When robots go to war, they won't look like us. They'll take to the sky with rotors, or they'll cruise through the sea like bulky torpedoes. The Uran-9 is an unmanned ground combat vehicle, or a robot tank. It's the latest in a long line of war robots made by Russia, and like all of them, it hasn't seen combat yet. It features a machine gun, a 30mm cannon, and missiles.

Hawthorne, Nevada isn't known for much. The town of roughly 3,000 sits on the western edge of the state, near an Army ammunition depot, and not much else. Announced today, Hawthorne is now the site of what might be a historic precedent: the first urban delivery in the United States by a fully autonomous drone. Look at the expectant package receivers! The drone was flown by drone delivery company Flirtey, which got it's start in 2013 in Australia, delivering textbooks to universities, before it moved to Nevada.

When the apocalypse comes, it won't do so on four rotors. Drones, especially drones-as-we-know-them--the affordable, commercially available quadcopters--are only really engines of their own destruction. Zoltan Istvan, transhumanist candidate for President, wrote today that the American constitution is unprepared for the challenges of swarming robots. With all due I respect, I couldn't possibly disagree more. "The Second Amendment Isn't Prepared for a 3D-Printed Drone Army", Istvan argues, and vividly sets a scene of total despair: Imagine this: A disgruntled citizen borrows 30,000 from his credit cards.

China's leading Internet search company, Baidu, says that data collected from its customers could be used to predict and preëmpt potentially deadly crowd gatherings in the real world. Baidu has an incredible amount of data to mine. Out of a total population of 1.35 billion in China, more than 657 million people use its services. The Baidu research also highlights how the digital trails left by Internet users can be used to understand city dynamics. Baidu's data is already being used in China to show city planners where to place transportation, facilities, or shops. However, some experts worry that such data mining might also help the government keep an eye out for social unrest.

NEW YORK, March 25, 2016 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- Today at 9:00 am EST, exClone Inc. announced the release of the Debate Guide Version 2.0 as a tool offered by the Wall Street Journal to its audience following the 2016 presidential elections. The Debate Guide brings direct quotes from what was discussed by the presidential candidates during the primetime debates, and the system is updated after each new debate. The tool allows users to compare the candidates for each issue discussed and brings quotes to particular questions through a dialogue, chatbot interface. Debate Guide 2.0 offers enhanced features that build on the success of the earlier beta versions. The Debate Guide's dialogue flow is a prime example to how advanced chatbots can handle content, knowledge, and expertise.

We've hardly made peace with the idea of driverless cars, and now we're being told that artificial intelligence (AI) could also control rifles, missiles and bombs of the future. The warning was issued last summer by leading figures such as Tesla chief Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking and MIT professor Noam Chomsky. "Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control," it read. The letter had the merit of publicising a debate that has been agitating diplomats, the defence industry and NGOs for several years, but without any major impact until now. Given the recent progress of robotics and artificial intelligence, their use in the world of weapons is not a matter of "Terminator"-like science fiction anymore.

The six astronauts at the International Space Station got an early Easter treat this weekend with the arrival of a supply ship full of fresh food and experiments. Instead of the usual bunny, Saturday's delivery came via a swan -- Orbital ATK's Cygnus capsule, named after the swan constellation. The cargo carrier rocketed away from Cape Canaveral on Tuesday night. NASA astronaut Timothy Kopra used the station's big robot arm to grab the capsule, as the two craft soared 250 miles above the Indian Ocean. A Russian cargo ship will lift off in a few days, followed by a SpaceX supply run on April 8. NASA has turned to private industry to keep the space station stocked.

The United States announced earlier this month that it had used both drones and manned aircraft to kill at least 150 al-Shabab fighters in Somalia, a move the Pentagon says was necessary to stop an imminent attack on US and African Union forces in the country. Critics of the US drone programme however, argue such strikes create more enemies than they kill. With the number of fighters joining al-Shabab having nearly doubled since 2013, how can the armed group be defeated? In this week's Arena, Somalia's former special envoy to the US Abukar Arman, who has called drone strikes a "priceless propaganda tool" for al-Shabab, is in debate with the country's former deputy prime minister Ahmed Abdisalam Adan, who says the strikes are needed. Follow UpFront on Twitter @AJUpFront and Facebook.

Cynomix is an advanced technology developed for four years under DARPA's Cyber Genome program. It was evaluated by DARPA and MIT Lincoln Labs, and rated as the highest among all DARPA teams in its category. The goal of DARPA's Cyber Genome program was to map the genome for malware, under the premise that while over 300,000 malware strains are released daily, most are variants of a manageable number of malware families. Cynomix was conceived as a technology for identifying the unique genetic markers held in common for each malware family, and for clustering them using machine learning algorithms applied to big data sets. These algorithms cluster thousands of labeled malware ingested daily, which enables Cynomix to stay current with the newest emerging threats. This approach gives Cynomix unmatched powers of detection by analyzing a broad sampling of malware in the wild, without having to see every minor malware variation.

DARPA has a new Grand Challenge underway, but it's not an automationBig Performance from Low-Power Hardware. Read more ... » moonshot like the selfWhen is CES 2016, what will be the best gadgets and how much are ticket prices?. Read more ... »-driving car challenges of the earlyHome IoT security could come from a glowing rock next year. The Defense Department's R&D wing wants to revolutionize something with a bit less sex appeal, but plenty of real-world applicationsNvidia Releases Machine Learning Products for Hyperscale Datacenters. The Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, which DARPA has cleverly abbreviated SC2, is about getting the billions and billions of wireless devices out there to play nice together rather than fight for space in the increasingly crowded RF landscape.