ALISON STEWART, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: Joining me now via Skype to discuss the significance of the U.S. military strike on the Taliban's leader is Jennifer Glasse, a freelance reporter, now in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. Jennifer, tell us a little bit more about Mansour, who he was within the hierarchy of the Taliban? JENNIFER GLASSE, FREELANCE REPORTER: He was the Taliban leader who took over in last summer. He was a bit of a controversy because when he took over after the announcement, that Mullah Omar had been dead for more than two years. There was a bit of a power struggle and division among the Taliban.

How would you perform accurate classification on a very large dataset, by just looking at a sample of it? One of his recent papers is about big data and similarity metrics. In this work Rocco proposes a deterministic method to obtain subsets from Big Data which are a good representative of the inherent structure in the data itself. This allows one to consider only a subset of the entire dataset, still performing at high accuracy if not better than traditional (eg. As you can see, there is always a solution in Big Data.

This controversial question is argued by many who hold very strong opinions.

Google wants to put the art back in artificial intelligence. During the last session at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival, in Durham, North Carolina, Douglas Eck, a researcher on Google Brain, the company's artificial-intelligence research project, outlined a new group that's going to focus on figuring out if computers can truly create. The group, called Magenta, will launch more publicly at the start of June, but attendees at Moogfest were given a taste of what it's going to be working on. Magenta will use TensorFlow, the machine-learning engine that Google built and opened up to the public at the end of 2015, to determine whether AI systems can be trained to create original pieces of music, art, or video. This is no simple task, given that even the most advanced artificially intelligent systems have enough trouble copying the styles of existing artists and musicians, let alone coming up with entirely new ideas themselves.

Computer users have long relied on Nvidia Corp.'s technology to paint virtual worlds on the screen as they gunned down videogame enemies. Now some researchers are betting it can also help save lives--of real people. Massachusetts General Hospital recently established a center in Boston that plans to use Nvidia chips to help an artificial-intelligence system spot anomalies on CT scans and other medical images, jobs now carried out by human radiologists. The project, drawing on a database of 10 billion existing images, is...

He bobbed his head with the groove, and leaned way in when he wanted to play more complicated melodies, rocking and rolling with the beat of the jam. This wasn't a your average jazz band member, though--this was Shimon, a four-armed robot marimba player built by the Georgia Institute of Technology to be able to listen to music, improvise, and play along with human musicians. At a performance at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina, Gil Weinberg, the lead researcher at Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology, demonstrated what he and his lab have been working on for the past 12 years. Their efforts have aimed at augmenting the creative capabilities of humans with robotics. That can mean robots like Shimon, which uses machine-learning programs trained on music theory and a wide range of musical styles, from chamber music to dubstep, to be able to add a superhuman element to musical performances, playing chord structures that would be physically impossible for humans to hit. But it can also mean robotic enhancements for humans: At the concert, Weinberg introduced Jason Barnes, a drummer who lost the lower part of his right arm a few years ago.

The giant hedge fund, which manages 35 billion, is as much a technology company as it is a hedge fund. It uses advanced technologies to find investment opportunities, and it just hosted its annual artificial intelligence competition. One of those technological applications involves using natural-language-processing techniques to analyze the Fed minutes, such as those set for release Wednesday afternoon. "Historically, interpretations of those minutes required art, so Fed watchers pontificated and critiqued," the firm said in a note. "Now natural language processing techniques can translate those minutes into relatively objective data."

At the top of the corporate world, Apple and Google are in a back-and-forth battle to be number one. It's not clear which of the two Silicon Valley giants will emerge on top in a contest which highlights the contrast of very different business models. Apple then regained, lost and recovered the leader position in May in a battle that appears set to continue for some time. At the close Friday, Apple was worth some 522 billion, to 496 billion for Alphabet. The two companies have both been hugely profitable in recent years, for different reasons. Apple has delivered a line of must-have iPhones and other gadgets that have set trends around the world but now "appears to be a little bit immobile," says Roger Kay, analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates.

Pakistan accused the United States on Sunday of violating its sovereignty with a drone strike against the leader of the Afghan Taliban, in perhaps the most high-profile US incursion into Pakistani territory since the 2011 raid to kill Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan said the attack killed Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, which, if confirmed, could trigger a succession battle within the armed group that has proved resilient despite a decade and a half of US military deployments to Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah said on Twitter that he was dead, the country's spy agency also said he had been killed, and a source close to Mansoor told Al Jazeera he believed the reports to be true. The Saturday drone strike, which US officials said was authorised by President Barack Obama, showed the US was prepared to go after the Taliban leadership in Pakistan, which the government in Kabul has repeatedly accused of sheltering the rebels. Pakistan protested on Sunday, saying the US government did not inform Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif beforehand.

Four sister robots built by NASA could be pioneers in the colonization of Mars, part of an advance construction team that sets up a habitat for more fragile human explorers. But first they're finding new homes on Earth and engineers to hone their skills. The space agency has kept one Valkyrie robot at its birthplace, the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It has loaned three others to universities in Massachusetts and Scotland so professors and students can tinker with the 6-foot-tall, 300-pound humanoids and make them more autonomous. One of the robots, nicknamed Val, still hasn't quite harmonized its 28 torque-controlled joints and nearly 200 sensors after arriving at a robotics center at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Engineering students let the electricity-powered robot down from a harness and tried to let it walk, only to watch as Val's legs awkwardly lurched and locked into a ballet pose.