The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration's Small UAS Rule (also known as Part 107) has provisions to obtaining waivers to the usual requirements for flying drones in the United States. For example, you're not generally allowed to fly drones at night, although the FAA has granted quite a few waivers allowing flight after dark. But another rule is that you can't fly drones over people who are not part of your operations, and until about a week ago, the FAA hadn't waived that rule for anybody. Now it has, for CNN. The FAA is allowing the cable news network to use a drone to obtain video over uninvolved people, even crowds assembled at places like sporting events.

At first blush, Scot Barton might not seem like an AI pioneer. He isn't building self-driving cars or teaching computers to thrash humans at computer games. But within his role at Farmers Insurance, he is blazing a trail for the technology. Barton leads a team that analyzes data to answer questions about customer behavior and the design of different policies. His group is now using all sorts of cutting-edge machine-learning techniques, from deep neural networks to decision trees.

According to the researchers, there are 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations in Go -- more than the number of atoms in the known universe. According to the researchers, there are 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations in Go -- more than the number of atoms in the known universe. A year after a computer beat a human world champion in the ancient strategy game of Go, researchers say they have constructed an even stronger version of the program -- one that can teach itself without the benefit of human knowledge. The program, known as AlphaGo Zero, became a Go master in just three days by playing 4.9 million games against itself in quick succession. "In a short space of time, AlphaGo Zero has understood all of the Go knowledge that has been accumulated by humans over thousands of years of playing," lead researcher David Silver of Google's DeepMind lab said in remarks on YouTube.

Robots have become central to the cleaning-up operation at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, six years after the tsunami that triggered the nuclear meltdown.

US scientists are using artificial intelligence to predict whether breast lesions identified from a biopsy will turn out to cancerous. The machine learning system has been tested on 335 high-risk lesions, and correctly diagnosed 97% as malignant. It reduced the number of unnecessary surgeries by more than 30%, the scientists said. One breast cancer specialist said that the research was "useful". The machine learning system was trained on information about such lesions, the system looks for patterns among a range of data points, such as demographics, family history, biopsies and pathology reports.

At first blush, Scot Barton might not seem like an AI pioneer. He isn't building self-driving cars or teaching computers to thrash humans at computer games. But within his role at Farmers Insurance, he is blazing a trail for the technology. Barton leads a team that analyzes data to answer questions about customer behavior and the design of different policies. His group is now using all sorts of cutting-edge machine-learning techniques, from deep neural networks to decision trees.

A drone crashed into a commercial plane in Canada on Thursday, renewing the aviation industry's worries about the growing number of small hobbyist aircraft taking to the skies. A landing Skyjet flight was less than two miles from Jean Lesage International Airport in Quebec City when a drone struck the aircraft, according to CTV News. The plane landed successfully and "only sustained minor damage," according to a Sunday statement from Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau. "This should not have happened," Garneau told reporters, according to CTV News. "The drone should not have been there."

The automobile is being dismantled, reimagined, and rebuilt in Silicon Valley. Intel's proposed $15.3 billion acquisition of Mobileye, an Israeli company that supplies carmakers with a computer-vision technology and advanced driver assistance systems, offers a chance to measure the scale of this rebuild. In particular, it shows how valuable on-the-road data is likely to be in the evolution of automated driving. While the price tag might seem steep, especially with so many players in automated driving today, Mobileye has some key technological strengths and strategic advantages. It's also developing new technologies that could help solidify this position.

Four years ago, Alameda County, California's purchase of two drones for use by law enforcement was controversial. Now, the Alameda County Sheriff's Department has six drones, and their use is routine. So said Tom Madigan, a commander at the Alameda Sheriff's Office, to drone industry representatives and other law enforcement officials gathered at Drone World Expo in San Jose, Calif., last week. The Alameda County drone program has been fully operational for only about two years, Madigan said. In that time, he indicated, the Alameda Sheriff's Office has flown drones 700 times as part of 175 real-world missions, including search and rescue, fire scene surveillance, homicide scene analysis, and providing eyes in the sky during high-risk tactical operations.

We hear a lot about the under-representation of women in so-called STEM fields - science, technology, engineering and maths. But the proportion of women in economics is by some measures smaller. In the US, only about 13% of women hold permanent academic positions in economics; and in the UK the proportion is only slightly better at 15.5%. Only one woman has ever won the Nobel Prize in economics - American Elinor Ostrom in 2009. And there wasn't even a single woman on some of the lists floating about guessing who this year's prize winner would be - it went to the behavioural economist Richard Thaler.