The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (or DARPA) wants robots that can walk like human beings and do other human activities, such as climbing ladders, using tools, and completing other day-to-day activities. But that requires a bit of stability. Now, one team has taken us a step closer to that dream by creating the SRI DURUS robot. SRI is one of the teams funded by DARPA that is tasked with creating robots that are ultimately 20 times more efficient walkers (as compared to their predecessor)s. Recent work shows that DURUS has almost reached its goal of being 20 times better than ATLAS, another bipedal robot.

VIENTIANE – Southeast Asian nations are in unparalleled disarray over Beijing's saber-rattling in the South China Sea, analysts and insiders say, with the fractures set to deepen as staunch China ally Laos hosts top regional diplomats this weekend. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi are among the delegates due to fly in from Sunday for two days of meetings in Vientiane, the capital of the communist nation. The South China Sea is set to cast a long shadow over the summit that is hosted by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Earlier this month a U.N.-backed tribunal found there was no legal basis for China's claims to most of the strategic and resource-rich seas -- a ruling rejected as "waste paper" by Beijing. ASEAN prides itself on consensus diplomacy but divisions have never been starker with Beijing blamed for driving a wedge between members. The Philippines brought the international arbitration case, while fellow ASEAN members Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei also have competing claims to parts of the sea.

With the unemployment rate falling to 5.3 percent, the lowest in seven years, policy makers are heaving a sigh of relief. Indeed, with the technology boom in progress, there is a lot to be optimistic about. Manufacturing will be returning to U.S. shores with robots doing the job of Chinese workers; American carmakers will be mass-producing self-driving electric vehicles; technology companies will develop medical devices that greatly improve health and longevity; we will have unlimited clean energy and 3D print our daily needs. The cost of all of these things will plummet and make it possible to provide for the basic needs of every human being. I am talking about technology advances that are happening now, which will bear fruit in the 2020s. But policy makers will have a big new problem to deal with: the disappearance of human jobs. Not only will there be fewer jobs for people doing manual work, the jobs of knowledge workers will also be replaced by computers.

Big data overload is already beginning, but analytics can't do everything. So focus on business needs, experiment, and look for actionable insights, say government's data experts. How DIBP is using AI to measure risk. The astounding possibilities of the big data era and the internet of things are only just beginning to emerge and already there is a problem: data overload. Artificial intelligence is a big part of successful new data-driven approaches to public sector challenges, like the Department of Immigration and Border Protection's Border Risk Identification System, and might also be the key to extracting business value from the data deluge.

After nearly four years on the job, NASA's Curiosity rover is finally making certain scientific decisions on its own. The Martian explorer now picks some of the rock targets to blast with the laser on its ChemCam instrument. A software upgrade known as AEGIS allows the rover to make key decisions when Mars is out of sync with Curiosity's handlers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, delivering more data in less time. It's the first time a robot has been able to choose such science targets autonomously on any planetary mission. "Time on Mars is valuable and we get more data this way and we get the data much faster," said AEGIS team member Raymond Francis, a scientific applications software engineer at JPL.

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages. For eons they have carried out a huge variety of tasks, from manufacturing goods, to transporting people around, to helping us decipher the natural world, to simply entertaining us. Machines can fight, protect, heal, and even teach us. But what they have not been able to do until quite recently is to learn, make decisions, and act on their own. Today, intelligent machines are everywhere. From the Netflix recommendation en- gine to Google Translate to Appleâ s Siri voice-recognition system, artificial intelligence has become sufficiently accurate, reliable, and useful to find its way into numerous devices and applications. These technologies have taken off in parallel with a dramatic expan- sion of the amount and complexity of data, which provides fertile teaching ground from which machines can learn to make intelligent decisions on their own.

A panel of industry experts from BMW, XBrain, Motus Ventures and the Department of Homeland Security come together to highlight the extent of how Artificial Intelligence affects daily life and industries across the globe. Panelists discuss AI's potential to solve some of the biggest problems we face today.

Trump "didn't get on stage and issue a bunch of racial epithets," said Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie, who watched his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. "We didn't hear the N-word, and we didn't hear other words that may offend many people. But just because he didn't use racial slurs doesn't mean he didn't frame issues in a way that people in racial and ethnic groups find problematic."

A 7-Eleven customer's order for Slurpees, a chicken sandwich, donuts, hot coffee, and candy will forever go down in history. What makes it remarkable is that the convenience store chain used a drone to deliver the order to a family in Reno, Nev., 7-Eleven said on Friday. The company partnered with drone startup Flirtey for the delivery, which the companies said was the first time a drone has legally delivered a package to a U.S. resident who placed an order from a retailer. "This delivery required special flight planning, risk analysis, and detailed flight procedures ensuring residential safety and privacy were equally integrated," Chris Walach, the director of operations for the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS), said in a statement. The NIAS is a Nevada government-backed non-profit autonomous vehicle advocacy group that helped oversee the delivery.

A suspected terror attack on a Munich shopping mall Friday left at least nine people dead, including a possible gunman, and at least 10 others injured while triggering a massive search for other shooters that locked down one of Europe's major cities. Authorities said they were investigating whether one of the victims near the Olympia Einkaufszentrum mall was an attacker who had committed suicide. Munich police told Fox News the body of a possible gunman was found more than half a mile away from the shopping center. Reuters, citing the Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR) TV channel, reported that police were using a robot to investigate a red backpack found near the body. People running away to seek shelter!! pic.twitter.com/PB189s6RQy