Officials say that Turkish security forces have used an armed drone to locate and kill six Kurdish militants who allegedly were responsible for kidnapping and killing a school teacher in southeast Turkey.

Aspen, Colorado – They look like a set of fancy headphones. But a set of spikes inside the band act as electrodes to stimulate the brain. According to California startup Halo Neuroscience, the device can help improve the performance of athletes, pilots and surgeons, and potentially help rehabilitation for stroke victims. "The brain is an electrical organ," said Daniel Chao, a physician and co-founder of Halo, in discussing the product at this week's Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference. By stimulating the motor cortex, Chao says the Halo device can "extract latent potential" in the brain to improve performance for people who rely on making quick decisions and movements such as athletes.

A new competition heralds what is likely to become the future of cybersecurity and cyberwarfare, with offensive and defensive AI algorithms doing battle. The contest, which will play out over the next five months, is run by Kaggle, a platform for data science competitions. It will pit researchers' algorithms against one another in attempts to confuse and trick each other, the hope being that this combat will yield insights into how to harden machine-learning systems against future attacks. "It's a brilliant idea to catalyze research into both fooling deep neural networks and designing deep neural networks that cannot be fooled," says Jeff Clune, an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming who studies the limits of machine learning. The contest will have three components.

Elon Musk thinks the government needs to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) now, before it becomes dangerous to humanity, the entrepreneur told a gathering of state governors over the weekend. "I have exposure to the very cutting-edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it," Musk told attendees at the National Governors Association summer meeting on Saturday (July 15). "I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react, because it seems so ethereal." If, instead, the government waits until AI actually starts harming people before imposing regulations, that may already be too late, Musk said. Musk is worried not only that AI will take over human jobs, but also that it may kill people.

Artificial intelligence helps farmers, doctors and rescue workers make a positive impact on society. Artificial intelligence (AI) powers many gadgets, like smartphones, smart thermostats and voice-activated virtual assistants that bring modern conveniences to daily life. Increasingly, AI is also being used to tackle critical social challenges. AI is a branch of computer science where machines can sense, learn, reason, act and adapt to the real world, amplifying human capabilities and automating tedious or dangerous tasks. Some experts believe AI has the potential to spark a serious social revolution.

Artificial intelligence will better our lives in many ways, but it will also pose a danger if people don't program AI properly. Autonomous vehicle pioneer Elon Musk warned over the weekend that AI is the "biggest risk" to civilization. Musk, who founded Tesla, has long said that AI will be dangerous. At the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island, Musk said that government regulation is necessary to keep AI from getting out of hand. On Monday's "The Glenn Beck Radio Program," Glenn Beck wondered how we will train AI to know good from bad when our postmodern society doesn't even know that.

Permutation-valued features arise in a variety of applications, either in a direct way when preferences are elicited over a collection of items, or an indirect way in which numerical ratings are converted to a ranking. To date, there has been relatively limited study of regression, classification, and testing problems based on permutation-valued features, as opposed to permutation-valued responses. This paper studies the use of reproducing kernel Hilbert space methods for learning from permutation-valued features. These methods embed the rankings into an implicitly defined function space, and allow for efficient estimation of regression and test functions in this richer space. Our first contribution is to characterize both the feature spaces and spectral properties associated with two kernels for rankings, the Kendall and Mallows kernels. Using tools from representation theory, we explain the limited expressive power of the Kendall kernel by characterizing its degenerate spectrum, and in sharp contrast, we prove that Mallows' kernel is universal and characteristic. We also introduce families of polynomial kernels that interpolate between the Kendall (degree one) and Mallows' (infinite degree) kernels. We show the practical effectiveness of our methods via applications to Eurobarometer survey data as well as a Movielens ratings dataset.

The Select Committee has been appointed to consider the economic, ethical and social implications of advances in artificial intelligence, and is now calling for evidence from those interested in these issues. The Committee will begin taking oral evidence in the autumn, and has to report by 31 March 2018. "This inquiry comes at a time when artificial intelligence is increasingly seizing the attention of industry, policymakers and the general public. The Committee wants to use this inquiry to understand what opportunities exist for society in the development and use of artificial intelligence, as well as what risks there might be. We are looking to be pragmatic in our approach, and want to make sure our recommendations to Government and others will be practical and sensible. There are significant questions to address relevant to both the present and the future, and we want to help inform the answers to them. To do this, we need the help of the widest range of people and organisations. If you are interested in artificial intelligence and any of its aspects, we want to hear from you. If you are interested in public policy, we want to hear from you. If you are interested in any of the issues raised by our call for evidence, we want to hear from you."

Facebook showed off some artificial intelligence at its F8 event. The United Kingdom's government has some questions about artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, the House of Lords announced a public call for experts to weigh in on issues surrounding AI, including its ethical, economic and social effects as the technology becomes more prevalent. When you think about all the crazy things that AI can accomplish, like a sex robot with a "brain," yeah, we've got some questions too. AI is already poised to take over jobs, as it has for an insurance company in Japan, but Britain's Parliament has concerns from all sides.

Companies may now have to set their sights on defending against cybercriminals armed with artificial intelligence. Even as companies adopt AI to help fight cyberattacks, the criminals are also on the trail of enhanced machine-learning skills. Many cybersecurity companies are starting to invest or implement AI in their cybersecurity solutions and it is giving their security teams a significant boost, according to a recently released report commissioned by McAfee. However, usage of AI and machine-learning technologies aren't limited to the good guys. Cybercriminals are starting to use these solutions to sift through large amounts of data to "classify victims that have weaker defenses" so they can get the maximum "return on their investment," Steve Grobman, chief technology officer for McAfee, told Bloomberg BNA.