekend for improper data collection. The social media giant has been racing to address privacy concerns in light of revelations that data firm Cambridge Analytica accessed private data from as many as 87 million accounts and later used it to support Donald Trump's presidential campaign. Late on Friday, Facebook responded to reports that the Canadian political consulting firm AggregateIQ is affiliated with Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL), the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. "In light of recent reports that AggregateIQ may be affiliated with SCL and may, as a result, have improperly received FB user data, we have added them to the list of entities we have suspended from our platform while we investigate," Facebook said in a statement.

The chest rises and falls rhythmically, hypnotically. We guess it's the chest. Nobody's marketed a sleep robot before, and we're not even sure it's a robot. It looks like a pillowy four-pound kidney bean, about the size of a novelty prize at a carnival game. "Spooning the sleep robot during the night, you will be soothed to sleep," the sales literature claims, with "thousands of years of Buddhist breathing techniques."

Campaigners are renewing calls for a pre-emptive ban on so-called "killer robots" as representatives of more than 80 countries meet to discuss the autonomous weapons systems. The use of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) is "a step too far", said Mary Wareham, the global coordinator of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. "They cross a moral line, because we would see machines taking human lives on the battlefield or in law enforcement. "We want weapon systems and the use of force to remain under human control," Wareham said. Wareham spoke to Al Jazeera before Monday's meeting in Geneva, Switzerland on a possible ban on LAWS. This is the fifth international meeting to discuss so-called "killer robots" since 2014, but no formal decisions will be taken yet as countries are still working towards a common definition of LAWS, and have yet to agree on whether they should be outlawed in international law. This is going to be a crucial year. If we do not move swiftly, we could end up in a situation where it's too late and where fully autonomous weapons proliferate to the extent that every country has them," Wareham told Al Jazeera.

At least 24 teams from 11 countries, including Germany, Turkey, China, Singapore and South Korea, have competed with local teams for the 2018 robotics football cup in Tehran, Iran. The 13th RoboCup Iran Open included a number of robotic football leagues, as well as teams focused on rescue and de-mining simulations, home applications and unmanned aerial vehicle operation. A team from Leipzig University of Applied Sciences won in the football standard league championship, while a team from Iran's Qazvin Islamic Azad University won the overall trophy by winning in seven categories. RoboCup is an international research and education initiative that researches artificial intelligence and its utility for future applications while fostering interest among young students in robotics. At the opening of the event last week, Sourena Sattari, Iran's vice president for science and technology, called for an overhaul in policy to help young robotics experts find jobs and outlets for their work.

Keras is a high-level neural network library written in Python, and runs on top of either Theano or TensorFlow. It is a minimal, highly modular framework that runs on both CPUs and GPUs, and allows you to put your ideas into action in the shortest possible time. This course will help you get started with the basics of Keras, in a highly practical manner. Antonio Gulli is a software executive and business leader with a passion for establishing and managing global technological talent, innovation, and execution. He is an expert in search engines, online services, machine learning, information retrieval, analytics, and cloud computing.

Neural Networks are at the forefront of almost all recent major technology breakthroughs. The intersection of big data, parallel programming, and AI generated a new wave of Neural Network research. In this course, you will be taken through some of the best uses of Neural Networks using TensorFlow. You'll explore Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms such as Generative Networks and Deep Q Learning. You will learn to implement some more complex types of neural networks such as Deep Q Learning with OpenAI Gym, autoencoders, and Siamese neural networks.