Moses led his people from the Pharaoh. William Wallace (or was it Mel Gibson?) helped bring FREEEDOOOOM for the Scots. In the past, you've seen me opine on the necessary destruction of the CMO [Chief Marketing Officer Is The Most Dangerous Title Around] as a standalone c-suiter--often more focused on grand vision and strategy than driving bottom-line results. While some called my report of the traditional CMO's death greatly exaggerated, the rise of the machines may actually provide a stay of execution. Now, I'm not reversing course and saying that the CMO should continue to exist in its present cost-draining ivory tower. Rather, I'm advocating that AI may provide salvation for the CMO by giving them the requisite free time to pursue the necessary bottom-line-moving efforts that make marketing worthwhile and justifiably profitable.

The $\mathcal{G}_I^0$ distribution is able to characterize different regions in monopolarized SAR imagery. It is indexed by three parameters: the number of looks (which can be estimated in the whole image), a scale parameter and a texture parameter. This paper presents a new proposal for feature extraction and region discrimination in SAR imagery, using the geodesic distance as a measure of dissimilarity between $\mathcal{G}_I^0$ models. We derive geodesic distances between models that describe several practical situations, assuming the number of looks known, for same and different texture and for same and different scale. We then apply this new tool to the problems of (i)~identifying edges between regions with different texture, and (ii)~quantify the dissimilarity between pairs of samples in actual SAR data. We analyze the advantages of using the geodesic distance when compared to stochastic distances.

Good news, fellow humans: The United Nations has decided to take on killer robots. At the international Convention on Conventional Weapons in Geneva, 123 participating nations voted to initiate official discussions on the danger of lethal autonomous weapons systems. That's the emerging designation for so-called "killer robots" -- weapons controlled by artificial intelligence that can target and strike without human intervention. The agreement is the latest development in a growing movement calling for an preemptive ban on weaponized A.I. and deadly autonomous weapons. Last year, a coalition of more than 1,000 scientists and industry leaders, including Elon Musk and representatives of Google and Microsoft, signed an official letter to the United Nations demanding action.

Humankind has cast an eye toward another "giant leap" forward nearly half a century after the United States' Apollo 11 spacecraft delivered humans to the moon for the first time. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is planning to put a manned spacecraft into orbit around Mars in the 2030s, before sending humans to explore the red planet. Similar in size to Earth, and relatively close, Mars is widely considered as the most promising and realistic candidate planet for manned space exploration. The planet, however, is more than 50 million km away from Earth even when their orbits are at their closest. With a round-trip journey taking multiple years, a realistic approach to the journey calls for fuel and other required materials to be made available along the way.

We'll come right out and say it: 2016 wasn't the greatest year by any standards. In particular, divisive politics and celebrity death seemed to cast a long shadow over the last 12 months. There was the occasional ray of light poking through the clouds though. Especially in technology, which is what brings us all together here at Engadget. Over the last year, we've tried to bring you as many of those uplifting stories (even if they are bittersweet) as possible, to provide a little respite from 2016's emotional hailstorm.

Next time you stop for gas at a self-serve pump, say hello to the robot in front of you. Its life story can tell you a lot about the robot economy roaring toward us like an EF5 tornado on the prairie. Yeah, your automated gas pump killed a lot of jobs over the years, but its biography might give you hope that the coming wave of automation driven by artificial intelligence (AI) will turn out better for almost all of us than a lot of people seem to think. The first crude version of an automated gas-delivering robot appeared in 1964 at a station in Westminster, Colorado. Short Stop convenience store owner John Roscoe bought an electric box that let a clerk inside activate any of the pumps outside. Self-serve pumps didn't catch on until the 1970s, when pump-makers added automation that let customers pay at the pump, and over the next 30 years, stations across the nation installed these task-specific robots and fired attendants. By the 2000s, the gas attendant job had all but disappeared.

If there's anything that can be said about 2016, it's that the year of research and exploration brought a surge of innovations on new technology. One such department that was thoroughly explored this year is the controversial yet undoubtedly cool territory of artificial intelligence. This influx of new technology elicited wonder and amazement in most. However, some made us question just how intelligent these inventions are. In September, Google unveiled the DeepMind Artificial Intelligence they called WaveNet.

Facebook has hidden a special new year easter egg in its website. The site is letting people celebrate New Year's Eve by watching fairly dismal fireworks light up their news feed. On New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, any time anyone writes the words "Happy New Year", they'll turn blue. Whenever anyone clicks on those words, a little firework animation will play. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

The UK's Investigatory Powers Act is now in effect, placing Britain under some of the widest-ranging spying powers ever seen. The law – passed last month but going into effect on 30 December – is intended as an update to Britain's often unwieldy surveillance legislation. But it also includes a large set of new powers – including the ability to collect the browsing records of everyone in the country and have them read by authorities as diverse as the Food Standards Agency and the Department for Work and Pensions. Most of the central parts of the act are now in force. That includes new powers to gather and retain data on citizens, and new ways to force technology companies and others to hand over the data that they have about people to intelligence agencies.

Daniel Waterhouse is a general partner of Balderton Capital. The gulf between "human" and "machine" is closing. Machine learning has enabled virtual reality to feel more "real" than ever before, and AI's replication of processes that were once confined to the human brain is ever-improving. Both are bringing technology into ever-closer proximity with the human body. Let's use this question as a starting point: Is standing on the edge of the roof of a Minecraft cathedral in VR mode scarier than looking over the edge of a mountain in Norway?