As companies building the technologies in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics that may be repurposed to develop autonomous weapons, we feel especially responsible in raising this alarm. We warmly welcome the decision of the UN's Conference of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) to establish a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems. We entreat the High Contracting Parties participating in the GGE to work hard at finding means to prevent an arms race in these weapons, to protect civilians from their misuse, and to avoid the destabilizing effects of these technologies. We urge the High Contracting Parties therefore to double their efforts at the first meeting of the GGE now planned for November.

With Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg sparring over its ethics and China announcing its intention to create a $150 billion domestic industry based on it, Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most discussed topic in the tech news cycle. It's likely to be a talking point no matter what your favourite watering hole for tech news. Billions of dollars have been invested by VCs in AI since 2016 with the US and China leading the race in record funding in terms of deals and dollars. In sharp contrast, Indian startups have collectively raised less than $100 million from (2014-2017YTD), according to data from startup analytics firm Tracxn -- that's smaller than Andrew Ng's recently launched $150 million VC fund. Another way to look at it: Grammarly, a Valley-based spell check tool raised more dollars than all of India's AI startups put together in the past three and a half years.

Faced with the worst labor shortage in decades, Japanese service companies are finally turning to labor-saving technology, an investment that could lift the sector's woeful level of productivity and allow them to raise wages. While Japan's manufacturers are renowned for deploying advanced robotics, most domestic-focused services companies fell behind in information technology investment, put off by a stagnant economy, restrictive labor rules and a shrinking domestic market. But as the workforce declines and the nation ages, businesses in areas like nursing and retail have found it harder to attract and keep staff. As Partners Co. is among companies looking to software for a solution. It plans to spend about ¥300 million ($2.7 million) to install new technology at its 15 nursing homes in and around Tokyo to make life easier for staff and residents.

That's not because it's impossible to ban weapons technologies. Some 192 nations have signed the Chemical Weapons Convention that bans chemical weapons, for example. But it hasn't suggested it would be open to international agreement banning autonomous weapons. In 2015, the UK government responded to calls for a ban on autonomous weapons by saying there was no need for one, and that existing international law was sufficient.

We propose a general framework for reduced-rank modeling of matrix-valued data. By applying a generalized nuclear norm penalty we can directly model low-dimensional latent variables associated with rows and columns. Our framework flexibly incorporates row and column features, smoothing kernels, and other sources of side information by penalizing deviations from the row and column models. Moreover, a large class of these models can be estimated scalably using convex optimization. The computational bottleneck in each case is one singular value decomposition per iteration of a large but easy-to-apply matrix. Our framework generalizes traditional convex matrix completion and multi-task learning methods as well as maximum a posteriori estimation under a large class of popular hierarchical Bayesian models.

A Florida based startup has developed a done that can carry and fire military weapons, including rifles and grenade launchers. The TIKAD drone, which was tested on a target in Israel in 2015, is remotely-operated and has been refined to absorb recoil motion from the firing of a weapon. The drone, which has the potential to reduce the number of boots on the ground in conflict situations, has already been ordered by the Israeli military and is being pitched for use by the US military. Duke Robotics co-founder and 20-year Israeli military veteran Lieutenant Colonel Raziel Atuar told Defense One that the drone can carry up to 22 pounds (10 kilograms) and is remotely operated. This means that a person would control the multirotor drone's flight and targeting from a distance.

More than 100 leading robotics experts are urging the United Nations to take action in order to prevent the development of "killer robots". In a letter to the organisation, artificial intelligence (AI) leaders, including billionaire Elon Musk, warn of "a third revolution in warfare". The letter says "lethal autonomous" technology is a "Pandora's box", adding that time is of the essence. The 116 experts are calling for a ban on the use of AI in managing weaponry. "Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend," the letter says.

Today (or, yesterday, but today Australia time, where it's probably already tomorrow), 116 founders of robotics and artificial intelligence companies from 26 countries released an open letter urging the United Nations to ban lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS). This is a follow-up to the 2015 anti-"killer robots" UN letter that we covered extensively when it was released, but with a new focus on industry that attempts to help convince the UN to get something done. The press release accompanying the letter mentions that it was signed by Elon Musk, Mustafa Suleyman (founder and Head of Applied AI at Google's DeepMind), Esben Østergaard, (founder & CTO of Universal Robotics), and a bunch of other people who you may or may not have heard of. You can read the entire thing here, including all 116 signatories. For some context on this, we spoke with Toby Walsh, Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and one of the organizers of the letter. Why was it important to release this second open letter?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become such a buzzword that it's at risk of becoming no more than tech marketing pixie dust. Just sprinkle a little here and suddenly, your solution inherits the foresight of a self-driving Tesla and the simplicity of an Amazon Echo. As more solutions crowd the cybersecurity market touting the benefits of AI, it's important to read through the hype. Machine learning (ML) can deliver transformative insights in some domains, but it has limitations. My goal is to help you pick apart vendor claims.

In the quest to better understand climate change, there is plenty we still don't know. But the question isn't whether or not climate change is happening. "What we sometimes hear on the news is political manufactured uncertainty," said Auroop Ganguly, a professor of civil & environmental engineering at Northeastern. Instead, real climate change uncertainty stems from the challenge of simulating the future. What will happen to Boston's electric grid under long-term extreme weather conditions?