There is huge potential for deep machine learning to become a valuable asset in the intelligence gathering space, according to Pentagon Deputy Secretary Robert Work -- it could ultimately allow U.S. forces to get an edge in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, ISIL, IS) by providing greater insights into their networks and practices. Work made the statement during a roughly hour-long talk called Securing Tomorrow, held March 30 by the Washington Post, where he addressed some of the threat concerns facing the United States and the strategy the Department of Defense is deploying to overcome them. Moderated by Post columnist David Ignatius, the discussion also focused on how the behemoth agency is approaching new technologies and the perceived threats being seen from top international competitors, like Russia and China. "Without question, we are absolutely certain, that the use of deep learning machines is going to allow us to have a better understanding of ISIS as a network and a better understanding of how we can target it precisely and lead to its defeat." The evaluative capabilities and intelligence gathering promise of deep machine learning, Work said, has already shown great potential through the use of publicly available materials on social media, which paint a clearer picture of the events surrounding the downing of Malaysian passenger airliner MH17.

Kinba has only just started on the front desk of King's College but the students are already in love with their new receptionist who can see, hear and have a stab at speaking. Under normal circumstances that would be unremarkable – but Kinba is a robot. Kinba, who has yet to be assigned a gender, took up its new post last week alongside the London university's existing – human – receptionist Camilla Templing at its building on the Strand. "Kinba's generated a real buzz of excitement about the place, to see it moving and speaking. People are coming and taking pictures and talking to it," Ms Templing says.

I recently had the opportunity to learn more about Inbenta, a provider of Natural Language Search technology for intelligent assistant and web self-service technologies. I spoke with global marketing director Julie Casson and Kelly Foster, linguist, to gain insight into a company I didn't know much about. Inbenta originated in Barcelona, and now has offices in the United States, France, Singapore, Brazil and the Netherlands. Casson and Foster are located at the office in Sunnyvale, California. Prior to our conversation, I knew that Inbenta offers intelligent assistant technology and an extremely innovative 3D avatar, called Victoria.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your gullible Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. "Our new technology solves all your problems linked to writing and typing. The automated cell uses an advanced technology that recognizes the human voice and types the exact same text on the device of your choice. The technology is available for pen, pencil, keyboard, laptop, smartphone and tablet."

People often ask how we've been able to learn about and cover so many different and diverse topics in machine learning (using at least three different programming languages – Python, Matlab, and R) and generally achieve such prominence in the community, all this in a relatively short time. Today we finally give a definitive answer. There's no Zygmunt the Polish economist ever willing to relocate to San Francisco. And the "we" that we always use in the posts is not majestic plural. We are three Chinese PhD students: Ah, Hai and Wang.

It doesn't look like a place to make groundbreaking discoveries that change the trajectory of society. But in these simulated, claustrophobic corridors, Demis Hassabis thinks he can lay the foundations for software that's smart enough to solve humanity's biggest problems. "Our goal's very big," says Hassabis, whose level-headed manner can mask the audacity of his ideas. He leads a team of roughly 200 computer scientists and neuroscientists at Google's DeepMind, the London-based group behind the AlphaGo software that defeated the world champion at Go in a five-game series earlier this month, setting a milestone in computing. It's supposed to be just an early checkpoint in an effort Hassabis describes as the Apollo program of artificial intelligence, aimed at "solving intelligence, and then using that to solve everything else."

Students from ETH Zurich are developing an exoskeleton for paraplegics that they say more accurately mimics natural knee gait meaning it won't struggle on uneven terrain. Powered exoskeletons can give paraplegics or those with lower-limb weakness the ability to walk again. Mechanical engineers from ETH Zurich believe they have the solution. This prototype exoskeleton has one important addition that could make it able to cope with whatever comes its way. "Here with the Varileg we implemented the mechanical variable impedance, which is something special that no other exoskeleton has implemented at the moment. And the advantage of this is that we can mimic the human-like stiffness adaptation of the human knee and this also allows us to adapt to unexpected obstacles because we can say how stiff the knee should behave."

A drone flies Feb. 27, 2015, over Reims, northwestern France. SAN FRANCISCO -- The national group that represents companies that make and sell drones has split, with those focused on consumers leaving to form their own organization. Four drone companies left the Small UAV Coalition on Thursday. While still tightly aligned with the coalition on big issues, the break-away companies plan to create a still-unnamed group to very specifically focus on consumer issues, said GoPro spokesman Jeff Brown. As the drone market matures, a shifting of needs was inevitable. Larger companies such as Amazon's Prime Air, Alphabet's Google X and others are looking more at drones for delivery, cargo and more commercial uses.

Dubbed the "Picobug" and inspired by a male stag beetle, the compact, 30-gram robot combines the flight of a Dragonfly quadrotor and the crawl of a DASH robot that allows multiple modes of locomotion. It can fly up to 13 miles per hour and skitter across a 10-foot-long table in 19 seconds. The university's GRASP Laboratory released footage of the little robot scuttling across a flat surface, flying over a cinder block, and traveling through tight spaces by flying and crawling simultaneously. Video by PBS NewsHour, footage provided by the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Laboratory. "Because of its small size, the Picobug can explore environments that other robots would not be able to access," Yash Mulgaonkar, a researcher at UPenn's GRASP Laboratory, told IEEE Spectrum.

The war film is one of cinema's most enduring genres; nearly every major conflict of the past century has been depicted on screen--multiple times. Films that wrestle with the rapidly changing nature of war, though, are rarer. As drone warfare continues its slow march into public consciousness, Eye in the Sky is the best movie yet to tackle the legal and moral quagmire surrounding modern technological warfare. To do that, Eye in the Sky goes granular, telling the story of one particular mission on one particular day. In the movie, opening wide today, British colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) oversees a secret operation to capture a terrorist cell in Nairobi, Kenya.