NIAMEY – Niger will allow U.S. forces stationed in the country to arm the drones being used to track jihadis, having previously allowed their use only for surveillance, the government said Saturday. The decision comes a month after jihadis ambushed a joint U.S.-Niger patrol in a volatile area near the border with Mali, killing four American soldiers and four Nigerien troops. But Defense Minister Kalla Moutari said the decision had been taken before the Oct. 4 attack at Tongo Tongo. "It was a negotiation that had been under way for a while. Arming the drones is an option we decided on before we learned of the tragedy at Tongo Tongo," Moutari told state radio.

"There are key trends the enterprise cannot afford to ignore," said David W. Cearley, vice president and Gartner fellow in a video previewing Gartner's CIO Symposium and ITxpo. "They have significant potential for impact and disruption on enterprises over the next five years." Gartner has outlined three buckets of 2018 technology trends and their characteristics. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are seeping into virtually every technology to enable systems that are self-educating, self-healing, dynamic and proactive. "Artificial intelligence and machine learning are increasingly a foundation component of all apps, and all of the services and all the things in our world around us," Cearley said.

With artificial intelligence set to revolutionize how the military runs surveillance missions around the world, one top Defense Department official hopes to bring intelligent systems to the Pentagon's efforts both on and off the battlefield. As director of defense intelligence for warfighter support, Air Force Lt. Gen Jack Shanahan spearheaded Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative to rapidly turn drone surveillance footage into useful intelligence through machine learning. The tool is scheduled to launch by the end of the year. The Pentagon has long used drones over the Middle East to inform the fight against groups like ISIS. Though drone and camera technology have advanced significantly, the back end looks much the same as it did decades ago, with analysts still spending countless hours manually scrolling through video for points of interest.

With 60 percent of businesses across the globe expected to use A.I. by 2018, South African companies are championing how machine learning can manage business operations Artificial intelligence, or A.I., is already used by 39 percent of businesses around the globe in some form, according to Sage's latest analysis. Be it to scan and organise vast amounts of data quickly to free up an employee for other tasks, or to help a customer answer common questions on a website, A.I. uses programmed requirements and machine learning to reduce the time taken to complete mundane tasks, improving business efficiency and operating costs. Yet, despite CNBC reporting that smart technology boosts productivity, many companies are still to factor A.I. into their business model. Fortunately, South African companies are leading the way by adopting machine learning programmes to increase efficiency in numerous areas of their businesses. With the internet opening new opportunities for employers to hire highly skilled workers from all over the world, as well as the ability to post job postings to websites and social media, businesses are receiving more résumés and CVs than ever before.

The mysteries of the pyramids have deepened with the discovery of what appears to be a giant void within the Khufu, or Cheops, monument in Egypt. It is not known why the cavity exists or indeed if it holds anything of value because it is not obviously accessible. Japanese and French scientists made the announcement after two years of study at the famous pyramid complex. They have been using a technique called muography, which can sense density changes inside large rock structures. The Great Pyramid, or Khufu's Pyramid, was constructed during the reign of Pharaoh Khufu between 2509 and 2483 BC.

The Great Pyramid of Giza has been shrouded in mystery for millennia, but now a long-held secret of its structure might be known thanks to particle physics. A narrow void lying deep within the ancient Wonder of the World has been found by scientists using cosmic-ray based imaging. The internal structure is located above the Grand Gallery - which links two of the Pyramid's chambers - and traces a similar route for at least 30 metres (100ft). While the precise design and purpose of the void is unknown, it has been hailed by the team of academics as the biggest discovery inside the Giza landmark since the 19th century. The Great Pyramid of Giza has been shrouded in mystery for millennia, but now a long-held secret of its structure might be known thanks to particle physics.

ZURICH (Reuters) - Switzerland's defense ministry has admitted sending staff to test reconnaissance drones in contested land held by Israel - an embarrassing blow for the neutral European country's status as an honest broker in the Middle East.

Mountari said the team of 12 U.S. Special Forces soldiers and 30 Nigerian troops had been "right up to the Mali border and had neutralized some bandits" just before the ambush took place. He declined to give further details. The U.S. military has been adamant that the Oct. 3-4 mission was not intended to involve contact with enemy forces. Mountari said: "They (U.S.-Nigerien contingent) came back to Niger, they greeted the population, they gathered intelligence and it was inside the country, when they didn't expect anything, that the attack happened."

Parallel best-first search algorithms such as Hash Distributed A* (HDA*) distribute work among the processes using a global hash function. We analyze the search and communication overheads of state-of-the-art hash-based parallel best-first search algorithms, and show that although Zobrist hashing, the standard hash function used by HDA*, achieves good load balance for many domains, it incurs significant communication overhead since almost all generated nodes are transferred to a different processor than their parents. We propose Abstract Zobrist hashing, a new work distribution method for parallel search which, instead of computing a hash value based on the raw features of a state, uses a feature projection function to generate a set of abstract features which results in a higher locality, resulting in reduced communications overhead. We show that Abstract Zobrist hashing outperforms previous methods on search domains using hand-coded, domain specific feature projection functions. We then propose GRAZHDA*, a graph-partitioning based approach to automatically generating feature projection functions. GRAZHDA* seeks to approximate the partitioning of the actual search space graph by partitioning the domain transition graph, an abstraction of the state space graph. We show that GRAZHDA* outperforms previous methods on domain-independent planning.

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and its variants demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in the class of generative models. To capture higher dimensional distributions, the common learning procedure requires high computational complexity and large number of parameters. In this paper, we present a new generative adversarial framework by representing each layer as a tensor structure connected by multilinear operations, aiming to reduce the number of model parameters by a large factor while preserving the quality of generalized performance. To learn the model, we develop an efficient algorithm by alternating optimization of the mode connections. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can achieve high compression rate for model parameters up to 40 times as compared to the existing GAN.