Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will soon be joined by a crew of free-flying mini-robots inspired by the Jedi training droids that Luke Skywalker practiced his light saber skills with in Star Wars. NASA's one-foot-cube Astrobees will be packed with cameras, sensors, and other tools and travel around the space station; its tasks will be far more mundane, however, than the movie training droids. The bots will help with tasks like measuring noise levels, testing carbon dioxide concentrations, or shooting video of astronauts at work. Ground crews will be able to remotely control the robot, sending it to various station waypoints, or even giving it a set of tasks to carry out largely autonomously, says Trey Smith, a research scientist in NASA's Intelligent Robotics Group. "In the end, it should be able to depart from its dock, do an entire survey of several modules, and then return to its dock at the end of it," he says.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly critical role in business. By 2020, 30 percent of organizations that fail to apply AI will not be operationally and economically viable, according to one report[1]. And in a survey, 91 percent of infrastructure and operations leaders cite "data" as a main inhibitor of AI initiatives[2]. What does a data professional need to know about AI and its data requirements in order to support his or her organization's AI efforts? Many factors have converged in recent years to make AI viable, including the growth of processing power and advances in AI techniques, notably in the area of deep learning (DL).

The need for new medications is higher than ever, but so is the cost and time to bring them to market. Developing a new drug can cost billions and take as long as 14 years, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Yet with all that effort, only 8 percent of drugs make it to market, the FDA said. "We need to make smarter decisions about which potential medicines we develop and test," said Abraham Heifets, co-founder of San Francisco-based startup Atomwise. The six-year-old company, a member of our Inception startup incubator program, is working to make that happen by using GPU-accelerated deep learning to predict which molecules are most likely to lead to treatments.

We've already seen Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and now it's time to get a look at the competition. EA, DICE and The Daily Show host Trevor Noah are set to reveal Battlefield 5 today at 4:00 p.m. ET, pulling back the curtain on EA's flagship game for the fall release season. We know some things about Battlefield 5, but there are some big questions as well. The first thing to watch for is the setting: it's widely rumored that DICE will be following Battlefield 1 with a game set in World War 2, an idea that the developer appeared to confirm with a teaser featuring WW2-specific iconography. The series started in 2002 with Battlefield 1942, adding in the franchise's signature large-scale combat to what was at the time the standard setting for a AAA shooter.

Rise of the Machines The Ministry of Defence wants to compile a list of AI boffins with UK security clearance that can be hired to help build Britain's inevitable robotic military future. The ministry's latest publication on artificial intelligence and the armed forces, titled Human-Machine Teaming sets out its vision for what the Rise of the Machines could look like in practice. While it ruled out weaponised AI, if only because of perceived problems with agreeing "a common definition" for lethal autonomous weapon systems*, the "concept note" did set out the MoD's view of how Britain is falling behind in the race to militarise self-thinking robots. "The impact is a shift in the relative rates of innovation from defence to commercial firms with the best systems already, and remaining, in the civilian sector. Military access to the best technologies will become a challenge, except in national crisis situations," wailed the note's authors, who hail from the MoD's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre at Shrivenham, the Wiltshire location where the armed forces' future strategic thinkers are hothoused.

Deception operations using high-quality fake videos produced with artificial intelligence are the next phase of information warfare operations by nation states aimed at subverting American democracy. Currently, "deepfakes," or human image-synthesized videos, mainly involve the use of celebrity likenesses and voices superimposed on women in porn videos. But the weaponization of deepfakes for political smear campaigns, in commercial operations to discredit businesses, or subversion by foreign intelligence services in disinformation operations is a looming threat. "I believe this is the next wave of attacks against America and Western democracies," said Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Rubio is pushing the U.S. intelligence community to address the danger of deepfake disinformation campaigns from nation states or terrorists before the threat fully emerges.

Think that AI will help put a stop to fake news? The Department of Defense is funding a project that will try to determine whether the increasingly real-looking fake video and audio generated by artificial intelligence might soon be impossible to distinguish from the real thing--even for another AI system. This summer, under a project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the world's leading digital forensics experts will gather for an AI fakery contest. They will compete to generate the most convincing AI-generated fake video, imagery, and audio--and they will also try to develop tools that can catch these counterfeits automatically. The contest will include so-called "deepfakes," videos in which one person's face is stitched onto another person's body. Rather predictably, the technology has already been used to generate a number of counterfeit celebrity porn videos.

The image of the angry man holding a little girl in one arm while violently abusing Yiannis Boutaris, the 75-year-old mayor of Thessaloniki with the other, shocked Greeks. Boutaris was attacked by a crowd at a Sunday commemoration of what is known as the genocide of the Pontians, a Christian ethnic group from the highlands of the southern Black Sea speaking a dialect of Greek, who escaped Ottoman Turkish persecution and emigrated to the newly-formed Greek nation-state. It is the latest in a series of violent attacks on Greek politicians by a public expressing outrage and impotence at collapsing living standards. But Boutaris, the tattooed septuagenarian ecologist and scion of a Vlach winemaking family, is not a typical representative of the establishment politicians Greeks blame for imposing increasing levels of austerity on a fractured society. The twice-elected mayor of Thessaloniki is a resolute cosmopolitan who worked to collapse the walls between Greece and Turkey, free his city from the segregating Greek creation myth, and make its troubled past more inclusive of former resident minorities, including Jews and Turks.

Articles about technology and the future of transportation rarely used to get far without mentioning jetpacks: a staple of science fiction from the 1920s onwards, the jetpack became a reality in the 1960s in the shape of devices such as the Bell Rocket Belt. But despite many similar efforts, the skies over our cities remain stubbornly free of jetpack-toting commuters. For a novel form of transport to make a material difference to our lives, several key requirements must be satisfied. Obviously the new technology must work safely, and operate within an appropriate regulatory framework. But public acceptance and solid business models are also vital if a new idea is to move from R&D lab to testbed to early adoption, and eventually into mainstream usage.

Business intelligence is fairly mature, with BI tools accessing data warehouses and data marts in support of both strategic and tactical decision making across marketing, sales and finance,