This week, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced a challenge to push the limits of robotic design and control. DARPA's Subterranean Challenge will require teams to have robots maneuver objects through three different environments: a series of caves, a bunker-like "urban environment," and a labyrinth of confined tunnels. While the robots will be remote-controlled, they'll need some serious autonomous skills. They will need to rapidly map and explore unfamiliar environments even when communications are spotty and conditions are challenging for sensors. The teams will be allowed to use as many different types of robot as they like, but this will mean dealing with greater complexity in communications and coordination.

Whether it's beating world-leading chess players or strong-arming cyber security strategies, artificial intelligence technology is quickly becoming ubiquitous across all industries. The pace of growth over the last few years has made AI a major commercial opportunity, with Gartner valuing the global market right now at $1.2 trillion, and that's before we've really seen a mass rollout of the technology. The UK has long been considered a major player in the development of AI, and its industry is enjoying a period of substantial investment. In April, the UK Government announced its AI Sector Deal – a £1 billion funding package backed by 50 leading businesses and organisations. The aim is to turn our already world-leading research into a major export in the coming years.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected the teams that will compete in the Subterranean Challenge. The multi-year robotics competition incentive is a $2 million prize which will result in robots that will autonomously search tunnels, caves, and underground structures. The competition aims to better equip warfighters and first responders to explore human-made tunnel systems, urban underground, and natural cave networks that are too dangerous, dark, or deep to risk human lives. The seven teams in the Systems competition challenge will develop and demonstrate physical systems in real-world environments. The teams selected in the Virtual competition will use simulation models and physics-based environments focusing on software-driven advances.

The head of Air Force training said Tuesday that the service wants artificial intelligence to become the go-to coach that helps airmen learn faster and better than ever before. Lt. Gen. Steven Kwast, commander of Air Education and Training Command, said he hopes that the results of testing, scheduled to be completed next year, will show that futuristic tools such as AI, virtual reality and super-computing can improve the speed and effectiveness of the human brain. "The data is very promising that we can accentuate the adult human brain to learn faster, better and, I'll say, more sticky, meaning when you learn something longer and better," Kwast told a group of defense reporters at the Air Force Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference. He used pilot training as an example of how artificial intelligence can be used as a coach in a flight simulator. "Let's take a loop: A pilot has to do a loop, and the artificial intelligence is watching you do that loop. And, as you pull back on the stick, it can tell what you are doing and says, 'Hey, you are pulling back too much. Keep your eye on the horizon,' " Kwast said.

Canadian company KinySdollS says the Houston showroom is set to be the first in the U.S. to rent or sell its real-life looking sex robots. The Canadian company looking to open a so-called "robot sex brothel" in Houston reportedly hit a snag during its construction. The Houston Chronicle reported Sunday that city workers noticed that builders did not have certain permits and ordered the project to stop work. Mayor Sylvester Turner said he's not trying to be the "moral police" but this is not the type of business he wants opening in the city. A spokesperson from his office said KinkySDollS must "apply for a demolition permit and submit plans." KinkySdollS announced last month on its Facebook page that it plans on opening a "love dolls brothel" in Houston.

Brexit and Wetherspoons, Brexit and fashion, Brexit and bananas … It seems as if so much of our everyday lives will be affected by Brexit – and if you play video games, you can certainly expect changes. The British video games industry adds £5bn to the economy and employs more than 12,000 people, 35% of whom are EU citizens. While the industry has been campaigning for a Brexit least likely to wreck the status quo, some indie developers have responded with pro-remain games. Tim Constant's Not Tonight offers a peek into a dystopian Britain obsessed with migration status: European citizens are segregated if they wish to continue living in the UK and constantly subject to document checks. The claustrophobic, pixelated setting suggests that post-Brexit Britain would succumb to paranoia.

This is an era of disruption. Technology innovation, the intensifying march of digitization, and the cumulative effect of the "big exponentials" - the laws of accelerating growth governing processing power, storage, and bandwidth - are shattering, reshaping, and redefining economics in and across industries. Companies in the technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) sectors are in the vanguard, bringing these new opportunities to market - even as their legacy businesses are threatened by them. TMT companies have begun to engage in end-to-end digital transformation by digitizing the value chain in their core businesses and enter new disruptive businesses. Still, they are subject to massive dislocation and attack.

Understanding the powerful Chinese government should be the top priority for Australian brands looking to move into the lucrative Chinese market, according to Blackmores executive director, Marcus Blackmore. The vitamin king told Which-50 prospective brands could "do well to copy some of the things we've done".

In this paper, we propose a deep, globally normalized topic model that incorporates structural relationships connecting documents in socially generated corpora, such as online forums. Our model (1) captures discursive interactions along observed reply links in addition to traditional topic information, and (2) incorporates latent distributed representations arranged in a deep architecture, which enables a GPU-based mean-field inference procedure that scales efficiently to large data. We apply our model to a new social media dataset consisting of 13M comments mined from the popular internet forum Reddit, a domain that poses significant challenges to models that do not account for relationships connecting user comments. We evaluate against existing methods across multiple metrics including perplexity and metadata prediction, and qualitatively analyze the learned interaction patterns.

The human mind is a powerful multifunctional knowledge storage and management system that performs generalization, type inference, anomaly detection, stereotyping, and other tasks. A dynamic KR system that appropriately profiles over sparse inputs to provide complete expectations for unknown facets can help with all these tasks. In this paper, we introduce the task of profiling, inspired by theories and findings in social psychology about the potential of profiles for reasoning and information processing. We describe two generic state-of-the-art neural architectures that can be easily instantiated as profiling machines to generate expectations and applied to any kind of knowledge to fill gaps. We evaluate these methods against Wikidata and crowd expectations, and compare the results to gain insight in the nature of knowledge captured by various profiling methods. We make all code and data available to facilitate future research.