Everywhere you turn these days there are more and more automated processes appearing all the time. From automatic vacuum cleaners to self-order counters at restaurants, to cars that automatically park themselves, robots are all around us in one way or another and physics is no different. In using the latest artificial intelligence to do the same tasks as people, we are not only saving time and money but saving on resources too. A recent physics experiment developed by physicists from The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy (UNSW ADFA) was shown to be completed by artificial intelligence (AI) just as a human would. The test was to create a replica of "Laser Beam" experiment that won the 2001 Nobel Prize and produced an extremely cold gas trapped in a laser beam (known as Bose-Einstein condensate) and the incredible AI literally taught itself how to do the experiment, from start to finish, in under one hour!

KABUL – Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mansour, who according to U.S. officials was probably killed in a drone strike, took over as head of the insurgent movement last July following the revelation that the group's founder, Mullah Omar, had been dead for two years. He was initially thought to favor peace talks with the government, but after becoming leader he repeatedly refused to come to the negotiating table. For some Mansour was the obvious choice to succeed Mullah Omar, the one-eyed warrior-cleric who led the Taliban from its rise in the chaos of the Afghan civil war of the 1990s. Born in the same southern province, Kandahar, some time in the early 1960s, Mansour was part of the movement from the start and effectively in charge since 2013, according to Taliban sources. Mansour spent part of his life in Pakistan, like millions of Afghans who fled the Soviet occupation.

A senior commander with the Afghan Taliban says the militant group's leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour has been killed in a U.S. drone strike. Mullah Abdul Rauf told The Associated Press Sunday that Mansour died in the strike late Friday night. He says the strike took place "in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area." The office of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani confirmed the strike but could not confirm Mansour's death. Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, however, says that Mansour is "more than likely" dead.

This week's economic calendar is pretty light. Market participants will be looking to an early getaway for the long weekend. While there will be plenty of entertaining FedSpeak, I expect a different topic to be at the fore. The news was pretty good, but the stock market was not. In my last WTWA, I predicted that the punditry would be asking whether it was "springtime for housing". That was the recurring topic as housing news was reported on several different days and garnered plenty of discussion. Competition came from the Fed Minutes, some dramatic earnings reports, and the election race. I always start my personal review of the week by looking at this great chart from Doug Short.

Four sister robots built by NASA could be pioneers in the colonization of Mars, part of an advance construction team that sets up a habitat for more fragile human explorers. But first they're finding new homes on Earth and engineers to hone their skills.

Recent work in distance metric learning has focused on learning transformations of data that best align with provided sets of pairwise similarity and dissimilarity constraints. The learned transformations lead to improved retrieval, classification, and clustering algorithms due to the better adapted distance or similarity measures. Here, we introduce the problem of learning these transformations when the underlying constraint generation process is nonstationary. This nonstationarity can be due to changes in either the ground-truth clustering used to generate constraints or changes to the feature subspaces in which the class structure is apparent. We propose and evaluate COMID-SADL, an adaptive, online approach for learning and tracking optimal metrics as they change over time that is highly robust to a variety of nonstationary behaviors in the changing metric. We demonstrate COMID-SADL on both real and synthetic data sets and show significant performance improvements relative to previously proposed batch and online distance metric learning algorithms.

The Taliban has denied reports that a US military drone strike had killed Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor and another fighter in Pakistan. Earlier on Saturday, a US official said that the drone attack "likely killed" Mansoor inside Pakistani territory. Authorised by US President Barack Obama, the strike took place at about 6 am EDT (1000 GMT), the official said, which would have placed it late on Friday night in the target area. Multiple US drones targeted the men as they rode in a vehicle in a remote area in Pakistan along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, southwest of the town of Ahmad Wal, the official added. The Pentagon confirmed that the US targeted Mansoor in a statement released on Saturday.

U.S. special operations forces launched an airstrike Saturday against Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in a remote town in Pakistan, U.S. military officials said, and initial evidence suggested Mansour was killed. U.S. military and intelligence officers were still assessing the results of the strike by multiple armed drones, they cautioned. The operation, which was authorized by President Obama and took place around 3 p.m. local time (3 a.m. Pacific time), hit Mansour as he traveled in a vehicle with another man along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, southwest of the town of Ahmad Wal. Mansour has emerged as the leader of a resurgent Taliban that in recent months has mounted a powerful insurgency against the Afghan government in a string of attacks that have killed civilians, Afghan forces and U.S. military personnel.

Between the University of Washington, a thriving tech community, and strong research institutions, like the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), many of the rapid developments in AI are playing out in Seattle. Perhaps that's why the White House has selected the Emerald City for its first public workshop on artificial intelligence. The Office of Science and Technology Policy will co-host the first of four events on artificial intelligence at the University of Washington May 24. The workshop, put on by the UW's Tech Policy Lab and School of Law, will explore issues such as policy, logistical applications, and safety, as they relate to AI. Speakers include AI2 CEO and UW Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Oren Etzioni, White House Deputy U.S. CTO Edward Felten, Microsoft Principal Researcher Kate Crawford, and other industry experts. The workshops are intended "to spur public dialogue on artificial intelligence and machine learning and identify challenges and opportunities related to this emerging technology," writes Felton in a White House blog post.

Sabrina Knight's second-grade students at a Brooklyn public school receive lessons in coding. Some school districts in the United States are attempting to expand computer science education while the Obama administration is pushing to bring the subject to every public school in the nation. On a recent Friday afternoon at a Brooklyn public school, the children of Sabrina Knight's second-grade class listened intently as she used a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to talk about algorithms. Moments later, a student volunteer walked back and forth across the room to demonstrate looping, a technical term used in the field of computer programming. "Thumbs up if you got it," Knight said, as a flurry of 7- and 8-year-old hands and thumbs shot up in the air.