This Tuesday morning, we're still talking about the eclipse, getting a name for Google's latest version of Android and testing the best virtual assistants out there. It'll be on the Pixel very soon. Google loves to make a big splash when it reveals the name for the latest version of Android. But the company is going all out this year, using the solar eclipse as an opportunity to reveal that Android O will henceforth be referred to as Oreo. It makes at least a little sense to tie this reveal into the eclipse -- those iconic photos of the solar event are at least a little bit evocative of Oreos, after all.

The world's leading Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics experts, including Tesla's Elon Musk and Google's Mustafa Suleyman, have urged the United Nations to take action to prevent the development of killer robots before it is too late. The letter signed by 116 experts from 26 countries opens with the words, "As companies building the technologies in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics that may be repurposed to develop autonomous weapons, we feel especially responsible in raising this alarm." Though none has been build yet, conceptually a killer robot is fully autonomous and can engage, target and kill humans without any human intervention. Unlike a cruise missile or a remotely piloted drone, where humans make all the target decisions, a quadcopter with AI, for example, can search and destroy people that meet pre-defined criteria on its own. "Retaining human control over use of force is a moral imperative and essential to promote compliance with international law, and ensure accountability," Mary Wareham, advocacy director, Arms Division, Human Rights Watch, wrote in January.

One response to the call by experts in robotics and artificial intelligence for an ban on "killer robots" ("lethal autonomous weapons systems" or Laws in the language of international treaties) is to say: shouldn't you have thought about that sooner? Figures such as Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, are among the 116 specialists calling for the ban. "We do not have long to act," they say. "Once this Pandora's box is opened, it will be hard to close." But such systems are arguably already here, such as the "unmanned combat air vehicle" Taranis developed by BAE and others, or the autonomous SGR-A1 sentry gun made by Samsung and deployed along the South Korean border.

The globe of Mars, as seen in a mosaic of images from the Viking orbiters. In the Martian north, summer brings a nightly dusting of snow. This surprising scene comes courtesy of new simulations of flip-flopping layers in the Martian atmosphere, which mix more vigorously than expected and produce stormy weather. Though still virtual, the snow shower fits quite well with an observation made by a robot placed on Mars in 2008--and it may offer an explanation for how a very different type of snow falls out of the red planet's polar skies. If the simulations are correct, the summertime snow on Mars happens in bursts that can last for several hours, scientists report in a study describing the find published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Bloomberg Government regularly publishes insights, opinions and best practices from our community of senior leaders and decision makers. This column is written by Oliver Tavakoli, chief technology officer at Vectra Networks. We have seen Federal Government agencies express interest in artificial intelligence-based (AI) endpoint security solutions and they are starting to look at AI-based cyber security for the network, but they are early in their process. As marketers and the media blend and entwine artificial intelligence, machine learning and cybersecurity buzzwords into a confusing cocktail of badness-stopping power, government security buyers, like their enterprise counterparts, are swamped with misconceptions and a lack of differentiated product clarity. Some marketing of artificial intelligence promises more that it can deliver today.

As companies building the technologies in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics that may be repurposed to develop autonomous weapons, we feel especially responsible in raising this alarm. We warmly welcome the decision of the UN's Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) to establish a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems. We entreat the High Contracting Parties participating in the GGE to work hard at finding means to prevent an arms race in these weapons, to protect civilians from their misuse, and to avoid the destabilizing effects of these technologies. We urge the High Contracting Parties therefore to double their efforts at the first meeting of the GGE now planned for November.

With Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sparring over its ethics and China announcing its intention to create a $150 billion domestic industry based on it, Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most discussed topic in the tech news cycle. It's likely to be a talking point no matter what your favourite watering hole for tech news. Billions of dollars have been invested by VCs in AI since 2016 with the US and China leading the race in record funding in terms of deals and dollars. In sharp contrast, Indian startups have collectively raised less than $100 million from (2014-2017YTD), according to data from startup analytics firm Tracxn -- that's smaller than Andrew Ng's recently launched $150 million VC fund. Another way to look at it: Grammarly, a Valley-based spell check tool raised more dollars than all of India's AI startups put together in the past three and a half years.

Faced with the worst labor shortage in decades, Japanese service companies are finally turning to labor-saving technology, an investment that could lift the sector's woeful level of productivity and allow them to raise wages. While Japan's manufacturers are renowned for deploying advanced robotics, most domestic-focused services companies fell behind in information technology investment, put off by a stagnant economy, restrictive labor rules and a shrinking domestic market. But as the workforce declines and the nation ages, businesses in areas like nursing and retail have found it harder to attract and keep staff. As Partners Co. is among companies looking to software for a solution. It plans to spend about ¥300 million ($2.7 million) to install new technology at its 15 nursing homes in and around Tokyo to make life easier for staff and residents.

That's not because it's impossible to ban weapons technologies. Some 192 nations have signed the Chemical Weapons Convention that bans chemical weapons, for example. But it hasn't suggested it would be open to international agreement banning autonomous weapons. In 2015, the UK government responded to calls for a ban on autonomous weapons by saying there was no need for one, and that existing international law was sufficient.

We propose a general framework for reduced-rank modeling of matrix-valued data. By applying a generalized nuclear norm penalty we can directly model low-dimensional latent variables associated with rows and columns. Our framework flexibly incorporates row and column features, smoothing kernels, and other sources of side information by penalizing deviations from the row and column models. Moreover, a large class of these models can be estimated scalably using convex optimization. The computational bottleneck in each case is one singular value decomposition per iteration of a large but easy-to-apply matrix. Our framework generalizes traditional convex matrix completion and multi-task learning methods as well as maximum a posteriori estimation under a large class of popular hierarchical Bayesian models.