Over a hundred experts in robotics and artificial intelligence are calling on the UN to ban the development and use of killer robots and add them to a list of'morally wrong' weapons including blinding lasers and chemical weapons. Google's Mustafa Suleyman and Tesla's Elon Musk are among the most prominent names on a list of 116 tech experts who have signed an open letter asking the UN to ban autonomous weapons in a bid to prevent an arms race. In December 2016 the UN voted to begin formal talks over the future of such weapons, including tanks, drones and automated machine guns. So far, 19 out of 123 member states have called for an outright ban on lethal autonomous weapons. One of the letter's key organisers, Toby Walsh, a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Australia unveiled the letter at the opening of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Melbourne.

Some of the world's leading robotics and artificial intelligence pioneers are calling on the United Nations to ban the development and use of killer robots. Tesla's Elon Musk and Google's Mustafa Suleyman are leading a group of 116 specialists from across 26 countries who are calling for the ban on autonomous weapons. The UN recently voted to begin formal discussions on such weapons which include drones, tanks and automated machine guns. Ahead of this, the group of founders of AI and robotics companies have sent an open letter to the UN calling for it to prevent the arms race that is currently under way for killer robots. In their letter, the founders warn the review conference of the convention on conventional weapons that this arms race threatens to usher in the "third revolution in warfare" after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Some of the world's leading robotics and artificial intelligence pioneers are calling on the United Nations to ban the development and use of killer robots. Tesla's Elon Musk and Google's Mustafa Suleyman are leading a group of 116 specialists from across 26 countries who are calling for the ban on autonomous weapons. The UN recently voted to begin formal discussions on such weapons which include drones, tanks and automated machine guns. Ahead of this the group of founders of AI and robotics companies have sent an open letter to the UN calling for it to prevent the arms race that's currently underway for killer robots. In their letter, the founders warn the review conference of the Convention on Conventional Weapons that this arms race threatens to usher in the "third revolution in warfare" after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

The emerging technologies on the Gartner Inc. Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2017 reveal three distinct megatrends that will enable businesses to survive and thrive in the digital economy over the next five to 10 years. Artificial intelligence (AI) everywhere, transparently immersive experiences and digital platforms are the trends that will provide unrivaled intelligence, create profoundly new experiences and offer platforms that allow organizations to connect with new business ecosystems. The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report is the longest-running annual Gartner Hype Cycle, providing a cross-industry perspective on the technologies and trends that business strategists, chief innovation officers, R&D leaders, entrepreneurs, global market developers and emerging-technology teams should consider in developing emerging-technology portfolios. The Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle is unique among most Gartner Hype Cycles because it garners insights from more than 2,000 technologies into a succinct set of compelling emerging technologies and trends. This Hype Cycle specifically focuses on the set of technologies that is showing promise in delivering a high degree of competitive advantage over the next five to 10 years (see Figure 1).

At a demonstration of Amazon Web Services' new artificial intelligence image recognition tool last week, the deep learning analysis calculated with near certainty that a photo of speaker Glenn Gore depicted a potted plant. "It is very clever, it can do some amazing things but it needs a lot of hand holding still. AI is almost like a toddler. They can do some pretty cool things, sometimes they can cause a fair bit of trouble," said AWS' chief architect in his day two keynote at the company's summit in Sydney. Where the toddler analogy falls short, however, is that a parent can make a reasonable guess as to, say, what led to their child drawing all over the walls, and ask them why.

The build towards WWE SummerSlam 2017 hasn't been as entertaining as it's been in recent years, but you might not know that by looking at the card. The pay-per-view is almost being treated like WrestleMania, considering it features 12 advertised matches and could last longer than five hours. The kickoff show starts at 6 p.m. EDT, and the actual pay-per-view gets underway an hour later at 7 p.m. EDT at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Fans can either watch the SummerSlam with a live stream on the WWE Network, or they can order the PPV for $54.99. A subscription to the network costs $9.99 per month, though new subscribers get the first month free.

The State Government of South Australia announced their contract with Solar Reserve to build a 150MW solar thermal power plant for Port Augusta, South Australia. This is an addition to the state-owned gas plant and the world's largest lithium ion battery recently announced contract with Tesla. According to State Premier Jay Weatherhill, this solar thermal plant "biggest of its kind in the world" and "will help make our energy grid more secure." This Aurora Solar Energy Project will be ready in 2020 and is expected to supply 100% of the government's anticipated power needs. IntelAI has been collaborating with NASA FDL's Lunar Water and Volatiles team in a 9-week program this year. Working with Intel's team and their deep learning technologies, Intel Nervana, NASA is looking to accelerate the development of a software solution to take AI to the moon.

Everyone's scared to take a bite from the fruit of knowledge. While earth can no longer be referred to as the Garden of Eden, humans, from time unknown, have been hesitant to embrace new knowledge and technology at once. One step at a time, has always been our motto. Be it films, books, music or theatre, our over-active imaginations have always been haunted by a dystopian future of the society. An unseen neural net-based "conscious group mind" and general Artificial Intelligence that is willing to do everything in its power to make sure it survives?

We study the problem of finding a short path from a start to a goal within a two-dimensional continuous and isotropic terrain that has been discretized into an array of accessible and blocked cells. A classic approach obtains a grid path where each step is along the edge of an accessible cell or diagonally across one. Grid paths suffer from `digitization bias' -- even if two locations have line-of-sight, the minimum travelling cost between them can be greater than the distance along the line-of-sight. In a vertex path, steps are allowed from a cell corner to any other cell corner if they have line-of-sight. While the `digitization bias' is smaller, shortest vertex paths are impractical to find by brute force. Recent research has thus turned to methods for finding short (but not necessarily shortest) vertex paths. To establish the methods' potential utility, we calculate upper bounds on the difference in length between the shortest vertex paths versus the shortest r-constrained ones where an r-constrained path consists of line segments that each traverse at most r rows and at most r columns of cells. The difference in length reduces as r increases -- indeed the shortest vertex paths are at most 1 percent shorter than the shortest 4-constrained ones. This article will be useful to developers and users of short(est) vertex paths algorithms who want to trade path length for improved runtimes in a predictable manner.

When we launched the Alternate Realities grant program in May we had no idea what to expect. We saw a need for funding in the arts happening at just the time when new media like AR and VR were starting to go mainstream. So, with support from our parent company, Oath, we set out to fund five immersive art projects that push the limits of storytelling through emerging technologies. Proposals came from as far away as Iran and Australia and ranged in discipline from theater to fashion, documentary to animation. There were multi-million dollar VR productions, animated shorts and escape rooms.