Balochistan, PAKISTAN/KABUL/WASHINGTON – Taliban supremo Mullah Akhtar Mansour was killed in a U.S. drone attack in Pakistan, senior militant sources told AFP Sunday, adding that an insurgent assembly was underway to decide on his successor. Saturday's bombing raid, the first known U.S. assault on a top Afghan Taliban leader on Pakistani soil, marks a major blow to the militant movement, which saw a new resurgence under Mansour. The elimination of Mansour, who rose to the rank of leader nine months earlier after a bitter internal leadership struggle, could also scupper any immediate prospect of peace talks. "I can say with good authority that Mullah Mansour is no more," a senior Taliban source told AFP. Mansour's death, which risks igniting new succession battles within the fractious group, was confirmed by two other senior figures who said its top leaders were gathering in Quetta to name their future chief.

Drone use across the U.S. is soaring, and the skies may soon get even more crowded, as the Federal Aviation Administration expects sales of these unmanned aerial vehicles to jump to seven million in 2020 from about 2.5 million this year. Interest in drones for both commercial and casual purposes is raising not only safety and privacy concerns, but also thorny legal questions about where and when drones should be allowed to fly--and who gets to decide. On one side are those who say property owners' rights generally extend up about 500 feet, which gives them the right to prevent drones from flying or hovering over their land. They say drones pose a much bigger threat to security and privacy than jets and airplanes, which travel at higher altitudes, in airspace regulated by the FAA. They say drones represent the next frontier in aviation, and as such, decisions about where and when they can fly should be made collectively, not by landowners through tort law.

Worldwide spending on cybersecurity likely topped 75 billion last year, researchers at Gartner estimated, with companies more wary than ever of the risks posed by data breaches and other digital attacks. And along with rising costs, the sheer volume of digital security data has also increased dramatically: IBM estimated in a recent study that the average organization sees more than 200,000 pieces of security event data per day and that more than 10,000 security-related research papers are published every year. "Security researchers are getting hit with a firehose," says Caleb Barlow, vice president of IBM Security. "Once they get done with today, they've got another deluge of data coming tomorrow." To help companies handle that flood of data, IBM says it's training its Watson artificial intelligence platform--previously known for using its natural language processing power to beat humans on Jeopardy--to parse cybersecurity information, from automated network-level threat reports to blog posts from security professionals. According to Barlow, the company hopes to train the system to detect and understand threats to computer systems and to answer questions from human security professionals about incidents they detect on their networks.

ALISON STEWART, PBS NEWSHOUR WEEKEND ANCHOR: Joining me now via Skype to discuss the significance of the U.S. military strike on the Taliban's leader is Jennifer Glasse, a freelance reporter, now in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul. Jennifer, tell us a little bit more about Mansour, who he was within the hierarchy of the Taliban? JENNIFER GLASSE, FREELANCE REPORTER: He was the Taliban leader who took over in last summer. He was a bit of a controversy because when he took over after the announcement, that Mullah Omar had been dead for more than two years. There was a bit of a power struggle and division among the Taliban.

The giant hedge fund, which manages 35 billion, is as much a technology company as it is a hedge fund. It uses advanced technologies to find investment opportunities, and it just hosted its annual artificial intelligence competition. One of those technological applications involves using natural-language-processing techniques to analyze the Fed minutes, such as those set for release Wednesday afternoon. "Historically, interpretations of those minutes required art, so Fed watchers pontificated and critiqued," the firm said in a note. "Now natural language processing techniques can translate those minutes into relatively objective data."

Pakistan accused the United States on Sunday of violating its sovereignty with a drone strike against the leader of the Afghan Taliban, in perhaps the most high-profile US incursion into Pakistani territory since the 2011 raid to kill Osama bin Laden. Afghanistan said the attack killed Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, which, if confirmed, could trigger a succession battle within the armed group that has proved resilient despite a decade and a half of US military deployments to Afghanistan. Afghanistan's Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah said on Twitter that he was dead, the country's spy agency also said he had been killed, and a source close to Mansoor told Al Jazeera he believed the reports to be true. The Saturday drone strike, which US officials said was authorised by President Barack Obama, showed the US was prepared to go after the Taliban leadership in Pakistan, which the government in Kabul has repeatedly accused of sheltering the rebels. Pakistan protested on Sunday, saying the US government did not inform Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif beforehand.

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. The space agency has kept one Valkyrie robot at its birthplace, the Johnson Space Center in Houston. It has loaned three others to universities in Massachusetts and Scotland so professors and students can tinker with the 6-foot-tall, 300-pound humanoids and make them more autonomous. One of the robots, nicknamed Val, still hasn't quite harmonized its 28 torque-controlled joints and nearly 200 sensors after arriving at a robotics center at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Engineering students let the electricity-powered robot down from a harness and tried to let it walk, only to watch as Val's legs awkwardly lurched and locked into a ballet pose.

Martha Kim is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington and a bachelors in Computer Science from Harvard University. Martha's research interests are in computer architecture, parallel programming, compilers, and low-power computing. Her current research focuses on hardware and software techniques to improve the usability of hardware accelerators, data-centric accelerator design, and application-level power management. This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the Center for Future Architectures Research (C-FAR), and Intel Corporation.

The University of Washington will be hosting the first of four White House Office of Science and Technology Policy workshops on artificial intelligence. The session in Seattle on Tuesday, involving the UW School of Law and the UW Tech Policy Lab, will focus on legal and policy issues around artificial intelligence. Speakers include UW professors, White House staff and the chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Oren Etzioni, who is also a UW computer science and engineering professor, will provide an overview on the current state of artificial intelligence, followed by two panel discussions. The first will examine issues around making decisions in the private or public sector using artificial intelligence.

The killing of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansour in a U.S. drone strike was greeted Sunday by Kabul's political leadership as a game-changer in efforts to end the long insurgent war plaguing Afghanistan. In a rare show of unity, President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah both welcomed the news of Mansour's death as the removal of a man who unleashed violence against innocent civilians in Afghanistan and was widely regarded as an obstacle to peace within the militant group. Mansour, believed to be in his 50s, was killed when a U.S. drone fired on his vehicle in the southwestern Pakistan province of Baluchistan, although there were conflicting accounts whether the airstrike occurred Friday or Saturday. He had emerged as the successor to Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, whose 2013 death was only revealed last summer. Mansour "engaged in deception, concealment of facts, drug-smuggling and terrorism while intimidating, maiming and killing innocent Afghans," Ghani said in a statement on his official Twitter account.