Once the fantasy of science fiction, battlefield robots are now a reality. "The whole idea is to take the war fighter out of harm's way," Robin Laird said. Laird is supervisor of the Unmanned Systems Branch of the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in San Diego. "In my mind, someday we'll be doing battle with robots not killing people," said Laird, whose program serves all four branches of the U.S. military. The military robots currently available, however, are not nearly as sophisticated as those that are sometimes portrayed by Hollywood films.

Tony Tether has headed up the Pentagon's way-out research arm, Darpa, since 2001. That makes him the longest-serving director in the agency's nearly 50-year history. He sat down with me for an interview in his office, on the top floor of a blandly menacing Northern Virginia office building, last December. For my story in the March issue of Wired (online next Tuesday), Tether and I talked about everything from bio-terrorists to zombie rodents to thinking machines to the golf courses in Iraq. Let's start with the big picture and talk a little bit about 9/11 -- it'?s been five years now -?-? and how, obviously, that has affected defense research hugely. What do you see as Darpa's big contributions to the war on terror? What do you think has been contributed so far, and what do you think is on the horizon that might be the most valuable? Tony Tether: We have several efforts in use in Iraq and Afghanistan today. There's been somewhat of a misunderstanding that when 9/11 unfolded that Darpa suddenly turned totally toward supplying things for the war. Now, of course, the war made us a great deal more interested in trying to find out what the issues and problems were over there so that we could develop programs along that line. Those programs are long-range and, for the most part, they'?re things that won't really come to fruition for several years. On the other hand, Darpa had started many things in the '90s, because we've been looking at this global terrorist war since probably 1994. At that time we called it the transnational threat –?? you know, a threat without a country. At the same time, there was a great push to look at the way our forces were developed and move them from huge divisions, force on force, to small units of action, back to the squad… As it turned out, 2001 came and we went into war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and, after the major conflict in Iraq, really small units became the way we were orchestrating that war. And it was probably that way from the very beginning in Afghanistan. So the technologies that we have been developing for four or five years, some of them were already ready to go. TT: One of the major things we knew a small unit would need, especially in a city, was situational awareness. So we developed â?? we already had been developing -- a small platform that we call Wasp.

Entrepreneurs need little convincing that technology is important, rapidly evolving, and likely to have a profound impact on their businesses. But keeping track of developments, and knowing where to focus one's attention, is anything but straightforward. Analysts at PricewaterhouseCoopers (pdf) say the impact of constant technological breakthroughs represent a "megatrend" – a change so big that "every business should develop an emerging technology strategy". They have highlighted eight key areas that all businesses should pay attention to. The artificial intelligence market is growing rapidly and forecast to be worth $36bn by 2025.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency on Wednesday updated rules relating to the collection, retention and dissemination of information of U.S. persons, including putting a limit of five years on holding certain sensitive data and introducing restrictions for querying the data. The announcement by the spy agency comes a couple of days before a new administration under President-elect Donald Trump takes charge, and could address to an extent concerns expressed by civil rights groups about the collection and handling of information of U.S. persons in the course of overseas surveillance. Such information is collected by the CIA under Executive Order 12333. Earlier this month the director of the CIA John Brennan and Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch approved the new rules, called the Attorney General Guidelines, to update the CIA's procedures, some of which had not been significantly updated since 1982, the agency said in a statement. The new rules come into force on March 18.

A day after pardoning NSA whistleblower Chelsea Manning on Tuesday, the outgoing administration of President Barack Obama imposed new limits on the CIA's power to gather private information on U.S. citizens. The new rules, which were also declassified, were posted on the CIA website Wednesday. The amendment to the rules known as the Attorney General Guidelines (so called because they require sanction from the Department of Justice) are the first of their kind since the rules were first introduced in 1981 through an executive order, number 12333, signed by Ronald Reagan. Classified since then, Wednesday was also the first time the veil of secrecy was lifted from the entire 41 pages of the rules, which are now public. "We are updating for the 21st century a set of rules that were previously not significantly updated since 1982," Caroline D. Krass, the general counsel of the CIA, reportedly said during a press briefing at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

South Korea proudly showed off footage of its top-of-the-line Kai KF-X fighter jet in 2015; the culmination of over 14 years of work. Unfortunately, a year and a bit later, Korea Times discovered that footage used to show off the fighter's impressive performance actually came from old video games. South Korea's military was quick to acknowledge that the footage (taken from Battlefield 3 and Ace Combat: Assault Horizon) wasn't authorized and has agreed to cease using the clips. In a bid to avoid national embarrassment, everyone involved is predictably blaming one other. While the military pointed the finger at the company that made the video, amazingly the video producers were quick to hedge their bets, claiming that both the Agency for Defence Development and Korea Aerospace Industries, stating that both companies had a final say.

EU rules for the fast-evolving field of robotics, for example, compliance with ethical standards and liability for accidents involving driverless cars, should be put forward by the EU Commission, urged the Legal Affairs Committee. Rapporteur Mady Delvaux (S&D, LU) said: "A growing number of areas of our daily lives are increasingly affected by robotics. In order to address this reality and to ensure that robots are and will remain in the service of humans, we urgently need to create a robust European legal framework". Her report, approved by 17 votes to 2, with 2 abstentions, looks at robotics-related issues such as liability, safety and changes in the labour market. MEPs stress that EU-wide rules are needed to fully exploit the economic potential of robotics and artificial intelligence and guarantee a standard level of safety and security. The EU needs to take the lead on regulatory standards, so as not to be forced to follow those set by third states, argues the report.

We introduce a new dynamical system for sequentially observed multivariate count data. This model is based on the gamma--Poisson construction---a natural choice for count data---and relies on a novel Bayesian nonparametric prior that ties and shrinks the model parameters, thus avoiding overfitting. We present an efficient MCMC inference algorithm that advances recent work on augmentation schemes for inference in negative binomial models. Finally, we demonstrate the model's inductive bias using a variety of real-world data sets, showing that it exhibits superior predictive performance over other models and infers highly interpretable latent structure.

A cloud of 3D-printed drones big enough to bring down the latest U.S. stealth fighter, the F35, was just one of the combat scenarios evoked in a discussion of the future of warfare at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday. Much of the discussion focused on the changes computers are bringing to the battlefield, including artificial intelligence and autonomous systems--but also the way the battlefield is coming to computing, with cyberwar, and social media psyops an ever more real prospect. Former U.S. Navy fighter pilot Mary Cummings, now director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University, delivered the first strike. "The barrier to entry to drone technology is so low that everyone can have one, and if the Chinese go out and print a million copies of a drone, a very small drone, and put those up against an F35 and they go into the engine, you basically obviate what is a very expensive platform," she said. Drones could not only defeat the F35, on which the U.S. is spending what Cummins called "a ridiculous amount of money," but also replace them, she said.

It's already been a busy year for cybersecurity, as U.S. President Barack Obama warned NATO allies recently to closely monitor their impending elections for the kind of suspected Russian hacking that afflicted the latest U.S. presidential election. And top U.S. intelligence directors testified about those hacks at a Senate hearing, where topics included ever more sophisticated cyber-attacks and the growing need to fortify American cybersecurity strategy. "Criminals are fighting a 21st century war, attacking our critical infrastructure and financial systems using unconventional techniques, while we defend ourselves with antiquated methods," The Hill stated last week. "All the passwords, tokens and other forms of strong authentication are meaningless if a person is tricked into handing over their credentials, inadvertently installs rogue software on their device that performs certain actions, or unwittingly gives a criminal access to their machine or account." These cybersecurity fundamentals have certainly become a failure point, and the unrelenting escalation of cyber-attacks has prompted the Federal Reserve, FDIC and others to propose new standards for cyber-risk management, according to The Hill.