Parrot was one of the first (if not the absolute first) companies to take a crack at the consumer drone space. The AR Drone came out in 2010 (!), and Parrot followed it up a solid upgrade in the AR Drone 2.0 a few years later. Since then, we've seen the Bebop, some clever flying toys, and had a bunch of fun with the fixed-wing Disco. But at this point, most consumers probably think DJI when they think of camera drones, because of how pervasive Phantoms and Mavics are. It's not like this caught Parrot by surprise or anything--two years ago, they saw the direction that the market was trending, and started working on a completely new consumer platform designed to be exceptionally easy to use and exceptionally portable, with the ability to produce exceptionally good aerial videos. Earlier last month, Parrot announced the Anafi, a US $700 consumer camera drone with a unique design and some unique features, coupled with the sort of thoughtful usability that we've come to expect from Parrot. We got a pretty good look at the drone in New York City, and have been trying one out over the past weeks. At Parrot's event in NYC, CEO Henri Seydoux introduced the drone with pictures like this: The idea, Seydoux said, was to build a drone like an insect, with a head (camera), thorax (electronics), and abdomen (battery).

When U.S. Special Forces entered Afghanistan in 2001, Facebook didn't exist, the iPhone had yet to be invented, and "A.I." often referred to an NBA star. Seventeen years later, American special operations forces continue to ride horseback in rural Afghanistan, but information technology has advanced rapidly. Recent breakthroughs in robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have captured the popular imagination and prompted sober talk of an impending AI revolution. Yet surprisingly little of that talk has touched on the small wars and insurgencies that have dominated U.S. foreign policy in the 21st century. The definitive work on emerging technology and insurgency has yet to be written, but two recent books offer suggestions for how the era of big data and AI will affect the United States' modern conflicts.

The average worker of the future is a socially adept leader, entrepreneur, and life-long learner with transferrable technology skills, who is also happy to work in a team, suggests a new McKinsey report. Chris Middleton looks at whether organisations can really find such people. Reports about the growing IT skills gap in digitally enhanced organisations have been circulating for as long as the internet has existed as a business tool, suggesting that the supposed urgency of fixing the problem has not been an impediment to many successful organisations. However, a new report from management consultancy McKinsey suggests that the rapid introduction of automation and artificial intelligence systems within companies is changing the very nature of work itself, as technologies increasingly augment some human skills, and replace others completely. Over the next decade, this will force companies to reconsider how work is organised internally.

Nicole Camarillo was touring the Army base at Fort Meade, Maryland in early 2017 when a young captain--I'll call him Matt, due to the sensitivity of his position--crossed her path. I've got to talk to that kid, Camarillo remembers thinking. Just weeks before, she'd seen Matt deliver a presentation on a tool he was developing to counter enemy drone strikes in the Middle East. The technology, he explained, was being developed on a "shoestring budget." As executive director of talent strategy at the US Army Cyber Command, a relatively new branch of the Army, Camarillo's job is to convince top employees in Silicon Valley that they should sacrifice their stock options and six-figure salaries and apply their technological know-how in the Army instead.

Contrary to envisaged fears that emerging technology like Artificial Intelligence (AI) will put a lot of humans out of jobs, SAS, a global technology solution company has said the computerised system if well applied, will create more jobs and help improve human efficiency, using data analytics. The information on the role of AI in business growth was revealed at the SAS Road to Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence Workshop, which held in Lagos on Tuesday. Senior Business Solution Manager, Advanced Analytics and AI at SAS, Mr. Larry Orimoloye, argued that emerging technology like AI was actually transforming businesses creating more jobs and enhancing business efficiency. According to him, in a customer operation centre where humans are responding to customers' complaints, a lot of training and investment are being put into in to enable the staff respond accurately to customers' needs and challenges. However, he pointed out that this is something that machines like robots can easily do because they have been programmed to do so and they have the intelligence to it accurately.

WHEN TAY MADE HER DEBUT in March 2016, Microsoft had high hopes for the artificial intelligence–powered "social chatbot." Like the automated, text-based chat programs that many people had already encountered on e-commerce sites and in customer service conversations, Tay could answer written questions; by doing so on Twitter and other social media, she could engage with the masses. But rather than simply doling out facts, Tay was engineered to converse in a more sophisticated way--one that had an emotional dimension. She would be able to show a sense of humor, to banter with people like a friend. Her creators had even engineered her to talk like a wisecracking teenage girl. When Twitter users asked Tay who her parents were, she might respond, "Oh a team of scientists in a Microsoft lab. They're what u would call my parents." If someone asked her how her day had been, she could quip, "omg totes exhausted."

A central problem of random matrix theory is to understand the eigenvalues of spiked random matrix models, introduced by Johnstone, in which a prominent eigenvector (or "spike") is planted into a random matrix. These distributions form natural statistical models for principal component analysis (PCA) problems throughout the sciences. Baik, Ben Arous and Peche showed that the spiked Wishart ensemble exhibits a sharp phase transition asymptotically: when the spike strength is above a critical threshold, it is possible to detect the presence of a spike based on the top eigenvalue, and below the threshold the top eigenvalue provides no information. Such results form the basis of our understanding of when PCA can detect a low-rank signal in the presence of noise. However, under structural assumptions on the spike, not all information is necessarily contained in the spectrum. We study the statistical limits of tests for the presence of a spike, including non-spectral tests. Our results leverage Le Cam's notion of contiguity, and include: i) For the Gaussian Wigner ensemble, we show that PCA achieves the optimal detection threshold for certain natural priors for the spike. ii) For any non-Gaussian Wigner ensemble, PCA is sub-optimal for detection. However, an efficient variant of PCA achieves the optimal threshold (for natural priors) by pre-transforming the matrix entries. iii) For the Gaussian Wishart ensemble, the PCA threshold is optimal for positive spikes (for natural priors) but this is not always the case for negative spikes.

Editor's Note: The rapid pace of technological innovation is changing the nature of warfare, and futurists are busy spinning out scenarios of a U.S.-China clash in twenty years involving nano-technology and fully autonomous weapons systems. Yet how will new technologies shape insurgency and counterinsurgency, which conjures up images of guerrillas hiding in Vietnam's jungles? My Brookings colleague Chris Meserole looks at two of the latest books on the subject and assesses how the balance between rebels and government may tilt. When U.S. Special Forces entered Afghanistan in 2001, Facebook didn't exist, the iPhone had yet to be invented, and "A.I." often referred to an NBA star. Seventeen years later, American special operations forces continue to ride horseback in rural Afghanistan, but information technology has advanced rapidly.

SAPPHIRE NOW took place on June 5-7 in Orlando with impressive numbers: more than 21,000 attendees from 102 different countries and 1,275 lectures, which was the SAP's main global event at the year. It was 3 days of much learning, where I had an opportunity to attend lectures, several demonstrations of products and applications, and meet interesting people. At the opening keynote of the event, called "The Next Move", SAP CEO Bill McDermott made the main announcements: the launch of SAP C/4 Hana and the SAP HANA Data Management Suite, the importance of SAP Leonardo, and also defined and listed what he considered the 10 main characteristics of an intelligent enterprise. McDermott commented on the importance of artificial intelligence to drive economic growth through the use of machines and the judgment of humans. "Great moments are born from great opportunities."

Google made headlines earlier this month when it pulled out of the U.S. Defense Department's flagship artificial intelligence program known as Project Maven, which leverages sophisticated algorithms to analyze drone footage. Until then, the project had been so secretive that few people knew Google was involved -- not even the former executive chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet, who now sits on the Defense Department's Innovation Advisory Board -- let alone what it actually is. But Google's decision not to seek another contract for the AI project has thrust it into the spotlight as tech companies face a wave of protests over government contracts. "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war," more than 3,000 Google employees wrote in an April letter to company CEO Sundar Pichai that prompted the move. The growing resistance from Silicon Valley to working with the government, particularly the Pentagon, raises questions about the viability of Defense Secretary James Mattis's ambitious plans to leverage cutting-edge commercial technology for military purposes.