With rising security challenges in the global commons, there is growing interest in the subject of "intelligent" weapons systems. This is especially so in the maritime realm, where recent studies have shown that precision-guided weaponry and networked systems are likely to play an increasingly important role. Even while accepting autonomous systems as the future of maritime warfare, however, many find the subject of "intelligent weapon systems" to be deeply contentious. A good point of departure for the discussion on autonomous combat systems is a recent report in the Chinese media about the development of a family of cruise missiles with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. In August this year, a Chinese daily reported that China's aerospace industry was developing tactical missiles with inbuilt intelligence that would help seek out targets in combat.

Yesterday, the President of the United States did something unusual. In an op-ed published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Barack Obama explicitly made the case for putting people inside of robots and moving them around. That is, he argued in favor of driverless cars, which is a less horrific statement of the same thing. Self-driving cars, or autonomous vehicles, are in development from Google, Apple, and Uber, as well as others, and they bring the promise of perfect, more efficient travel, with cars communicating automatically to each other and deadly human error a thing of the past. It is an exciting potential future, but if it's to come to fruition, it needs rules.

NEW YORK – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Japan's aging, shrinking population was not a burden, but an incentive to boost productivity through innovations like robots, wireless sensors and artificial intelligence. Abe's comments on Wednesday came days after official data showed that Japan has 34.6 million people aged 65 and older, or 27.3 percent of the population -- the highest proportion among advanced nations. "I have absolutely no worries about Japan's demography," Abe said in a prepared speech at a Reuters Newsmaker event, noting that nominal gross domestic product had grown despite losing 3 million working-age people over the last three years. Japan may be losing its population. But these are incentives for us," he said. Because we will continue to be motivated to grow our productivity," Abe added, citing robots, wireless sensors, and Artificial Intelligence as among the tools to do so.

Take a look at the tag on your shirt. If you are in the U.S., chances are it was made in a country like China or Thailand and then shipped overseas. Jonathan Zornow, the sole employee of a new startup called Sewbo, thinks the U.S. could bring garment manufacturing a little closer to home by automating the feeding of fabric into sewing machines--a step that to this day is done by hand. Zornow has created a process by which a robotic arm guides chemically stiffened pieces of fabric through a commercial sewing machine. Machines already play a large part in clothing manufacturing.

Proposals to introduce new legislation which would pardon gay men convicted under historical gross indecency laws will be brought forward "in due course", the government has said. The so-called Alan Turing law could see thousands of men pardoned for crimes of which they would be innocent today. World War Two code-breaker Turing was pardoned in 2013, decades after he was convicted of gross indecency in 1952. A government spokesman said it was "committed" to the proposal. "This government is committed to introducing posthumous pardons for people with certain historical sexual offence convictions who would be innocent of any crime now," the spokesman said.

For Matt Osborne, finding exploited children typically starts with a walk on the beach, and it ends with hands cuffed behind his back. It's almost always the same--Osborne and a few friends travel somewhere that's known for sex tourism and walk along the beach or hang in area nightclubs, not to look for girls but to be seen themselves. A group of white American men is easy to spot in heavily-touristed resort towns in Asia, Central America, and South America, so it doesn't take long to make a connection. "They approach us," Osborne says. "At first, everything is innocuous. Want to go jet ski or parasailing? Buy a margarita or beer? They offer us drugs, and the conversation always turns to girls. And if you let them talk long enough and say, 'What else do you have? What else do you have?' Then sooner or later, they always offer us young girls."

We propose an extension to Hawkes processes by treating the levels of self-excitation as a stochastic differential equation. Our new point process allows better approximation in application domains where events and intensities accelerate each other with correlated levels of contagion. We generalize a recent algorithm for simulating draws from Hawkes processes whose levels of excitation are stochastic processes, and propose a hybrid Markov chain Monte Carlo approach for model fitting. Our sampling procedure scales linearly with the number of required events and does not require stationarity of the point process. A modular inference procedure consisting of a combination between Gibbs and Metropolis Hastings steps is put forward. We recover expectation maximization as a special case. Our general approach is illustrated for contagion following geometric Brownian motion and exponential Langevin dynamics.

Each election cycle, the purveyors of mass media make a play to appeal to the public's interest in politics--and provide an antidote for it. Whether it's the screeds from folks like Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver, or the drama provided by Hillary Clinton-endorsed shows like House of Cards or The Good Wife, pop culture--TV especially--tends to provide a salve during election years. Yet none of these things capture how strange the 2016 campaign has been as well as Welcome to Night Vale. Yes, Welcome to Night Vale. The science fiction podcast about a small desert town might just be the one thing that can fully alleviate the fear and anxiety induced by watching Clinton and Donald Trump run the gauntlet that is running for president.

This Wednesday, the tech billionaire investor announced an investment in Luminance, a newly launched startup that uses artificial technology to read contracts in order help law firms with the arduous process of due diligence for mergers and acquisitions (M&A). It's not a "sexy" piece of technology, Lynch argues -- but one that has huge implications for the way we live our lives, and is indicative of a quiet revolution in artificial intelligence. What this is is probably an example of what's going to be changing a lot of things. If you can get machine technology to be reading contracts, it's going to be changing a lot of the world around us ... you're seeing the beginning of a new age." He has since founded venture capital firm Invoke Capital -- the vehicle through which the investment in Luminance was made. This week, Business Insider sat down with the investor to discuss Luminance, Brexit, his augmented reality plans, and why he likes having an "unfair advantage." Mike Lynch is an investor in Luminance -- but was also instrumental in helping create it. "The bit that makes it possible is the machine learning, and that was being done by some research people at Cambridge, and I actually have a connection because my PhD a long, long time ago was in machine learning," Lynch said. "I was introduced to them, and what they were doing looked great, but I said to them'look, you gotta go and meet some real world people.' "So they started getting real data and they met up with [law firm] Slaughter and May, and basically the machine learnt from Slaughter and May how to do these thing and at that point they made a little company. They got a CEO who is a lady who'd actually been involved in a lot of M&A deals over their career and we funded it, and it's been developing the product, and today it comes out into the bright lights of day."

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md -- In comments that conjure up dystopian images of a future dominated by robot soldiers controlled by Skynet, researchers with the Pentagon's futuristic think tank said they are working on better ways to merge the rapid decision making of computers with the analytical capabilities of humans. In fact, scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects agency, or DARPA, are even looking into advanced neuroscience in hopes of one day merging computerized artificial intelligence with the human brain. "I think the future [of] warfighting is going to look a lot more like less incredibly smart people working with more incredibly smart machines," said DARPA Deputy Director Steve Walker during a briefing with reporters at the 2016 Air Force Association Air, Space and Cyber conference here. "And how those two things come together is going to define how we move forward." Walker said researchers are already finding ways to help machines better collaborate with human operators.