The threat of killer robots may sound a little far-fetched but this latest'harmful robot' suggests we may have taken a step closer to this dystopian reality. Roboticist Alexander Reben from the University of Berkeley, California, has created a bot called "The First Law" that is capable of pricking a finger, but is programmed to choose not to every time if it means avoiding being switched off. Ultimately, it can decide whether or not to inflict pain to serve its own interest. The robot is named after the first law in a set of rules devised by sci-fi author Isaac Asimov, which - quoted as being from the Handbook of Robotics, 2058 AD – states "a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm". Reben's research paper explains how the robot operates in relation to "reinforcement learning agents" and how they are unlikely to behave optimally all the time.

Applied #AI summits for Amsterdam's startups, bluechips academics to discuss the current state of the industry what's coming soon.

Two hospitals in Belgium have employed robots to welcome patients and visitors, in what is reportedly the first use of automata to greet people in a medical setting. The robot, named Pepper, was unveiled Monday at a hospital in the eastern city of Liege, where it will act as a receptionist, Agence France-Presse reports. The cartoon-featured humanoid robot, which costs about 30,000 euros ( 33,800), is also being introduced at another facility in Ostend -- in northwest Belgium -- where it will perform the extra function of guiding visitors to the hospital's appropriate departments. Pepper the robot is manufactured by Tokyo-based tech firm SoftBank and versions are assembled in France, where they have already been tested out in a few shopping malls. The robot, described by its makers as "kindly, endearing and surprising," has a tablet computer mounted on its chest.

NEW DELHI – Scientists from Britain and India will release underwater robots into the Bay of Bengal in a bid to more accurately predict India's monsoon, an event critical to millions of farmers, they said Tuesday. Researchers will also fly a plane packed with scientific equipment over the bay to measure the atmosphere as part of the multimillion-dollar study of the monsoon, which hit southern India last week. Better forecasting will improve the livelihoods of India's more than 200 million farmers and agricultural laborers, who are reeling from a devastating drought. Scientists from the University of East Anglia will release seven underwater robots from an Indian ship next week to study how ocean processes influence monsoon rainfall. At the same time, colleagues from the University of Reading and climate experts in India will use instruments on board the plane flying from the southern city of Bangalore to measure heat and moisture in the air.

We know of humans that we consider super-intelligent, but we don't yet know how to engineer that intelligence - or exceed it - in people. But some researchers think that advances in genomic science and machine learning are going to open up new avenues of possibility in that realm, potentially leading to individuals whose cognitive abilities leave the greatest minds of history in the dust. That future of superintelligent humans may be upon us sooner than we think. Consider individuals that we consider the smartest of all time, those like Carl Friedrich Gauss or John von Neumann, says Stephen Hsu, a physicist who is the vice president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State University and an advisor to the genomics researchers at BGI. Hsu is a member of BGI's Cognitive Genomics Lab, a research group that's trying to unlock the genetic codes that account for complex traits like height, susceptibility to conditions like obesity, and - perhaps most controversially - intelligence. Most researchers believe that intelligence is influenced by genes and environment, and when it comes to genes, we think a large number of genetic variants all make very small contributions.

It's a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari's office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. "It's from 2010," he says, "and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!" Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer -- a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future. Instead of continuing to develop new materials the old-fashioned way -- stumbling across them by luck, then painstakingly measuring their properties in the laboratory -- Marzari and like-minded researchers are using computer modelling and machine-learning techniques to generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands.

Chris Drozd, left, and Stefan Salvatore leave flowers and pictures for victims of the nightclub shooting on Sunday, at the Dr. Phillips Performing Arts Center, Monday, June 13, 2016 in Orlando, Fla. A gunman opened fire in a crowded Orlando nightclub early Sunday killing dozens of people. President Barack Obama, left, speaks to members of the media in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, June 13, 2016, after getting briefed on the investigation of a shooting at a nightclub in Orlando by FBI Director James Comey, right, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, not shown, and other officials. Craig Federighi, Apple senior vice president of software engineering, speaks at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, Monday, June 13, 2016. Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the club in Orlando, Florida, claimed to support Islamic State extremists, as well opposing groups such as Hezbolla and Nusra Front.

Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at the club in Orlando, Florida, claimed to support Islamic State extremists, as well opposing groups such as Hezbolla and Nusra Front. Large crowds gather for the "OneOrlando Vigil" in the city where the rampage occurred, while other memorials are being held across the country. Officials scrutinized Omar Mateen for making radical, violent statements in 2013, then investigated him again in 2014 because he was casually acquainted with a suicide bomber. Donald Trump vows to impose bans on immigrants from parts of the world associated with terrorism, while Hillary Clinton warns that demonizing all Muslims would only play into the hands of extremists. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown calls for Labour Party supporters to vote to stay in the European Union.

For too long, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) has existed inside a heavily shielded bubble, one in which game makers target retailers and journalists with carefully controlled messages designed to stoke the imagination of the most dedicated of game players. And what have those players wanted? Indeed, at the pre-conference events ahead of the Tuesday start of this year's E3, it seemed at first that nothing had changed. At L.A. Live on Sunday afternoon, Electronic Arts offered insiders a look at a sequel to "Titanfall," a military-esque shooter featuring giant robots, as well as the gritty, World War I-set "Battlefield I." Then Monday morning at Microsoft's bonanza at USC's Galen Center, cheers erupted during a demo of the latest "Gears of War" when a woman used a gun to obliterate an already downed creature. These sorts of displays do little to debunk age-old stereotypes about games and those who play them.

Analysts are saying that Apple's upcoming updates to its Siri voice assistant should help the company address criticisms that it can't compete on artificial intelligence. Apple is now opening Siri to apps made by other companies, and like Google and Microsoft, it's bringing the digital assistant to desktop and laptop computers. It's also making Siri smarter by using what Apple calls differential privacy. Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy explains it as Apple using non-personal information in aggregate to teach Siri new tricks, then having all the personalization take place on the individual device. It's in contrast to Google's approach of doing everything over the internet -- that is, in the "cloud."