In his quest to transform the way the Pentagon wages war, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has turned to Silicon Valley, hoping its experimental culture, innovation and sense of urgency would rub off on the rigid bureaucracy he runs. Carter has made several trips to the region and appointed Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google's parent company to an advisory board. And recently he sat down at the Pentagon with Elon Musk to see what suggestions the billionaire founder of Tesla and SpaceX might have to make the nation's military more efficient and daring. "Having an incentive structure that rewards innovation is extremely important," he said in an interview after the meeting. Whatever you reward will happen." The Pentagon finds itself in a new arms race, struggling to keep pace with forms of combat that are fought with bytes as well as bullets. The technological advancements disrupting established business sectors are now shaking up the world of war - where robots, swarming drones and ...

If you think your mind is the only safe place left for all your secrets, think again, because scientists are making real steps towards reading your thoughts and putting them on a screen for everyone to see. A team from the University of Oregon has built a system that can read people's thoughts via brain scans, and reconstruct the faces they were visualising in their heads. As you'll soon see, the results were pretty damn creepy. "We can take someone's memory - which is typically something internal and private - and we can pull it out from their brains," one of the team, neuroscientist Brice Kuhl, told Brian Resnick at Vox. The researchers selected 23 volunteers, and compiled a set of 1,000 colour photos of random people's faces.

Rolls-Royce this week unveiled a white paper on autonomous ships at an Amsterdam symposium, predicting the commercialization of the technology by the end of the decade. It's not if; it's when," Oskar Levander, Rolls-Royce's vice president for marine innovation, told the Autonomous Ship Technology Symposium 2016 Tuesday as the company issued its white paper, "Advanced Autonomous Waterborne Applications Initiative." "The technologies needed to make remote and autonomous ships a reality exist. The AAWA project is testing sensor arrays in a range of operating and climatic conditions in Finland and has created a simulated autonomous ship control system which allows the behavior of the complete communication system to be explored. We will see a remote-controlled ship in commercial use by the end of the decade," Levander said. The technology, which Rolls-Royce said has the support of shipowners and operators, was tested on Finferries' 213-foot double-ended ferry, the Stella, which operates between Korpo and Houtskär. Also working on the project is ESL Shipping Ltd., which is testing implications for cargo vessels. "Our solutions in ship intelligence will deliver multifaceted enhancements in vessel performance and operation for our customers.

Consider TPOT your Data Science Assistant. TPOT is a Python tool that automatically creates and optimizes machine learning pipelines using genetic programming. TPOT will automate the most tedious part of machine learning by intelligently exploring thousands of possible pipelines to find the best one for your data. Once TPOT is finished searching (or you get tired of waiting), it provides you with the Python code for the best pipeline it found so you can tinker with the pipeline from there. TPOT is built on top of scikit-learn, so all of the code it generates should look familiar... if you're familiar with scikit-learn, anyway.

At the Oregon Digital Government Summit held in Salem earlier this month, Michael Finch, CIO of Lane County, Ore., discussed some of the opportunities for cognitive learning and artificial intelligence at the local government level, citing the ability to better serve constituents with tailored services informed by usage data. Eyragon Eidam is the assistant news editor for Government Technology magazine, and covers legislation, social media and public safety. He can be reached at eeidam@erepublic.com.

Artificial intelligence is a major player at Cannes Lions this week. And while AI is expected to transform tech within five years, Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt assured attendees that there's little chance it will become "evil" as Hollywood films have depicted. In fact, he said, there are imminent benefits of AI. "Computer vision is now better than human vision. It means self-driving cars probably see a lot better than you, especially if you are drunk." Meanwhile, British musician and producer Brian Eno spoke about creativity and AI, defending human intelligence. "AI is not as advanced as we expected it would be," he said.

Over at the Mercury News site, Ethan Baron has a fun story on tourists who travel (sometimes from other countries) to Silicon Valley to visit big companies such as Apple, Facebook, and Google. None of these places are set up to welcome civilians, and all are security conscious, so the visits usually don't amount to much more than posing in front of signage and maybe buying a tchotchke in a gift shop. As the article conveys, Google's campus is at least a tad more tourist-friendly than most: The giant sculptures of Android mascots are on a public thoroughfare and well worth a visit. The local color also spills out onto the streets of Mountain View, where every motorist gets to experience the novelty of dodging Googlers on colorful bikes. But really, if you've traveled to Silicon Valley to learn about Silicon Valley, my top recommendation would be to visit the wonderful Computer History Museum.

Robots probably won't kill people, but people could kill people with robots. That's the concern of an open letter signed by scientists and other interested parties -- including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak and Stephen Hawking. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. See also: Team KAIST won the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge, so now what? The Future of Life Institute, the volunteer-backed research organization which posted the letter, aims to "maximize the future benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls," according to its website.

CHRISTOPHER BOOKER: The most unpleasant job in all of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Boston next door neighbor, may well belong to a robot named Luigi. These researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lower Luigi into the city's sewer system to collect samples of human wastewater. More than two-feet long this robot is on the cutting edge of data collection and public health research. He was created by M.I.T.'s Senseable City lab, which innovates new approaches to study urban environments. ERIC ALM: It's a great way to get behavioral data that would be very difficult to get on a person-by-person basis.

PARIS – A tropical fish can tell one human face from another despite lacking a brain section that homo sapiens and other "smart" animals use for this task, scientists said. The astonishing ability was demonstrated in experiments with eight archerfish, a tropical species best known for spitting pressurized water jets to shoot prey out of the air. Instead of aiming at bugs, the sharpshooting fish were taught to spit at pictures of human faces displayed on a computer monitor suspended over their aquarium. "We were pleasantly surprised at the speed at which the fish learned as well as their high degree of accuracy," said study co-author Cait Newport of the Oxford University's department of zoology. The fish, which require excellent vision for hunting, were first introduced to two faces, and conditioned to spit at one of them in exchange for a food reward.