NASA's next Mars lander is almost ready for its mission to the red planet. The spacecraft, dubbed InSight, is set to undergo its final round of tests following accelerated efforts this summer at Lockheed Martin's clean room facility near Denver. Once it arrives to Mars just after Thanksgiving next year, InSight will serve as the first lander fully dedicated to the study of the planet's deep interior, with hopes it will uncover new clues on the processes that gave rise to all rocky planets. According to NASA, the stationary lander will eventually be deployed to a region near Mars' equator. The new lander is equipped with two solar panels, which unfold'like paper fans' for a total width of about 20 feet.

Expedia CEO Dara Khosrashahi has reportedly been offered the top job at Uber, though it's currently unclear if he has accepted the offer. The Iranian-American businessman took the helm of travel site Expedia in August of 2005. In this July 13, 2012, file photo, Dara Khosrowshahi the CEO of Expedia, Inc., attends the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. Two people briefed on the matter said that Khosrowshahi has been named CEO of ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. (Photo: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File) SAN FRANCISCO -- Deal alert: Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, the surprise pick to helm Uber, comes with a resume tailored to fixing many of the ride-hailing company's problems. Now, the price alert: Khosrowshahi's success after 12 years leading Expedia means Uber will have to cover nearly $200 million in compensation left on the table, according to a Bloomberg analysis.

The next mission to Mars won't land a rover or drop off any humans to create a colony but rather it will give researchers a better idea of what the Red Planet's interior is like. The spacecraft that will land and stay stationary on Mars, called InSight, is currently set to launch in the five weeks following May 5, 2018, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The mission was selected by NASA out of 28 proposals for possible missions to conduct in the solar system. The mission is important because Mars could offer information about the formation and early years of rocky planets better than Earth could. This could help researchers better understand other newer planets or even exoplanets.

Whether or not shark attacks are a major problem in Australia (spoiler alert: they're not), the Australian government has devoted an enormous amount of resources into trying to mitigate the risk of sharks near popular beaches. They've tried nets to keep the sharks out, they've tried electronic gadgets to dissuade them, and they've tried lots of different ways of killing them, without much in the way of evidence that any of it is particularly effective. After six months of trials, the latest and most robot-y idea is about to be implemented: drones will start patrolling some Australian beaches next month, using cameras and some AI-backed image analysis software to spot lurking sharks much better than humans can. We can manage a 20-30 percent accuracy rate, which means both identifying other things as sharks (kinda bad) and misidentifying sharks as other things (way worse). As with many tasks of this kind, a machine learning system does much better: once it's been trained on labeled aerial videos of sharks, whales, dolphins, surfers, swimmers, boats, and whatever else, the software is 90 percent accurate at telling humans to panic because there's a shark somewhere.

Pictures captured by an undersea drone show the wreck of World War II-era submarine USS Bugara in stunning detail. Experts on the research vessel E/V Nautilus used two Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) to explore the submarine's wreck on the Pacific seafloor. The dive was the first archaeological survey of the site since Bugara sank 46 years ago. Bugara received three battle stars for her service in World War II, and later served during the Korean and Vietnam wars. The submarine, which was decommissioned in 1970, was earmarked as a target vessel for torpedo testing.

Pioneers from the worlds of artificial intelligence and robotics – including Elon Musk and Deepmind's Mustafa Suleyman – have asked the United Nations to ban autonomous weapon systems. A letter from the experts says the weapons currently under development risk opening a "Pandora's box" that if left open could create a dangerous "third revolution in warfare". The open letter coincides with the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which is currently being held in Melbourne, Australia. Ahead of the same conference in 2015, the Telsa founder was joined by Steven Hawking, Steve Wozniak and Noam Chomsky in condemning a new "global arms race". Suggestions that warfare will be transformed by artificially intelligent weapons capable of making their own decisions about who to kill are not hyperbolic.

Twenty scientists and engineers aged 16 to 34 were challenged to "visioneer" a new generation of underwater craft. Their ideas drew heavily on marine life, feature surfaces that can shape-shift, and boast radical new propulsion technologies. The concepts aim to inspire new ideas for underwater combat in the future. Cdr Peter Pipkin, the Royal Navy's fleet robotics officer, said: "Today's Royal Navy is one of the most technologically advanced forces in the world, and that's because we have always sought to think differently and come up with ideas that challenge traditional thinking." In the 18th Century the Royal Navy began sheathing ships in copper - dramatically improving speed - and the dreadnought revolutionised naval warfare in the run up to World War One.

This story was originally published by Data-Smart City Solutions. It was excerpted from a paper "Artificial Intelligence for Citizen Services and Government" written by Harvard Ash Center Technology and Democracy Fellow Hila Mehr. From online services like Netflix and Facebook, to chatbots on our phones and in our homes like Siri and Alexa, we are beginning to interact with artificial intelligence (AI) on a near daily basis. AI is the programming or training of a computer to do tasks typically reserved for human intelligence, whether it is recommending which movie to watch next or answering technical questions. From small cities in the US to countries like Japan, government agencies are looking to AI to improve citizen services.

One aspect of Artificial Intelligence is an effort to build machines and to advance technology using Google Alphabet that can learn from environments, from mishaps, and from real-life user experience to help individuals seeking a medical diagnosis. This takes advantage of Google's intelligent medical search engine. A lot of research and testing goes into finding the right path and the right breakthrough. Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a company's annual Founders' Letter to stockholders back in April, "This is another important step toward creating artificial intelligence that can help us in everything from accomplishing our daily tasks and travels to eventually tackling even bigger challenges like climate change and cancer diagnosis." He cited examples such as voice search, translation tools, and image recognition; he spoke about how Google scientists work to build products that improve over time, making them increasingly useful and helpful to the human race. U.S. Internet users can now search Google for help sorting out medical symptoms and not just actual conditions. While it may be surprising the number of individuals who ask Google to help to diagnose ailments, Google's mobile site, as well as its iOS and Android apps, now have a feature that that proposes to track down information on medical symptoms. Instead of having to search for a medical condition, an individual can search for a certain symptom, such as "I have a pounding headache."

The next major cyberattack could involve artificial intelligence systems. It could even happen soon: At a recent cybersecurity conference, 62 industry professionals, out of the 100 questioned, said they thought the first AI-enhanced cyberattack could come in the next 12 months. This doesn't mean robots will be marching down Main Street. Rather, artificial intelligence will make existing cyberattack efforts – things like identity theft, denial-of-service attacks and password cracking – more powerful and more efficient. This is dangerous enough – this type of hacking can steal money, cause emotional harm and even injure or kill people.