With gifts given and Christmas Day drawing to a close, drone expert Faine Greenwood is taking up a different kind of holiday tradition: rounding up all the spectacular drone crashes and accidents that take place mere hours after the airborne presents are unwrapped.

When Britain leaves the European Union, many immigrants will be forced out of the country. But many of those people provide much-needed labor, and calls to automate the jobs they leave behind are impractical. Eighteen months after the U.K. voted to leave the EU, many details of the exit remain unnegotiated. But the process is broadly expected to have one big impact: a clampdown on immigration from EU countries. In fact, immigration has already declined since the vote, with the U.K.'s Office of National Statistics reporting that net migration into the U.K. is down from 336,000 in the 12 months preceding June 2016 to 230,000 in the 12 months preceding June 2017.

Much is said about artificial intelligence (AI), but it is still in the early stages. One way to watch the grown of AI, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) is to look for acquisition of companies focused in those areas. One just announced acquisition is of AI voice response company Next IT by Verint. The announcement on the Next IT web site is backed up by reports of a $30 million (USD) acquisition price. That brings up two key concepts.

The release of the most recent Blade Runner film has further fueled the long-standing debate as to whether artificial intelligence (AI) should be subject to regulation. One domain that has been quick to adopt AI technology is marketing. There's little debate that AI will fundamentally alter the marketing landscape. Already, the use of chatbots--the likes of Apple's Siri, GoogleAssistant, Amazon's Echo, Microsoft's Cortana, etc.--has empowered marketers to increase and optimize engagement with consumers. As well, AI has enabled marketers to more effectively target consumers and develop more relevant personalized content.

A company in California just proved that an exotic and potentially game-changing kind of computer can be used to perform a common form of machine learning. The feat raises hopes that quantum computers, which exploit the logic-defying principles of quantum physics to perform certain types of calculations at ridiculous speeds, could have a big impact on the hottest area of the tech industry: artificial intelligence. Researchers at Rigetti Computing, a company based in Berkeley, California, used one of its prototype quantum chips--a superconducting device housed within an elaborate super-chilled setup--to run what's known as a clustering algorithm. Clustering is a machine-learning technique used to organize data into similar groups. Rigetti is also making the new quantum computer--which can handle 19 quantum bits, or qubits--available through its cloud computing platform, called Forest, today.

Facebook will soon begin alerting users of photos that feature them, based on facial recognition technology.

When Ayanna Howard was a little girl, her favorite TV show was the Bionic Woman.

Small-business owners are always on the hunt for opportunities that can give their businesses a leg up. In the past, small business owners have eagerly adopted software-as-a-service products, transitioned to cloud infrastructure and embraced self-service digital advertising. Today, one of the most exciting opportunities is the potential to leverage machine learning (ML) to give your business a competitive advantage. ML solutions automate workflows, enhance data-driven decisions and facilitate interactions with customers.

The Kepler space telescope, which launched in 2009, has produced more than 30,000 signals measuring light from stars to search for possible planets in distant parts of the galaxy. Sifting through that and other telescope data, astronomers have found more than 3,500 planets, up from 329 known before the Kepler mission. Now artificial intelligence is helping to find even more.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German luxury automaker BMW said on Friday it will spend over 100 million euros ($118 million) on a test track for self-driving and electric cars in the Czech Republic, as it expands its foray into alternative driving technologies.