Major players in the tech industry including Google and Microsoft have bet big money on the rise of internet bots as a form of communication between man and machine. While not the eerily humanoid robots in sci-fi movies (yet), the advancement and refinement of the bots' mechanical psyche parallel to the development of robotic parts is one step closer to merging the two. That is if it hasn't happened already. Isaac Asimov was a prolific sci-fi writer and Professor of Biochemistry at Boston University and is regarded by many as the father of robotics. "The Three Laws of Robotics 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; 3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law; The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm."?

Growing up in a small village in Vietnam, Quoc Le had no electricity till he was nine. A little over 20 years later he has helped design artificial intelligence used by millions everyday. The 32-year-old helps lead the Google Brain team, a specialised unit that attempts to give computers the kind of profound neural networks that human beings possess, or at least helps them simulate it. It is Google's attempt to build an artificial brain. It may not be humanoid-like machine that can think for itself that many will have in mind, but "intelligence" has already been integrated into Google products, the kinds of technology that Mr Le could only imagine as a child.

An artist's rendering of Japan's new National Stadium, which will become the main venue for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. THE Olympic Games have long been used to showcase some of the world's newest technologies. From electronic stopwatches in Stockholm in 1912, to live television broadcasts in Berlin in 1936, to instant video replay at Salt Lake City in 2002 -- host cities have looked to stay at the cutting edge. But in four years, those innovations are going to look as ancient as the Games themselves as the most tech-savvy of nations -- Japan -- prepares to dazzle visitors and audiences across the globe with the most futuristic Olympics of them all. "The Olympic Games is a sports festival, but also it's a chance to show the innovation of scientific technologies," Tokyo's organising committee CEO Toshiro Muto said. "We have the potential to make this Olympic Games wonderful (and one) that the people of the world are going to admire."

Australia has warned the world that artificially intelligent killer robots "may be closer than many of us had imagined" and nations need to work harder to tackle the future threat they may pose. Is the Australian Defence Force the next big customer for unmanned aerial vehicles? At a United Nations meeting on "lethal autonomous weapons systems" in Geneva, Switzerland, the Australian delegation on Monday night called on the world to come up with agreed rules about how to handle the rapid pace in technology in military artificial intelligence. "The development of fully autonomous systems able to conduct military targeting operations which kill and injure combatants or civilians may be closer than many of us had imagined," the delegation's statement said. "It is an appropriate time to consider the risks of such weapons systems and to make sure we understand fully what might constitute misuse as well as legitimate use of emerging technologies."

Missing teen's remains found in Lerderderg State Park Is the Australian Defence Force the next big customer for unmanned aerial vehicles? Australia has warned the world that artificially intelligent killer robots "may be closer than many of us had imagined" and nations need to work harder to tackle the future threat they may pose. At a United Nations meeting on "lethal autonomous weapons systems" in Geneva, Switzerland, the Australian delegation on Monday night called on the world to come up with agreed rules about how to handle the rapid pace in technology in military artificial intelligence. The Terminator movies imagined a future where killer robots posed a threat to humanity: some warn that the threat is real. "The development of fully autonomous systems able to conduct military targeting operations which kill and injure combatants or civilians may be closer than many of us had imagined," the delegation's statement said.

Some of the world's most prominent scientists and technology entrepreneurs including physicist Stephen Hawking, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak signed a letter warning about the dangers of autonomous weapons, which they said would be technologically feasible "within years, not decades". Australia has warned the world that artificially intelligent killer robots "may be closer than many of us had imagined" and nations need to work harder to tackle the future threat they may pose. At a United Nations meeting on "lethal autonomous weapons systems" in Geneva, Switzerland, the Australian delegation on Monday night called on the world to come up with agreed rules about how to handle the rapid pace in technology in military artificial intelligence. "The development of fully autonomous systems able to conduct military targeting operations which kill and injure combatants or civilians may be closer than many of us had imagined," the delegation's statement said. "It is an appropriate time to consider the risks of such weapons systems and to make sure we understand fully what might constitute misuse as well as legitimate use of emerging technologies."

"The robots are coming" is not something Paul Revere said during the American Revolution, but it is certainly something many people have uttered over the years. So have we finally reached the tipping point where artificial intelligence and robots will begin to take over human jobs en masse? Perhaps not, but we are closer to the time when they will be even more essential assets and presences in the workforce, explains Martin Ford, the author of the book "Rise of the Robots." I caught up with Ford at The Economist magazine's Innovation Forum event, which was held earlier this month. He pointed out that artificial intelligence is making its way into sectors that were once manned by only man, including the legal profession, where computer systems such as Watson could muscle in on human territory to provide legal counsel, and even journalism where stories are being written without direct human input about some articles.

Planning with hybrid domains modelled in PDDL+ has been gaining research interest in the Automated Planning community in recent years. Hybrid domain models capture a more accurate representation of real world problems that involve continuous processes than is possible using discrete systems. However, solving problems represented as PDDL+ domains is very challenging due to the construction of complex system dynamics, including non-linear processes and events. In this paper we introduce DiNo, a new planner capable of tackling complex problems with non-linear system dynamics governing the continuous evolution of states. DiNo is based on the discretise-and-validate approach and uses the novel Staged Relaxed Planning Graph+ (SRPG+) heuristic, which is introduced in this paper. Although several planners have been developed to work with subsets of PDDL+ features, or restricted forms of processes, DiNo is currently the only heuristic planner capable of handling non-linear system dynamics combined with the full PDDL+ feature set.

Humans may one day create superintelligence, artificially intelligent machines that surpass mankind's intellect. Would these artificial intelligences choose to play games with us, and if so, which games? We believe this question is relevant for the ethics of general AI, the current widespread integration of AI systems into daily life, and for game AI research. We present a catalog of scenarios, some good for humanity and some bad, in which various kinds of play might take place between humans and intelligent machines. We assume a superintelligence, because of its greater cognitive ability, would stand in a similar relation to us as an adult does to a child, an expert to a novice, or a human to an animal. We define friendly games, learning games, observational games, and domination games, and proceed to consider games adults play with children, experts play with novices, and humans play with animals. Reasoning by analogy, we imagine corresponding games that superintelligences might choose to play with us, finding that domination games would pose a significant risk to humanity.

In this paper we describe the Unified Cybersecurity Ontology (UCO) that is intended to support information integration and cyber situational awareness in cybersecurity systems. The ontology incorporates and integratesheterogeneous data and knowledge schemas from different cybersecurity systems and most commonly usedcybersecurity standards for information sharing and exchange. The UCO ontology has also been mapped to anumber of existing cybersecurity ontologies as well asconcepts in the Linked Open Data cloud (Berners-Lee,Bizer, and Heath 2009). Similar to DBpedia (Auer etal. 2007) which serves as the core for general knowledge in Linked Open Data cloud, we envision UCO toserve as the core for cybersecurity domain, which wouldevolve and grow with the passage of time with additional cybersecurity data sets as they become available.We also present a prototype system and concrete usecases supported by the UCO ontology. To the best of ourknowledge, this is the first cybersecurity ontology thathas been mapped to general world ontologies to support broader and diverse security use cases. We comparethe resulting ontology with previous efforts, discuss itsstrengths and limitations, and describe potential futurework directions.