Deep learning is cutting edge artificial intelligence. It's what Google used to build AlphaGo, which beat the world champion of board game Go earlier this year in China. And it's being used by many of the world's top tech companies as the basis for recommender systems, fraud detection and cybersecurity. Government should be using deep learning, because it is a sophisticated tool that can help agencies fulfill their mission for use cases as diverse as risk profiling, cost forecasting and the analysis of satellite imagery. An additional benefit that supports both recent governmentwide policy and tight budgets is that most of the best deep-learning algorithms are open source.

Swamped by too much raw intel data to sift through, US spy agencies are pinning their hopes on artificial intelligence to crunch billions of digital bits and understand events around the world. Dawn Meyerriecks, the CIA's deputy director for technology development, said this week the CIA currently has 137 different AI projects, many of them with developers in Silicon Valley. These range from trying to predict significant future events, by finding correlations in data shifts and other evidence, to having computers tag objects or individuals in video that can draw the attention of intelligence analysts. Officials of other key spy agencies at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington this week, including military intelligence, also said they were seeking AI-based solutions for turning terabytes of digital data coming in daily into trustworthy intelligence that can be used for policy and battlefield action. AI has widespread functions, from battlefield weapons to the potential to help quickly rebuild computer systems and programs brought down by hacking attacks, as one official described.

Just last month, Tesla CEO and tech billionaire Elon Musk aired his sentiments about the threats that AI poses to humans. It's pretty alarming, but some experts assured the public that'AI Doomsday' is still far from happening. However, that doesn't mean that we are safe from online hackers who might use AI as their future cyber weapon. Still, just like the other technological advancements that we have right now, artificial intelligence can be exploited by criminals to carry out their evil work. Almost every week, news of hacking incidents come from all corners of the world.

The U.S. military carried out another round of drone strikes in Somalia Wednesday. A trio of drone strikes hit the Al Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab terror group killed six militants, U.S. Africa Command announced. The strikes took place 160 miles south of the capital, Mogadishu. They came after two separate drones strikes last week. Hundreds of U.S. soldiers have returned to Somalia for the first time since the "Black Hawk Down" incident in the early 1990s.

British warships will soon integrate Siri-like voice systems into their controls, according to the head of the UK's Royal Navy. Speaking at the Defence and Security Equipment International exhibition -- one the biggest arms fairs in the world -- First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Phillip Jones said the Royal Navy wanted to embrace the speed at which warfare is being transformed by IT, and pointed to new Type-31 frigates as an example. "The Type 31e will feature different app-based tools which can access the ship's data. These will be operated from a series of touchscreen displays, Siri-style voice-controlled assistants and perhaps even augmented reality technology," Jones said. "This is not a gimmick or a fad. As modern warfare becomes ever faster, and ever more data driven, our greatest asset will be the ability to cut through the deluge of information to think and act decisively."

NASA's Curiosity Rover has been roaming around Mars for more than five years. In that time, it's sent back a ton of data about the red planet. Thanks to the robot, we know that the veins dotted around its craters were likely created by evaporating lakes. It also spotted more water evidence in possible mud cracks. And, its findings led scientists to theorize that ancient Mars had a lot more oxygen that they initially thought.

In 2016, Stanford students started hacking for defense--that is, they took on real projects from National Security Agency, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Army Cyber Command, the Veterans Administration, and other agencies with defense-related problems. The students actually came up with prototype solutions. The innovative Hacking For Defense (H4D) class, which requires each student team to conduct at least 100 interviews with defense industry "clients," caught on quickly. Today, according to Steve Blank, an instructor at Stanford and one of the creators of the curriculum, eight universities in addition to Stanford have offered or will offer a Hacking for Defense class this year: Boise State, Columbia, Georgetown, James Madison, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Southern California, and the University of Southern Mississippi. The class has spun out Hacking for Diplomacy, Hacking for Energy, and other targeted classes that use the same methodology.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Prior to deployment, robots must be extensively trained and tested. With physical prototypes, this can be expensive and impractical.

Geospatial imagery as well as facial recognition and other biometrics are driving the intelligence community's research into artificial intelligence. Other intelligence activities, such as human language translation and event warning and forecasting, also stand to gain from advances being pursued in government, academic and industry research programs funded by the community's research arm. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is working toward breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, or AI, through a number of research programs. All these AI programs tap expertise in government, industry or academia. IARPA is one of the biggest financial backers of AI research, states its director, Jason Matheny, and imagery is the biggest growth area for intelligence AI.

During the past several years, in my capacity as deputy director and then acting director of national intelligence, I have participated in National Security Council meetings about immediate challenges, from North Korea's aggressive missile and nuclear development programs to Russian military operations along its borders, and from ISIS threats to the homeland to Chinese activity in the South China Sea. Michael Dempsey is the national intelligence fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former acting director of national intelligence. The author is an employee of the US government on a sponsored fellowship, but all opinions are those of the author and do not reflect the official views of the US government. Even in instances in which the threat the US confronted was especially complex, there was at least a familiar policy playbook of options, as well as a shared understanding of how to approach these crises. However, in today's dynamic security landscape, it's fair to ask whether US policymakers might soon be forced to grapple with a new series of threats for which we have no common understanding or carefully considered counter-measures.