At the vast, windswept White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico earlier this year, nearly a dozen military contractors armed with laser guns, high-tech nets and other experimental systems met to tackle one of the Pentagon's most vexing counterterrorism conundrums: how to destroy the Islamic State's increasingly lethal fleet of drones. The militant group has used surveillance drones on the battlefield for more than two years. But an increase in deadly attacks since last fall -- mostly targeting Iraqi troops and Syrian militia members with small bombs or grenades, but also threatening American advisers -- has highlighted the terrorists' success in adapting off-the-shelf, low-cost technology into an effective new weapon. The Pentagon is so alarmed by this growing threat -- even as it routs the Islamic State from its strongholds in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria -- that it has launched a $700 million crash program overseen by two senior Army generals to draw on the collective know-how and resources of all branches of the armed services, Silicon Valley and defense industry giants like Boeing and Raytheon to devise tactics and technology to thwart the menace. One important piece of that effort was the contest in New Mexico.

In this special guest feature, Sekhar Sarukkai, Chief Scientist at Skyhigh Networks, discusses the power of machine learning and user behavior analytics in detecting and mitigating the effects of cyberattacks before financial loss occurs. Sekhar is responsible for driving innovations in cloud security technology. He brings more than 20 years of experience in enterprise networking, security, and cloud services development. Prior to founding Skyhigh Networks, Sekhar was a Sr. Director of Engineering at Cisco Systems responsible for delivering Cisco's market leading network access control products, including Cisco's Identity Services Engine. He started his career at NASA Ames Research Center after obtaining his MS/PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University.

When Apple's new iPhone X arrives next month, its Face ID technology will introduce a new era of convenience--but also new risks of broad face-based surveillance by corporations and governments. Apple's strong record on privacy means it's likely to deploy the facial recognition tool responsibly, but that doesn't account for third-party companies that plan to integrate Face ID into their apps. Such companies could seek to assemble their own databases of faces and, in the worst case scenario, use a facial database to identify consumers online and in the streets for ad purposes. Apple has yet to disclose full details of how Face ID will operate, though a source familiar with the tool says there is a plan to prevent app makers from violating user privacy. Meanwhile, outside of a single state law, consumers will have little recourse if companies begin to collect images of their face without consent.

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. This video shows some impressively robust autonomous rough-terrain locomotion from ANYmal, but it's mostly worth watching for the epic ANYmal back massage (!) at the end: We present an architecture for rough-terrain locomotion with quadrupedal robots. All sensing, state estimation, mapping, control, and planning runs in real-time onboard the robot.

Google's AI chief has spoken out about what he feels are misconceptions and overstated dangers surrounding intelligent machines. John Giannandrea took particular aim at'unreasonable concerns' over the arrival of general artificial intelligence, or robots that can think like humans. Although he failed to name tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has been particular vocal over his fears about the technology, many have inferred this connection. Google's AI chief has spoken out about what he feels are misconceptions and overstated dangers surrounding intelligent machines. John Giannandrea took particular aim at'unreasonable concerns' over the arrival of robots that can think like humans Mr Giannandrea was born in Scotland.

China's programme to launch a mission to Mars in 2020 is'well underway' according to its top planner. As the country moves forward with its ambitious space programme, a probe that will will carry 13 types of payload is being developed. The Communist regime hopes to have both six rovers on the surface of the red planet, as well as seven vehicles in orbit, collecting vital data. This could one day lead to both a'robotic and human settlement' on the red planet, according to the project's leader. China's programme to launch a mission to Mars in 2020 is'well underway' according to its top planner.As the country moves forward with its ambitious space programme, a probe that will will carry 13 types of payload, including six rovers, are being developed (artist's impression) The Long March-5 carrier rocket will blast off from the Wenchang Space Launch Centre in the tropical island province of Hainan in July or August 2020.

In its quest to find out how young Earth evolved and life on this planet began, NASA has used Earth's gravity like a slingshot to propel a spacecraft into an orbit that will help it land on an asteroid and bring a sample back home. The maneuver, which is being referred to as a "gravity assist," happened on Friday, when the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft that launched last year passed within 11,000 miles of Earth -- a point visible to viewers on the ground through a telescope -- going 19,000 mph. During that pass, our planet's gravity bounced the spacecraft's orbital path 6 degrees, putting it in line with the 4.5-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu. During its closest point to us, OSIRIS-REx was over Antarctica, although it flew over and was visible to other areas on Friday. "A few weeks after the flyby we will assess the outgoing trajectory on its way to Bennu," Dan Wibben, an expert from company KinetX Aerospace who led the design of the gravity assist maneuver, said in a NASA statement.

Artificial Intelligence began as a philosophical conundrum in ancient times, developed into a science fiction forecast (and warning) in the Modern Era and is a practical reality today. This shows that from the earliest known period of human history to the present day it has been a subject of interest to some of the brightest minds and powerful personalities. Here's a run-down of some of the most insightful, important or accurate things which have been said: Alan Turing was a pioneer in bringing AI from the realm of philosophical prediction to reality. He realized in the 1950s it would need greater understanding of human intelligence before we could hope to build machines which would "think" like us. "I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."

We are surrounded by hysteria about the future of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. There is hysteria about how powerful they will become how quickly, and there is hysteria about what they will do to jobs. As I write these words on September 2nd, 2017, I note just two news stories from the last 48 hours. Yesterday, in the New York Times, Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, wrote an opinion piece titled How to Regulate Artificial Intelligence where he does a good job of arguing against the hysteria that Artificial Intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. He proposes rather sensible ways of thinking about regulations for Artificial Intelligence deployment, rather than the chicken little "the sky is falling" calls for regulation of research and knowledge that we have seen from people who really, really, should know a little better. Today, there is a story in Market Watch that robots will take half of today's jobs in 10 to 20 years. It even has a graphic to prove the numbers. How many robots are currently operational in those jobs? How many realistic demonstrations have there been of robots working in this arena? Similar stories apply to all the other job categories in this diagram where it is suggested that there will be massive disruptions of 90%, and even as much as 97%, in jobs that currently require physical presence at some particular job site. Mistaken predictions lead to fear of things that are not going to happen. Why are people making mistakes in predictions about Artificial Intelligence and robotics, so that Oren Etzioni, I, and others, need to spend time pushing back on them? Below I outline seven ways of thinking that lead to mistaken predictions about robotics and Artificial Intelligence. We find instances of these ways of thinking in many of the predictions about our AI future. I am going to first list the four such general topic areas of such predictions that I notice, along with a brief assessment of where I think they currently stand. Research on AGI is an attempt to distinguish a thinking entity from current day AI technology such as Machine Learning. Here the idea is that we will build autonomous agents that operate much like beings in the world. This has always been my own motivation for working in robotics and AI, but the recent successes of AI are not at all like this.