WASHINGTON – Top Republicans suggested on Sunday that Donald Trump needs more public policy schooling, particularly on foreign affairs, to earn the confidence of a fractured party and show he's ready to take on likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. "I think he's going to need to learn. He's going to need to understand really completely … how complex this world is," said Trump's top Senate ally and top foreign policy adviser, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. To Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., Trump "is a work in progress," more so than most candidates. "Usually you know a lot more about a candidate because they've run for other things. And he does have a shoot-from-the-hip style."

The Defense Department of the United States is reportedly seeking entrepreneurial Silicon Valley bigwigs to build out the future of defense with the help of artificial intelligence technology. Can artificial intelligence (AI) be used as a defense armor? Well, the Defense Department of the United States is reportedly seeking entrepreneurial Silicon Valley bigwigs to build out the future of defense with the help of AI technology. With the emergence of artificial intelligence, Washington has sought the expertise of Silicon Valley's technology leaders. In fact, U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter visited the Valley for the fourth time to talk about the importance of incorporating artificial intelligence in America's warfare weapons, New York Times notes.

Algorithms help us to choose which films to watch, which music to stream and which literature to read. But what if algorithms went beyond their jobs as mediators of human culture and started to create culture themselves? ANALYSIS: Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, hired IBM's Watson programming team to incorporate artificial intelligence into the investment process. Later this year, I will be doing something similar, so stay tuned to learn more about this exciting endeavour. Sports excite people as a triumph of human effort.

It's a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari's office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. "It's from 2010," he says, "and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!" Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer -- a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future. Instead of continuing to develop new materials the old-fashioned way -- stumbling across them by luck, then painstakingly measuring their properties in the laboratory -- Marzari and like-minded researchers are using computer modelling and machine-learning techniques to generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands.

Driverless cars, drones and a proposed first commercial spaceport for the UK will feature in the Queen's speech.

Driverless cars, drones and a proposed first commercial spaceport for the UK will feature in the Queen's speech. The Department for Transport has said such cutting-edge technologies are crucial to the country's economy and that its proposals, to be unveiled on Wednesday, will help deliver jobs. Legislation will be introduced to enable driverless cars, already trialled in the UK, to be insured under ordinary policies. The government has said that the spaceport will be constructed by the end of the current parliament. The self-driving car market is currently growing at 16% a year and could be worth up to 900bn worldwide by 2025, while the port is part of the government's plan to raise revenues in the space sector from 12bn to 40bn by 2030, which would mean capturing about 10% of the sector worldwide.

It was a public engagement exercise that turned into a national row after a public poll to name a new British research vessel saw the name Boaty McBoatface get the most support. But Google has had a cheeky dig at the humourless officials in the British government who objected to the name by calling its latest artificial intelligence software Parsey McParseface. The technology firm, which has just become the world's largest company, has released software that uses sophisticated machine learning to analyse the linguistic structure of language. It forms part of an open-source neural network aimed at training computers to understand how human languages are put together so they can be processed. It announced the English version of this system is called Parsey McParseface in a blog that outlined how it hopes the software will transform artificial intelligence.

The U.S. Air Force is looking to fund the development of a system that allows it to easily convert any of its manned aircraft into robot-piloted planes, potentially making huge portions of its existing fleet fully autonomous. According to a public solicitation notice, the "drop-in" system would "rapidly convert a variety of traditionally manned aircraft" to be autonomously controlled without any modifications to the aircraft itself. That means that unlike the Navy's fully autonomous X47-B drone, the robot would use vision-based recognition systems to "manually" read gauges and operate the yoke, throttle and other controls just like a human pilot as soon as it's dropped into the cockpit. "Non-invasive approaches to robotically piloted aircraft using existing commercial technology and components offer the benefits of unmanned operations without the complexity and upfront cost associated with the development of new unmanned vehicles," the Air Force's posting reads. "Such a system will have the ability to automatically pilot an aircraft using only the gauges and cockpit controls available to a human pilot thus eliminating custom design and integration costs."

The experimental Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) recently sewed a piglet's gut together using a computer program and camera-based guidance, overseen by a team of doctors and computer scientists from the Children's National Health System in Washington DC and Johns Hopkins University. The procedure took 50 minutes, as opposed to 8 minutes when performed by a surgeon, but (unfortunately for doctors) resulted in more evenly spaced sutures and less leakage from the gut. And with iterative improvements, it's likely that the time difference can be shrunk. Meanwhile, FDA-approved robotic surgery on humans is making strides as well, though it requires a surgeon to operate the mechanical arm. The potential treatment paradigm, highlighted by The Economist this month, raises questions about whether patients will trust robots with their lives, and who is liable if something goes wrong. Another question robots pose: Are doctors in line for a string of layoffs?

Today's security systems usually fall into one of two categories: man or machine. So-called "analyst-driven solutions" rely on rules created by human experts and therefore miss any attacks that don't match the rules. Meanwhile, today's machine-learning approaches rely on "anomaly detection," which tends to trigger false positives that both create distrust of the system and end up having to be investigated by humans, anyway. But what if there was a solution that could merge those two worlds? What would it look like?