Aurora Flight Sciences' Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automantion System (ALIAS), is mounted in the co-pilot seat of a Cessena Caravan aircraft which is preparing for take-off at Manassas Airport in Manassas, Va., Monday, Oct. 17. Government and industry are working together on a robot-like autopilot system that could eliminate the need for a second human pilot in the cockpit. But inside the cockpit, in the right seat, a robot with spindly metal tubes and rods for arms and legs and a claw hand grasping the throttle, was doing the flying. In the left seat, a human pilot tapped commands to his mute colleague using an electronic tablet. The demonstration was part of a Defense Department and industry collaboration that is attempting to replace the second human pilot in two-person flight crews with robot co-pilots that never tire, get bored, feel stressed out or become distracted.

The first autonomous robots to deliver packages straight to your front door won't be flying -- they'll be rolling around on six wheels. Starship Technologies, an Estonia-based startup created by two Skype co-founders, Janus Friis and Ahti Heinla, is slated to begin testing its autonomous delivery robot to bring groceries and restaurant takeout to Washington, D.C., homes and businesses this fall. It's the first U.S. municipality to approve ground-based robots to roll around on city sidewalks. Starship hopes to solve the "last mile" problem –– the work of getting packages from the fulfillment center directly to people's homes -- currently done by humans. It's a problem Amazon wants to solve with drones, but the FAA's rules bar drones from flying around humans without an operator in line of sight.

Politicians have traditionally been very good at masking their emotions when it suits them, but we humans are easy to fool. A machine, on the other hand, might be able to peer through the shroud of deception to get at the true nature of a politician's emotional state. Or at least that's the goal of the project undertaken by four grad students at Columbia University. They built an AI application called "Debate in (E)motion" to watch the recent US Presidential debates to evaluate the emotions of each candidate. The AI isn't listening to what the candidates are saying, and it has no political bias. It is simply extracting a frame from the video every five seconds and scanning for recognizable human emotions.

A matchmaking service aimed at "sugar daddies" and "sugar babies" is feeling the heat after posting a billboard advertising to undocumented immigrants in Austin, Texas. ArrangementFinders.com, a service that promises to link wealthy older men to young women who are hoping for a financial or other type of arrangement, posted a billboard on Interstate 35 in South Austin reading, "Undocumented immigrant? Before you get deported – get a sugar daddy." Residents are upset about the implication that people would break immigration laws by, presumably, marrying in order to gain citizenship. When asked by ABC affiliate KVUE about the billboard, Kylie Brumley said, ""I think it's really disrespectful to all women and illegal immigrants." Jesse Aguilera said, "To get around getting legalization like that, it's just really offensive." "On a billboard they're encouraging people to commit a federal felony," Thomas Esparza Jr. told Fox 7 Austin. "It's rare that you see a billboard that says, 'Commit a felony.'" Jacob Webster, who was identified as the Chief Marketing Officer for ArrangementFinders.com "I think you're going to have people that are against it, and then you're going to have people that are going to sign up for it," Webster said. ArrangementFinders.com was founded in 2010, and is owned by Avid Life Media, a Toronto-based company that also operates Ashley Madison, the infamous dating website for married people. Cost of membership to ArrangementFinders.com is 79 per month for men, free to women. The two can then meet off-line to determine what kind of "mutually beneficial relationship" they would like to have, according to the website. The site is known for its controversial advertising. In 2014, the company had billboards removed in Chicago and Los Angeles, including one that read, "Because the best job is a b--w job." Webster told Fox 7 that Latinas make up one-third of the women who sign up for ArrangementFinders.com, "How could we speak to this growing demographic for this site in a way where we could get the max effect?" he said. He added that the billboard had been rejected by other locations. "We had a couple approvals, but we got a lot more denials.

In a study published earlier this month in the journal Astrobiology, two researchers say the scientific community should take a closer look at a study of Mars' soil published in 1976. Because two NASA robots may have discovered signs of life on Mars almost four decades ago, say Gilbert Levin from Arizona State University and Patricia Ann Straat from the US National Institutes of Health. It all started when NASA sent two probes, named Viking 1 and Viking 2, to Mars in 1976 to test for signs of life on the Red Planet. As the first spacecraft from Earth to reach Mars, the Viking probes conducted three studies on the planet's biology. To conduct one of the studies, the labed release (LR) experiment, scientists took soil picked up by the Viking probes and mixed it with nutrient-rich water.

Just about every major technology player is investing serious financial and human capital in pursuit of advances in cognitive computing. The National Science and Technology Committee on Technology released a much-anticipated report on how to prepare for the future where we have mature artificial intelligence systems. The report, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, outlines specific implications that artificial intelligence will have when it comes to transforming our society and outlines twenty-three recommendations for federal agencies to consider. Computers that think and work like humans will change the nature of our public agencies, from how they are designed and managed to the delivery of public services and the management of public goods. We have good reason to believe that there will be significant benefits to be had from cognitive computing solutions.

David Kenny took the helm of IBM's Watson Group ibm in February, after Big Blue acquired The Weather Company, where Kenny had served as CEO. In the months since then, the Watson business has grown dramatically, with well over 100,000 developers worldwide now working with more than three dozen Watson application program interfaces (APIs). Fortune Deputy Editor Clifton Leaf caught up with Kenny in mid-October, when IBM Watson's General Manager was in San Francisco, getting ready to open Watson West--the AI system's newest business outpost--and to launch the company's second World of Watson conference, a gathering of its burgeoning ecosystem of partners and users, in Las Vegas on Oct. 24. FORTUNE: We hear a lot of terms on the AI front these days--"artificial intelligence," "machine learning," "deep learning," "unsupervised learning," and the one IBM uses to describe Watson: "cognitive computing." KENNY: Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, which essentially is a set of algorithms. Deep-learning uses more advanced things like convolutional neural networks, which basically means you can look at things more deeply into more layers. Machine learning could work, for example, when it came to reading text. Deep learning was needed when we wanted to read an X-ray. And all of that has led to this concept of artificial intelligence--though at IBM, we tend to say, in many cases, that it's not artificial as much as it's augmented.

Demonstrating our automation system on the UH-1 and the Caravan will prove the viability of our system for both military and commercial applications,

Does it seem like your virtual personal assistant (VPA) knows everything about your life? Microsoft's Cortana can give you reminders, track packages, send emails or texts, keep track of your flights and even remind you to say happy birthday to your cousin next time she calls. According to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, developers made deliberate design decisions with customers in mind as the company moves into the world of artificial intelligence (AI). "When it comes to AI, the fundamental vision I have is that AI will be infused into everything," Mr. Nadella said in the Mastermind Interview at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2016 in Orlando. "The currency going forward is going to be how to build trust in technology so that people and organizations are comfortable using more technology, and I think that's one of the pressing issues of our time," he said.

Much of the internet appears to be broken. A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack has taken down systems run by Dyn, Inc, one of the largest providers of internet services in the world. And as a result it seems to be causing problems for a variety of websites – including Reddit, Spotify and Twitter. Dyn runs domain name servers or DNS. They work as a phone book or map to the internet, making sure that when someone writes an address into their computer or phone, it can be directed to the right place and show the right information.