Google's Alphabet has a new walking robot that wouldn't look out of place in Interstellar or science-fiction homes of the future. The reportedly as-yet-unnamed robot was shown off at the New Economic Summit in Tokyo by Alphabet-owned Japanese robotics company Schaft. It has a very different design to Alphabet's other robots made by Boston Dynamics, with a compact two-leg design and central body that can be moved up or down to cope with different tasks. Unlike Alphabet's larger bipedal robots designed either to interact in a human-like fashion with the world - the humanoid Atlas - or to be a robotic packhorse for the US military or dog's plaything, the Schaft robot is designed to be lower cost, lower power and be used by civilians, carrying up to 60kg over uneven terrain and stairs. The robot was demonstrated dealing with unsure footing, compensating for standing on a moving pipe in one instance and walking on shingle in another.

I would like to propose that Watson could solve one of the biggest challenges facing anyone trying to innovate and product their innovation with a US patent - the USPTO first office action. While everyone is working hard and I know the patent office is overloaded, here how three problems I've seen over my years of working that perhaps Watson could address: 1) Speed - it can take 6-12 months to get a first office action 2) Almost any patent application is nowadays first rejected due to obviousness. But the patents cited to create this argument are often taken out of context. To me, these seem like challenges that Watson would be perfectly designed to addressed. And all the literature to be reviewed is, by definition, in the public domain.

Picture the scenario - a sentient machine is "living" in the US in the year 2050 and starts browsing through the US constitution. Having read it, it decides that it wants the opportunity to vote. Oh, and it also wants the right to procreate. Pretty basic human rights that it feels it should have now it has human-level intelligence. "Do you give it the right to vote or the right to procreate because you can't do both?" asks Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington.

Early on Sunday morning, humankind came one step closer to building a portable habitat for Mars, as an inflatable room was attached to the International Space Station where it will be tested for durability over the next two years. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is a 3,086-pound pod made of layers of fabric and Kevlar-like material that one day might be able to house astronauts during deep-space missions, and possibly even space tourists on sightseeing trips. Developing an expandable space shelter would be a boon to the future of space exploration, says NASA, because this type of structure offers abundant living and working space while being much lighter and more compact than a metal structure. This makes inflatable pods easier to fit onto rockets and cheaper to launch. "When we're traveling to Mars or beyond, astronauts need habitats that are both durable and easy to transport and to set up," NASA wrote in a Tumblr post.

In this special guest feature, Karthik Krishnan, Vice President of Product Management at Niara, discusses how machine learning is an option that's gaining popularity to detect cyber attacks given its effectiveness in classifying and clustering attack activity, even within large event data streams. Karthik is responsible for driving product strategy and direction as well as customer engagements. He helped to drive the initial framework for the Niara Security Analytics Platform. Before joining Niara, he served as vice president of product management at Embrane, acquired by Cisco in 2015, and senior director of product management at PGP, acquired by Symantec in 2010. Karthik also spent five years at Juniper as the director of product management, driving product strategy, sales and customer engagements for Juniper's Access Control products.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Confident about continuing growth opportunities for the Indian job market, United States-based consultancy giant Korn Ferry Hay Group feels the outsourcing story is no more about cheap labour and the key drivers going forward will be value addition and technology. "There would continue to be opportunities for the Indian job market for sure. But substitution of certain jobs by technology would mean that the role of labour and labour arbitrage is not that important. "So I think the technology solutions to issues has an impact. I think technology is going to play a role in what those opportunities is going to be in the future," Korn Ferry Hay Group CEO Stephen D. Kaye told PTI in an interview. Kaye, who heads one of the world's largest management consultancies and was on a visit to India, said outsourcing was a response to a particular situation where companies were looking for cheap labour but the situation is now changing with the advent of technology and artificial intelligence. Many global leaders, including United States President Barack Obama and Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner in the presidential race, have voiced concerns about outsourcing in their bid to save local jobs. This has led to fears about loss of business for back-office service providers from India. Experts believe advances in the field of automation and robotics are expected to radically change the job market and to survive this period, employees are required to re-skill to remain relevant in the job market. With the increasing levels of sophistication and artificial intelligence, I don't think it is cheaper labour that is going to be the driver," Kaye said.

The US military apparently never tires of thinking up capability gaps, and that means we may soon see fleets of small drones dropping out of bombers, then later being yanked out of the sky by cargo planes. Cartoonish as it may sound--as is the case with so many deadly-serious but still far-out military concepts--it makes a lot of sense. And Darpa, the Pentagon's weapon of choice for making crazy things happen, just chose four companies to push the idea forward. Called Gremlins (because you weren't already freaked out) the project calls for a new type of reusable unmanned aerial vehicle that can be air-launched on intelligence-gathering missions from cargo airplanes, bombers, or other military aircraft over "denied" (i.e., hostile) airspace. Once their missions are complete, up to three hours later, the drones will fly back to retrieval area where a C-130 cargo airplane will collect them.

Are you skeptical about machines' ability to effectively aid social science decision making? Machines are becoming ever more intelligent, increasingly able to help humans make decisions across the social science spectrum, but cognitive computing is still in its infancy, with much unexplored ground ahead. Accordingly, government leaders who harness the power of cognitive computing are helping usher in a renaissance of simplified operations and enhanced constituent engagement. The secret to effectively using cognitive computing to aid human decision making lies in teaching computers to ask the right questions while taking account context and staying focused on what computers do well. Computers operate at great speed.

The head of Britain's digital espionage agency has apologized for the organization's historic prejudice against homosexuals, saying it failed to learn from the treatment of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing. In a rare public speech, GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan told a gathering organized by the rights group Stonewall that the agency's ban on homosexuals had caused long-lasting psychological damage to many and hurt the agency because talented people were excluded from working there. "The fact that it was common practice for decades reflected the intolerance of the times and the pressures of the Cold War, but it does not make it any less wrong and we should apologize for it," Hannigan said Friday at the conference organized by Stonewall, which campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality. The speech offered a poignant tribute to Turing, the gay computer science pioneer and architect of the effort to crack Nazi Germany's Enigma cipher. Turing was convicted of indecency in 1952 and stripped of his security clearance.