United States President Barack Obama's administration said Friday that up to 116 civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries where America is not at war. Obama's goal for the release of the numbers is reportedly to create greater transparency about the actions of the U.S. military and CIA in counterterrorism measures against militants plotting attacks against the United States. The announcement covered strikes from the day Obama took office in January 2009 through Dec. 31, 2015. The report by National Intelligence Director James Clapper said the U.S. conducted 473 counterterror strikes, including those by unmanned drones, in this period. Even though the report does not mention the countries where the attacks were carried out, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the Defense Department and CIA have pursued targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.

WASHINGTON – The United States on Friday lifted the lid on one of the most controversial tactics of President Barack Obama's secretive counterterrorism campaign, detailing for the first time the number killed in airstrikes in countries like Pakistan and Libya. The White House also released an executive order outlining the steps that should be taken to reduce civilian casualties in America's battle against violent extremism. In a much-anticipated report, National Intelligence Director James Clapper provided fatality estimates for the 473 strikes between 2009 and 2015 that were conducted outside America's principal war zones in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He said between 64 and 116 civilians were killed, and up to 2,581 combatants. Such attacks are typically conducted via drones, though manned warplanes and missiles have also been used.

Roboticists covered a sweeping range of topics at Xconomy's annual Robo Madness West conference last week, from the ethics of artificial intelligence to the powerful impact of robots that have faces. Two themes ran through all the panel discussions, whether they focused on robot design, logistics and manufacturing, drones, or artificial intelligence. Hardware--Ways to make a killing by making cheaper, better versions of certain components. People--In various roles, they make up some of the thorniest challenges to the growth of the robotics/AI sector. Let's talk about hardware first. While robot developers are benefiting from the availability of some cheap, commodity components to build their prototypes, there seems to be plenty of room for innovation, according to the Robo Madness panelists.

The age of automation is no longer a vague concept discussed by futurists and tech visionaries in secret meetings. It is upon us, and it's already fundamentally changing the way we live and work. They'll drive us to work. They'll even represent us in court. It's exciting to imagine, but it also raises important questions.

The fatal crash of a Tesla electric car using an autopilot feature still in beta testing -- and never reviewed by regulators -- highlighted what some say is a gaping pothole on the road to self-driving vehicles: the lack of federal rules.

Ben Dickson is a software engineer and freelance writer. He writes regularly on business, technology and politics. Thanks to technologies that generate, store and analyze huge sets of data, companies are able to perform tasks that previously were impossible. But the added benefit does come with its own setbacks, specifically from a security standpoint. With reams of data being generated and transferred over networks, cybersecurity experts will have a hard time monitoring everything that gets exchanged -- potential threats can easily go unnoticed.

After escalating one of the most lethal covert operations in U.S. history, President Obama finally made a public estimate of the civilian cost of the nation's secret drone program, which has targeted Islamic militants in remote corners of the globe. Human rights groups immediately challenged the estimate and the amount of transparency from the administration, saying both were too limited. The White House said that 64 to 116 civilians had been wrongly killed in 473 strikes launched by the U.S. government from the time Obama was inaugurated and the end of last year. The vast majority of the attacks were launched by drones, officials said, but the estimate also covers some strikes using manned aircraft. Monitoring organizations estimate the number of civilians killed in U.S. strikes ranges from 200 to more than 1,000.

The advent of the Industrial Internet has raised the bar for security analysts and data scientists, a workforce whose number is quickly being dwarfed by the amount of connected machines. Now, machine learning and artificial intelligence professionals are teaming with traditional embedded vendors to help suppress the rising tide of cyber threats and Big Data. On their website, cyber security firm Norse Corporation generates a detailed, real-time map of cyber attacks occurring around the world, including the attack origin, attack type, and attack target (Figure 1). Hundreds of attacks are registered in any given minute, which, while disconcerting, pales in comparison with the number of systems being connected to the Industrial Internet. This brief exercise demonstrates a couple of things: 1) the quantity and speed of cyber threats that can be used to attack vulnerable, safety-critical industrial systems; and 2) the growing need for data scientists and security analysts1, as well as tools and technologies to support them as the Internet of Things (IoT) expands.

Called the structure-mapping engine (SME), the new model is capable of analogical problem solving, including capturing the way humans spontaneously use analogies between situations to solve moral dilemmas. Previous models of analogy, including prior versions of SME, have not been able to scale to the size of representations that people tend to use. Forbus's new version of SME can handle the size and complexity of relational representations that are needed for visual reasoning, cracking textbook problems, and solving moral dilemmas. To encourage research on analogy, Forbus's team is releasing the SME source code and a 5,000-example corpus, which includes comparisons drawn from visual problem solving, textbook problem solving, and moral decision making.

Northwestern Engineering's Ken Forbus is closing the gap between humans and machines. Using cognitive science theories, Forbus and his collaborators have developed a model that could give computers the ability to reason more like humans and even make moral decisions. Called the structure-mapping engine (SME), the new model is capable of analogical problem solving, including capturing the way humans spontaneously use analogies between situations to solve moral dilemmas. "In terms of thinking like humans, analogies are where it's at," said Forbus, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. "Humans use relational statements fluidly to describe things, solve problems, indicate causality, and weigh moral dilemmas."