The 28,000-word report, "Artificial Intelligence and Life in 2030," looks at eight categories -- from employment to healthcare, security, entertainment, education, service robots, transportation and poor communities -- and tries to predict how smart technologies will affect urban life.

Chris Bettinger (left) holds the edible battery he designed with Young Jo Kim and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Chris Bettinger (left) holds the edible battery he designed with Young Jo Kim and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. That's how researcher Christopher Bettinger describes one of the biggest obstacles for sending tiny medical robots into the human body for diagnosing and treating diseases. These devices run on batteries (like those in watches) and they are usually made of toxic materials such as lithium. This month, Bettinger, based at Carnegie Mellon University, presented his group's work on creating edible, nontoxic batteries at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

U.S. stocks rose Friday as investors found some positive aspects in a middling employment report. Job growth slowed in August, and traders hope that will persuade the Federal Reserve to wait before raising interest rates. Stocks started the day with big gains following the Labor Department's job report. Energy companies rose more than the rest of the market as oil prices broke out of a four-day slump. The gains were broad, but the stocks that rose the most were utilities, which would stand to benefit if interest rates remain low.

Cybersecurity research involves publishing papers about malicious exploits as much as publishing information on how to design tools to protect cyber-infrastructure. It is this information exchange between ethical hackers and security experts, which results in a well-balanced cyber-ecosystem. In the blooming domain of AI Safety Engineering, hundreds of papers have been published on different proposals geared at the creation of a safe machine, yet nothing, to our knowledge, has been published on how to design a malevolent machine. Availability of such information would be of great value particularly to computer scientists, mathematicians, and others who have an interest in AI safety, and who are attempting to avoid the spontaneous emergence or the deliberate creation of a dangerous AI, which can negatively affect human activities and in the worst case cause the complete obliteration of the human species. This paper provides some general guidelines for the creation of a Malevolent Artificial Intelligence (MAI).

Determining optimal well placements and controls are two important tasks in oil field development. These problems are computationally expensive, nonconvex, and contain multiple optima. The practical solution of these problems require efficient and robust algorithms. In this paper, the multilevel coordinate search (MCS) algorithm is applied for well placement and control optimization problems. MCS is a derivative-free algorithm that combines global and local search. Both synthetic and real oil fields are considered. The performance of MCS is compared to generalized pattern search (GPS), particle swarm optimization (PSO), and covariance matrix adaptive evolution strategy (CMA-ES) algorithms. Results show that the MCS algorithm is strongly competitive, and outperforms for the joint optimization problem and with a limited computational budget. The effect of parameter settings for MCS are compared for the test examples. For the joint optimization problem we compare the performance of the simultaneous and sequential procedures and show the utility of the latter.

Electric utilities across the U.S. are wasting no time to take advantage of FAA rules authorizing use of drones for commercial purposes. Electric utilities across the U.S. are wasting no time taking advantage of new FAA rules authorizing use of drones for commercial purposes. "We've certainly heard from our members that they're excited about this technology," said Chris Hickling, the director of government relations for the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), the trade group for investor-owned utilities in the U.S. "They see it as part of building a smarter infrastructure. We see it as an area that's going to continue to grow." More than 20 utilities have already tested unmanned aerial vehicles for inspecting transmission and distribution lines for damage from storm and normal wear and tear, using temporary rules from the Federal Aviation Administration, and are now ready to demonstrate them even more.

Electronics giant Flextronics, through its solar gear subsidiary NEXTracker, has acquired a young startup called BrightBox Technologies, which builds predictive modeling and machine learning software, the companies announced late on Monday. NEXTracker makes hardware, called trackers, which automatically tilt solar panels throughout the day to face the sun to increase the amount of power that panels generate. These trackers are generally used on large solar panel farms in remote locations that sell their power to utilities or large companies. Flextronics (now called Flex) itself bought NEXTracker last year for 330 million. Now, NEXTracker is acquiring BrightBox Technologies, a three-year-old company based in Berkeley, Calif. that has developed software to optimize heating and cooling systems in buildings.

Salesforce has spent over 4 billion on acquisitions in the past year alone, and it's making some investors grow concerned about the company's spending strategy. According to a note by Macquarie Research on Tuesday, Salesforce may have some explaining to do during its earnings call on Wednesday to ease the investors worried about the company's record-high buying spree over the past year. That includes the 2.8 billion Demandware acquisition, which was the largest deal Salesforce has made to date, and the 750 million deal for the 40-person startup Quip. Still, Piper Jaffray noted that most of the acquisitions make sense because they've been in the artificial intelligence and machine learning space, in which Salesforce is launching its new product Einstein.

With the growing focus on renewable energy, there is a need to accurately forecast energy production. In this video, we explore a typical work flow when forecasting wind energy and wrap up the conversation with possible predictive maintenance use cases for the wind turbines. Although the discussion focuses on wind energy domain, this work can be easily reused with minor tweaks for other renewable energy sources.

The best reason to revisit World of Warcraft by way of its new Legion expansion, out August 30 for PC and Mac, is that you're a lapsed devotee. You already grasp exactly the sort of rock-rolling footslog you're signing up for, though maybe a year or three or five away from the game was enough to bleed off any lingering longing to return. And to think: five years would be less than half the time Blizzard's online fantasy opus has been with us (of upwards of 12 million concurrently subscribed in 2010, and over 100 million if we're talking discrete accounts). Released in November 2004, it predates YouTube, Hurricane Katrina, Angela Merkel's chancellorship, Twitter, the Wii, the 2008 global financial crisis, Barack Obama's presidency, both the iPhone and iPad, the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Edward Snowden's leaks, Brexit, and of course, Donald Trump's candidacy. Which bring us to Legion, the sixth expansion to a game that's managed to buck all attempts at shelf life prognostication.