Human-robot strike teams, autonomous land mines, and covert swarms of minuscule robotic spies: the US Department of Defense's idea of the future of war seems like a sci-fi movie. In a report that dreams of new ways to destroy adversaries and protect American assets in equal portions, the DOD's science research division cements the idea that artificial intelligence and autonomous robotic systems will be a crucial part of the nation's ongoing defense strategy. US military already uses a host of robotic systems in the battlefield, from reconnaissance and attack drones to bomb disposal robots. However, these are all remotely-piloted systems, meaning a human has a high level of control over the machine's actions at all times. The new DOD report sees tactical advantages from humans and purely self-driven machines working together in the field.

The robot that became racist: AI that learnt from the web finds white-sounding names'pleasant' and ... Niki.AI launches a highly capable bot for Messenger, and it can do a hell lot of things for you Gab.ai Sees Continued Success in Week One AI's, Bots and Canvases Part IV: The war is on! Refugees, Brexit and AI all to feature at Cambridge University's 2016 Festival of Ideas

HCL Systems calls its Dry Ice. With traditional IT outsourcing revenue streams at risk to automation, a number of IT service providers are responding by developing their own homegrown systems which are designed to perform routine tasks and operations otherwise performed by humans. The good news is that CIOs now have a number of automation options to choose from. The array of choices can be confusing and the unproven systems can be risky. It may not be immediately clear how these new automation options from traditional IT service providers differ from the solutions of the more well-established robotic systems companies like IPSoft or BluePrism.

Ted Dunning, Chief Applications Architect for MapR, presented a session titled: "Some Important Streaming Algorithms You Should Know About" at the Spark Summit 2015 conference held in San Francisco. During the session, he highlighted some newer streaming algorithms such as t-digest and streaming k-means. This article is adapted from his talk. The key thing about streaming algorithms is they have to be approximate algorithms. There are a few things that you can compute exactly in a streaming fashion, but there are lots of important things that you can't compute that way, so we have to approximate. Most important aggregates can be approximated online.

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Apple is said to have acquired Turi, a machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) startup, based in Seattle, US. The news was confirmed by various unnamed sources who pegged the deal value at around 200m ( 153m; 180.39m). Upon contacting Apple on the same, the California, US headquartered technology giant said, "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans," according to GeekWire, an American technology news website. GeekWire said this was a standard comment Apple was known to give after making such acquisitions. It added that the deal reflected Apple's efforts to increase its presence in the Seattle region, where it has been building an engineering presence for the past two years.

CHENNAI: Buying on Amazon, Flipkart or Snapdeal always comes with the prompt'Do you want to save your card details?' A question that poses a lot of risks -- at the merchant gateway, bank and customer end -- irrespective of whether it is a large retailer or your neighbourhood florist and confectioners. For banks, customers using e-commerce sites poses the debate of convenience versus security. With convenience comes lesser steps and faster buying, but higher security would mean multiple authentications and more time -- so to strike a fine balance between the two -- Indian banks are now looking at software products like FSS' Access Control, geo-fencing of accounts and rule-based access. "What it means is, if you use your card at an ATM in Chennai and in the next 5 minutes your husband tries to buy a product online from an e-commerce site from Delhi -- the card could get blocked or ask for further authentication. With artificial intelligence, the system could sense this is an unusual transaction because the same card is being used within 5 minutes at locations more than 1,000 kilometres apart," says Suresh Rajagopalan, president products, FSS.

Salesforce, the US Software as a Service giant is to build an Artificial Intelligence platform to be known as Einstein. Speaking with Forbes, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff revealed an Artificial Intelligence project that will integrate AI across the Salesforce product range. Mr Benioff said he plans to take his competition by surprise. The Einstein move is being seen as development of its RelateIQ acquisition which it bought for 392m two years ago. And it follows the purchase of analytics firm BeyondCore two weeks ago for an undisclosed sum.

A CIA-linked firm has joined forces with Amazon in a bid to use "computer vision" to snoop on the Earth in unprecedented detail. CosmiQ Works, a firm closely associated with the US intelligence agency, is working with the online retail giant and the satellite mapping firm DigitalGlobe to train algorithms to work out what's happening on the surface of our planet. Satellites can already capture astonishingly detailed images from up in space, but the CIA-linked project wants to go one step further and use artificial intelligence to analyse these pictures. The partners hope to collect 60 million satellite images and store them in a database called SpaceNet which will be open and accessible by members of the public. Programmers will then design algorithms which can work out what's happening in the images or highlight the buildings, objects and natural features in the photos.

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