FOR the second straight year, Deloitte surveyed executives in the US knowledgeable about cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence,1 representing companies that are testing and implementing them today. We found that these early adopters2 remain bullish on cognitive technologies' value. As in last year's survey, the level of support for AI is truly extraordinary. These findings illustrate that cognitive technologies hold enticing promise, some of which is being fulfilled today. However, AI technologies may deliver their best returns when companies balance excitement over their potential with the ability to execute. A year later, and the thrill isn't gone. In Deloitte's 2017 cognitive survey, we were struck by early adopters' enthusiasm for cognitive technologies.4 That excitement owed much to the returns they said cognitive technologies were generating: 83 percent stated they were seeing either "moderate" or "substantial" benefits. Respondents also said they expected that cognitive technologies would change both their companies and their industries rapidly. In 2018, respondents remain enthusiastic about the value cognitive technologies bring. Their companies are investing in foundational cognitive capabilities, and using them with more skill. Thirty-seven percent of respondents say their companies have invested US$5 million or more in cognitive technologies. Another reason is that companies have more ways to acquire cognitive capabilities, and they are taking advantage.

The space race is heating up again in ways we haven't seen since the end of the Cold War. We haven't been to the moon since 1972 but a number of private companies and national agencies have begun looking to our nearest celestial neighbor with renewed interest, not only as a site of scientific study but also as a fuel resource and potential staging area for trips further out into the solar system. Last December, Trump signed Space Policy Directive-1, which directs NASA "to lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities." Essentially, the move will help NASA better organize exploratory efforts with its international partners and private spaceflight companies."I "What we're doing now is entirely different than what we did back [during the Apollo era]." To that end, NASA has since submitted to Congress a plan to establish the necessary infrastructure to not just get us back to the moon but to return there regularly. Dubbed the "Exploration Campaign", this plan focuses on three core areas: low-Earth orbit (LEO), the crewed missions to the moon for long-term habitation and study, and robotic missions to Mars and beyond. "EM-1 will take Orion and the Space Launch system into a high lunar orbit and that's actually the orbit that NASA has identified to do the asteroid retrieval mission that will bring a large boulder into that orbit" Lockheed Martin's Orion program manager Mike Hawes told the Observer in 2016. "This will essentially be a dress rehearsal for that mission.

Autodesk, the software company behind AutoCAD, has teamed up with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to look at news ways to create an interplanetary lander that could potentially touch down on the moons of Saturn or Jupiter. When Mark Davis, the senior director of industry research at Autodesk, first approached JPL about the collaboration, NASA wasn't too interested. But when Autodesk showed that it was possible to achieve a 30 percent or more performance improvement by way of new designs and materials, Davis' team had JPL's attention. Because of the high costs and risks of space travel, NASA engineers tend to stick with what works. That means using tried and tested materials like titanium and aluminum.

The UK government is actively funding the development of flying "killer robots" despite publicly stating it has no plans to develop them, a study claims. Research into fully autonomous drone weapons by the campaign group Drone Wars UK revealed the UK's Defence and Security Accelerator (Dasa) is funding research for developing weapons able to kill without direct human input. The report, titled Off the Leash: The Development of Autonomous Military Drones in the UK, highlighted the Taranis drone, which is capable of autonomously flying, plotting routes and locating targets. Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS – The global chemical weapons watchdog will in February begin to assign blame for attacks with banned munitions in Syria's war, using new powers approved by member states but opposed by Damascus and its key allies Russia and Iran. The agency was handed the new task in response to an upsurge in the use of chemical weapons in recent years, notably in the Syrian conflict, where scores of attacks with sarin and chlorine have been carried out by Syrian forces and rebel groups, according to a joint United Nations-OPCW investigation. A core team of 10 experts charged with apportioning blame for poison gas attacks in Syria will be hired soon, Fernando Arias, the new head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), told the Foreign Press Association of the Netherlands on Tuesday. The Syria team will be able to look into all attacks previously investigated by the OPCW, dating back to 2014. The OPCW was granted additional powers to identify individuals and institutions responsible for attacks by its 193 member states at a special session in June.

Britain will not develop Terminator-style machines which can kill without human command because they are unethical, the chief scientist at the Ministry of Defence said. Countries worldwide are in a new arms race to develop lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) which can kill in a war zone without a person having to push a button. But this has sparked major fears that some countries could develop a fleet of killer robots which are not reined in by humans. Simon Cholerton, the MoD's chief scientific adviser, has revealed that Britain is'doing no work and has no plans to develop fully automated weapons'. He said that Britain will snub the new technological field even if the UK's Armed Forces are put at a disadvantage on the battlefield, because it is immoral.

Oxygen on-board future space missions will be made from the recycled breath of astronauts. The Advanced Closed Loop System (ACLS) has been built by the European Space Agency (ESA) and is now being installed on-board the orbiting spacecraft. The apparatus recycles half the carbon dioxide (CO2) exhaled by astronauts and converts it into oxygen. Scientists have heralded the invention as an important step towards long-term missions to mars and beyond. ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst poses with the ACLS life-support rack, newly installed on the International Space Station.

As an international relations scholar who studies space law and policy, I have come to realize what most people do not fully appreciate: Dealing with space debris is as much a national security issue as it is a technical one. Considering the debris circling the Earth as just an obstacle in the path of human missions is naive. As outer space activities are deeply rooted in the geopolitics down on Earth, the hidden challenge posed by the debris is the militarization of space technologies meant to clean it up. To be clear, space debris poses considerable risks; however, to understand those risks, I should explain what it is and how it is formed. As outer space activities are deeply rooted in the geopolitics down on Earth, the hidden challenge posed by the debris is the militarization of space technologies meant to clean it up.

While Silicon Valley workers continue to protest their employers selling artificial intelligence products to the US military, the US military is still looking to spend money on AI. The Army Research Lab, the Project Maven team, and the US Department of Defense's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center will host technology companies later this month in Maryland, where the government will view private demonstrations. According to federal contracting data (free login required for the full list), large tech companies such as Intel, IBM, GE, Oracle, as well as defense company Raytheon, have expressed interest in showing off their AI for the military. Absent from the list are AI giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, though the DoD has not responded to an inquiry as to whether the available contracting data is the complete list of attending organizations. The DoD's needs aren't too different from those of a Silicon Valley tech company, though the technology is unlikely to be used in a food delivery app or search engine.

The verification problem for neural networks is verifying whether a neural network will suffer from adversarial samples, or approximating the maximal allowed scale of adversarial perturbation that can be endured. While most prior work contributes to verifying feed-forward networks, little has been explored for verifying recurrent networks. This is due to the existence of a more rigorous constraint on the perturbation space for sequential data, and the lack of a proper metric for measuring the perturbation. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing a metric which measures the distance between strings, and use deterministic finite automata (DFA) to represent a rigorous oracle which examines if the generated adversarial samples violate certain constraints on a perturbation. More specifically, we empirically show that certain recurrent networks allow relatively stable DFA extraction. As such, DFAs extracted from these recurrent networks can serve as a surrogate oracle for when the ground truth DFA is unknown. We apply our verification mechanism to several widely used recurrent networks on a set of the Tomita grammars. The results demonstrate that only a few models remain robust against adversarial samples. In addition, we show that for grammars with different levels of complexity, there is also a difference in the difficulty of robust learning of these grammars.