Tallinn, Estonia - Things are bad on the small island nation of Berylia after a diplomatic row with Crimsonia, its bigger neighbour and rival. There are street protests by the Crimsonian minority in Berylia, which then suffers a wave of cyber-attacks that make it lose control of its drones and its only international airbase. Crimsonia is blamed for the cyberoffensive even though there's no hard proof. Crippled by the attacks, Berylia, a new member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), weighs its options. One of them is to invoke Article 5 and take the military alliance to war against Crimsonia.

Uber has been rocked by a steady stream of scandals and negative publicity in recent years, including revelations of questionable spy programs, a high-stakes technology lawsuit, claims of sexual harassment and discrimination and embarrassing leaks about executive conduct. The PR disasters culminated in CEO Travis Kalanick taking an indefinite leave of absence this week and promises of bold reform that largely ignored the ride-hailing company's strained relationship with drivers. Here is a timeline of some of the most consequential controversies. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick faced backlash for a sexist joke about his increasing desirability, telling an Esquire reporter: "We call that Boob-er." Uber faced accusations that it booked thousands of fake rides from its competitor Lyft in an effort to cut into its profits and services.

With the rise of cloud-based apps and the proliferation of mobile devices, information security is becoming a top priority for both the IT department and the C-Suite. Businesses ranging from startups to large corporations are increasingly looking to new technologies, like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, to protect their consumers. For cybersecurity, AI can analyze vast amounts of data and help cybersecurity professionals identify more threats than would be possible if left to do it manually. But the same technology that can improve corporate defences can also be used to attack them.

From robot simians that can clean up nuclear accidents, to powered exoskeletons that enable you to lift huge objects, robotic technologies are developing incredibly quickly. Ashitey Trebi-Ollennu, chief engineer at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks us through five robots that are changing the world.

A network of independently trained Gaussian processes (StackedGP) is introduced to obtain predictions of quantities of interest with quantified uncertainties. The main applications of the StackedGP framework are to integrate different datasets through model composition, enhance predictions of quantities of interest through a cascade of intermediate predictions, and to propagate uncertainties through emulated dynamical systems driven by uncertain forcing variables. By using analytical first and second-order moments of a Gaussian process with uncertain inputs using squared exponential and polynomial kernels, approximated expectations of quantities of interests that require an arbitrary composition of functions can be obtained. The StackedGP model is extended to any number of layers and nodes per layer, and it provides flexibility in kernel selection for the input nodes. The proposed nonparametric stacked model is validated using synthetic datasets, and its performance in model composition and cascading predictions is measured in two applications using real data.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for security may be soon reaching a tipping point: In a global survey of C-suite executives, Radware found that about four in five (81%) reported having already or recently implemented more reliance on automated solutions. Some 57% of executives report trusting automated systems that employ AI and machine learning as much or more than humans to protect their organizations. Two in five (38%) executives indicated that within two years, automated security systems would be the primary resource for managing cybersecurity. "Businesses have to fight fire with fire," said Carl Herberger, vice president of security solutions at Radware. "Today's threat actors continue to build highly automated and adaptive tools, like the Mirai and Hajime botnets. These attacks can wreak catastrophic damage to a network. Executives that aren't yet fighting these new dynamic threats with continuously adaptive attack detection and mitigation capabilities are putting their organization at risk."

It's often been observed that technological advancement is a double-edged sword – and this is especially true in the realm of cybersecurity. Attackers have been known to use automation technology to stage and sustain their strikes – while those same machine learning algorithms and real-time response mechanisms can help enterprises that suffer an assault to speed up their efforts at remediation. However, this can only happen if these automated and learning technologies are actually being deployed by enterprise users. With recent security research suggesting that a typical business organization takes an average of 146 days to fix critical software or system vulnerabilities, the penetration of such technology clearly hasn't reached acceptable levels, yet. Nevertheless, there's an increasing level of buzz over machine learning, adaptive technologies, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and the roles they can and should play in improving enterprise cybersecurity.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill Thursday that signals to Google, Uber and carmakers that they are welcome to test self-driving cars on the state's roads and highways without a driver behind the wheel. There was nothing in existing law that banned autonomous vehicles from Texas roads. After all, Google has been testing them since 2015 in Austin, and Arlington is rolling them out. And several Texas sites were chosen by the U.S. Department of Transportation to test the technology in closed-course settings. Yet because state statutes didn't address the emerging technology at all, some manufacturers have told state officials they were wary about testing vehicles alongside street and highway traffic in Texas.

With Yahoo now part of the Verizon empire, Jefferson Graham takes a good look at the homepage, and finds it....rather dated. This week Yahoo, one of the oldest Internet brands, became part of the Verizon empire, one of the companies (along with HuffPost, AOL and TechCrunch) that live within the newly created Oath unit, which hopes to compete against Google and Facebook as a bulked-up alternative for online advertisers. This Sept. 23, 2016 file photo shows the Yahoo logo pictured on a computer monitor in Taipei, Taiwan. Verizon on Tuesday, June 13, closed its $4.48 billion acquisition of Yahoo. And let's take a quick minute and look at the jewel of Oath, the beleaguered and ignored Yahoo.com.

For much of the past year, Uber has been caught up in increasing waves of scandal. Earlier this week, the backlash against Uber finally came to a head for the ride-hailing company. CEO Travis Kalanick announced Tuesday he plans to take an indefinite leave of absence from the company, saying in an internal email he needed "to work on myself" and "focus on building out a world-class leadership team." Last month, Kalanick's mother died in a boating accident that also sent his father to the hospital. For the moment, Kalanick leaves behind a company that is reeling from a string of public embarrassments and now is without its central driver.