Oroville - For the first time since it was completed in 1968, California's rain-swollen Oroville Dam overtopped its emergency spillway on Saturday, sending sheets of water down a forested hillside, adding mud and debris to the churning Feather River below. Turmoil grows over White House correspondents' dinner Washington - It is supposed to be a light-hearted gathering of journalists, celebrities and the president, where differences are put aside for good-natured jibes. Review: Tenor Mario Frangoulis charms on'Send Me An Angel' Special International tenor Mario Frangoulis delivers on his live performance of "Send Me An Angel," which was filmed in Greece. Germany to elect'anti-Trump' Steinmeier as new president Berlin - Billed as Germany's "anti-Trump", centre-left former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is set to be elected Sunday as the new ceremonial head of state. Konjic - Bosnia's fisheries watchdog gazes over an expanse of sand and mud, a space once occupied by a large thriving lake but recently emptied in the race for electricity production.

The British Navy has fired its first torpedo using a radical new'brain' fitted to a nuclear submarine. The Royal Navy's latest and most advanced Astute class submarine, Artful, used the Common Combat System for the first time. It is the first to use this new technology which is now being retrofitted to earlier Astute class submarines. The new system, provided by VMware, Dell and Aish, processes information from submarine sensors to enable crew members to make important command decisions. It was used during the test to interpret sonar readings and then attack a moving target with a practice weapon.

They are the ultimate symbol of military might, capable of providing a dominant presence in almost any region of the world where there is a nearby ocean. But as technology has advanced, the hulking weaponry and armour of warships that have ruled the waves are having to change and adapt to these high-tech times. From drones to unmanned boats and laser weapons, experts at How It Works Magazine have revealed what fleets of the future will look like. From drones to unmanned boats and laser weapons, experts at How It Works Magazine have revealed what fleets of the future will look like. This artist's impression shows a selection of some of the features that could make their way onto warships over the next decade The Royal Navy in the UK has been challenging young British scientists and engineers to design the fleet of the future.

It has been dubbed the Robo-Olympics, and will see the world's most advanced robots go head to series in a series of ever more challenging events. Twenty five of the top robotics organizations in the world are competing for $3.5 million in prizes, and will take on a gruelling simulated disaster-response course during the two day contest. Robots will try to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response. The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they'll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. There will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end - which turned out to be turning a valve.

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Antipoaching patrols like this team at the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya may soon use AI technology to stay one step ahead of criminals. Poachers kill an estimated 96 African elephants every day, causing conservationists to warn that the iconic animals could disappear in our lifetime if the tide doesn't turn. But now scientists hope a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool could help wildlife officials get a leg up against poachers. PAWS, which stands for Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security, is a newly developed AI that takes data about previous poaching activities and outputs routes for patrols based on where poaching is likely to occur. These routes are also randomized to keep poachers from learning patrol patterns.

I remember sitting in a conference audience in the late 1990s during the fat part of the first dot-com expansion curve, when everyone was complaining that the Internet was irrationally overhyped. Then, pre-Google Eric Schmidt took the stage and told us that, "I actually think the Internet is underhyped." As a tech journalist in those days, I'd had the privilege of long talks with Schmidt and hadn't wasted the opportunity to learn. Other people laughed, but I knew he was serious -- and he was right. The point is, I've begun to get the sense that most marketers aren't yet taking AI seriously enough.

Machine ethics offers an alternative solution for artificial intelligence (AI) safety governance. In order to mitigate risks in human-robot interactions, robots will have to comply with humanity's ethical and legal norms, once they've merged into our daily life with highly autonomous capability. In terms of technical challenges, there are still many open questions in machine ethics. For example, what is deontic logic and how can it be used for improving AI safety? How do we fashion the knowledge representation for ethical robots? These are all significant questions for us to investigate. In this interview, we invite Prof. Ronald C. Arkin to share his insights on robot ethics, with a focus on its technical aspects.

If you ask 100 people for the definition of "artificial intelligence," you'll get at least 100 answers, if not more. At AWS, we define it as a service or system which can perform tasks that usually require human-level intelligence such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making, or translation. On this new AWS blog, we'll be covering these areas and more, with in-depth technical content, customer stories, and new feature announcements. The challenges related to building sophisticated AI systems center mostly around scale: the datasets are large, training is computationally hungry, and inferring predictions can be challenging to do at scale or on lower-power and mobile devices. Customers have been using AWS to solve these general problems for years, and the ability to be able to access storage, GPUs, CPUs, and IoT services on demand has emerged as a perfect fit for intelligent systems in production.

The likes of China -- who among other things is building cruise missiles with a certain degree of autonomy -- are nipping away at America's heels. The Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the centre of its strategy to maintain the United States' position as the world's dominant military power, earmarking $US18 billion ($23.5 billion) over the next three years for developing the technology. Speaking from San Francisco ahead of a major AI industry conference, Prof Walsh said unlike previous arms races, much of the progress in AI development was being made by private corporations. "It's the same sort of technology that is going to go into autonomous cars which is going to be a good thing ... but giving it the right to make life or death decisions (in the battlefield) is probably a bad idea," Prof Walsh said.