TEHRAN, Iran – An Iranian semi-official news agency is reporting that a drone belonging to the Iranian navy has crashed in the southern port town of Jask. The Sunday report by Tasnim, which has ties to the military, said thick smoke rose from the crash site in downtown Jask, some 930 miles southeast of the capital Tehran. The report gave no additional details. Reports of crashed drones and ultralight planes are not uncommon in Iran, where weather conditions are often bad and safety measures often ignored.

It may look like a video game, but the new computer simulation developed by a team of researchers in Barcelona could one day train autonomous cars to be better drivers. Called'Synthia,' the program creates a virtual city complete with pedestrians, traffic signs and other components of an urban environment, automatically annotated at the pixel-level. This allows for a more efficient method of training AI systems, and can be used to teach them to recognize and behave in response to the less predictable aspects of city driving, like a nearby cyclist or adverse weather. A new computer simulation could one day train autonomous cars to be better drivers. Called'Synthia,' the program creates a virtual city complete with pedestrians, traffic signs and other components of an urban environment, automatically annotated at the pixel-level Researchers hope programs like Synthia can be used to improve the abilities of AI to recognize different objects, to make autonomous driving more reliable.

It has been dubbed the Robo-Olympics, and will see the world's most advanced robots go head to series in a series of ever more challenging events. Twenty five of the top robotics organizations in the world are competing for $3.5 million in prizes, and will take on a gruelling simulated disaster-response course during the two day contest. Robots will try to complete a series of challenge tasks selected by DARPA for their relevance to disaster response. The robots will start in a vehicle, drive to a simulated disaster building, and then they'll have to open doors, walk on rubble, and use tools. There will be a surprise task waiting for the robots at the end - which turned out to be turning a valve.

Machine ethics offers an alternative solution for artificial intelligence (AI) safety governance. In order to mitigate risks in human-robot interactions, robots will have to comply with humanity's ethical and legal norms, once they've merged into our daily life with highly autonomous capability. In terms of technical challenges, there are still many open questions in machine ethics. For example, what is deontic logic and how can it be used for improving AI safety? How do we fashion the knowledge representation for ethical robots? These are all significant questions for us to investigate. In this interview, we invite Prof. Ronald C. Arkin to share his insights on robot ethics, with a focus on its technical aspects.

The likes of China -- who among other things is building cruise missiles with a certain degree of autonomy -- are nipping away at America's heels. The Pentagon has put artificial intelligence at the centre of its strategy to maintain the United States' position as the world's dominant military power, earmarking $US18 billion ($23.5 billion) over the next three years for developing the technology. Speaking from San Francisco ahead of a major AI industry conference, Prof Walsh said unlike previous arms races, much of the progress in AI development was being made by private corporations. "It's the same sort of technology that is going to go into autonomous cars which is going to be a good thing ... but giving it the right to make life or death decisions (in the battlefield) is probably a bad idea," Prof Walsh said.

Autonomous weapons are being increasingly sought my militaries around the world, but experts fear the worst. AUTONOMOUS robots with the ability to make life or death decisions and snuff out the enemy could very soon be a common feature of warfare, as a new-age arms race between world powers heats up. Harnessing artificial intelligence -- and weaponising it for the battlefield and to gain advantage in cyber warfare -- has the US, Chinese, Russian and other governments furiously working away to gain the edge over their global counterparts. But researchers warn of the incredible dangers involved and the "terrifying future" we risk courting. "The arms race is already starting," said Professor Toby Walsh from UNSW's School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Darktrace co-founder Poppy Gustafsson recently predicted, at TechCrunch Disrupt London, that malicious actors will increasingly use artificial intelligence to create more sophisticated spearphishing attacks. Criminals are just as capable of using artificial intelligence as those trying to thwart them, according to security vendor ESET's 2017 trends report, with "next-gen" security marketers throwing around the buzzwords "machine learning," "behavioral analysis" and more. That's making it more difficult for potential customers to sift through all the hype. It predicts the rise of "jackware" or Internet-of-Things ransomware, such as locking the software in cars until a ransom is paid. UK-based security vendor Darktrace takes the view that determined hackers will get into your network, so a perimeter-based strategy won't work.

If you attend a protest in Washington, D.C., nowadays, better plan on leaving your cellphone at home. That is, unless you want police to confiscate it, mine it for incriminating information and then gather even more data from their BFF -- Facebook. At least one person arrested during protests on Inauguration Day got an email from Facebook's Law Enforcement Response Team alerting them that investigators wanted access to their data. Another received a Facebook data subpoena. The email was basically a countdown to when Facebook inevitably handed that data over to D.C. police. That is, unless the respondent figured out how to file an objection within a 10-day window.

Ford CEO Mark Fields announced a $1 billion investment in a new self-driving car tech company, Argo AI. (Photo: Ethan Miller, Getty Images) SAN FRANCISCO -- Ford Motor is betting $1 billion on the world's self-driving car future. The Detroit automaker announced Friday that it would allocate that sum over five years to a new autonomous car startup called Argo AI, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pa., and will have offices in Michigan and California. Ford's financial outlay is part of a continuing investment strategy anchored to transforming the car and truck seller into a mobility company with a hand in ride-hailing, ride-sharing and even bicycle rentals. Argo AI was cofounded a few months ago by Google car project veteran Bryan Salesky and Uber engineer Peter Rander, who met while working at Carnegie Mellon University's vaunted robotics and engineering school. "The reason for the investment is not only to drive the delivery of our own autonomous vehicle by 2021, but also to deliver value to our shareholders by creating a software platform that can be licensed to others," Ford CEO Mark Fields told USA TODAY.

While Hollywood envisions Artificial Intelligence as one day gaining self-consciousness and starting to wipe out humanity, we're currently still struggling with teaching it how to take a joke. Today's machine learning algorithms are all around us. Machine learning is considered to play a vital role in development of artificial intelligence, but it currently still requires human intervention and tweaking. The merging of man and algorithms allows us to make sense of the terabytes of seemingly unrelated data that's constantly pouring into the internet on a daily basis. Machine learning in the security industry has also proven to be very effective at finding new or unknown malware, based on the features the new malware shares with previously known threats. However, you need to train machine learning algorithms with a dataset that's comprised of known malware samples.