Israel Aerospace Industries' (IAI) new combat robot has a wide variety of applications. The machine called RoBattle can be used as an advance guard, as a decoy or for surveillance missions. Because it uses a system that the manufacturer calls modular "robotic kit" made up of several components: vehicle control, navigation, RT mapping and autonomy, sensors and mission payloads. Since it has a modular design, the company can swap in parts depending on what a particular mission needs. For instance, it could either use wheels or tracks, and its payload could be anything from robotic arms and sensors/radars to remote-controlled weapons.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to help reform policing and criminal justice practices nationwide, experts say. However, one challenge to deploying widespread artificial intelligence is refining the data to avoid reinforcing historic biases. The White House and the University of Chicago have teamed up with police departments across America to "start fixing" biases with the data collected over the years by the criminal justice system by building new ways of looking at the data, said director of the Center for Data Science and Public Policy at the University of Chicago Riyad Ghani. "We think that AI and machine learning… combined with all the data that exists can help solve these problems," Ghani said. The United States locks up more people per capita than any other nation, and artificial intelligence and machine learning can create predictive modeling and find patterns in behaviors of the officers and those being arrested, explained Ghani.

Denis Poroy/Getty Images London entrepreneurs have a constructive debate over the relative methods of taking venture capital versus bootstrapping your business. The city's tech scene is at a pivotal moment, continuing to boom even as the country debate's its future in the European Union, a decision which will have huge implications for the future health of the industry. Meanwhile, radical new formats and mediums are starting to be explored in earnest, from artificial intelligence to virtual reality. At Google's annual I/O Extended event in London, Business Insider sat down with a handful of exciting London Android developers and CEOs, from luxury smartphone business Vertu to fast-growing language learning app startup Memrise. We wanted to hear what they're excited -- and worried -- about over the year ahead.

It's become customary to be wowed by computers today. IBM's supercomputer, Watson, beat former Jeopardy! More recently, Google's AlphaGo eclipsed Lee Sedol in a challenge of Go, an ancient board game. These computer systems used artificial intelligence (AI) to outshine humans. While board and game show victories are exciting, they overshadow the practical benefits of AI.

Financial services incumbents along with early-stage startups and large tech companies are all competing in fintech. CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal gave a 110-slide presentation at our fintech conference in New York. The full deck covered broad VC funding trends for fintech and the developments in large categories such as wealth management, blockchain, remittance tech, and insurance tech. On robo-advisors, Sanwal noted that market volatility has not necessarily been a boon to the category. "It's not all roses," he said.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference next Monday will be all about the brains behind Apple devices--the operating systems. It's not likely we'll see any new gadgetry (I could be wrong; it's happened), but we'll get a busload of information about new tricks in iOS, Mac OS, watchOS, and tvOS. At last year's WWDC, you may remember, Apple introduced OS X 10.11 (El Capitan), iOS 9, and WatchOS 2. The News app debuted, Maps added public transit directions, and HomeKit and CarPlay both got updates. This year we'll hear a lot about how Siri is moving deeper into Apple's major OSs, and about her advances in general smarts and usefulness. And Apple execs will probably talk about how the company has further integrated its cloud services into its OSs and apps.

Those artificial intelligence programs being created by Google and other brain trusts are getting more clever by the day. When they're not beating game masters in a Go tournament they're composing new, original music. But leave it to the government to try to make the best use of new technology. We can't be satisfied with simply replacing our chess grand masters and Beyonce' with a snazzy new algorithm, so at least one expert in the Obama administration is pondering a new idea. Maybe they could replace judges in the courtroom. Artificial intelligence might soon become a standard part of criminal justice proceedings.

Armorway, an AI platform and data analytics startup, announced Tuesday that it had completed a round of seed funding to the tune of 2.5 million to further expand its AI platform for tackling information security threats. According to a press release announcing the round, Armorway will use the capital to deliver "descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics with cognitive intelligence and deep machine learning to dynamically understand and respond to all types of security threats." Additionally, the company will use the extra funding to expand its customer base and R&D team, as well as continue working on product development. Armorway CEO and co-founder Zareh Baghdasarian said that Armorway is focused on using AI and predictive analytics to find potential threats and respond before they become a problem. "Security organizations of all kinds spend significant time and effort on incident response and investigation--both reactive processes which are inconsistent with the true definition of better safety and prevention," Armorway offers two core products: Trust and Sentinel.

Here I am, a human, writing a story assigned to a machine. If I'd published what the computer came up with, you'd be reading something like: "content that was that communications and everything that makes on a person what they're are also to be in the Internet in the fact about it is that models are technologication of the same that its also from the most computer." A machine really did come up with that garbage. But let me back up for a second. A little over a year ago, I started asking around--among computer scientists at universities and tech companies, mostly--to see if someone would help me design and carry out a weird little experiment I had in mind.

In an announcement, IARPA officials laid out the project's goals: "The DIVA program will produce a common framework and software prototype for activity detection, person/object detection and recognition across a multicamera network," IARPA officials wrote. "The impact will be the development of tools for forensic analysis, as well as real-time alerting for user-defined threat scenarios." In other words: the system should be able to identify suspicious behavior in real-time. One of the problems with existing systems is that they can identify individual people or objects, but not many of them at the same time, or the complex interactions between them. The DIVA system as it is proposed would be able to identify certain types of movements like a person carrying a firearm, two people exchanging an object, or someone walking up and abandoning a potentially dangerous object on the street.