The U.S. military says it conducted two drone strikes Thursday against Al-Qaeda-affiliated al-Shabaab fighters in southern Somalia. The results of the strikes were still being assessed, a statement from the U.S. Africa Command said. The strikes took place near the Banadiir region of Somalia, an area that includes the capital, Mogadishu, the statement said. "We continue to work in coordination with our Somali partners and allies to systematically dismantle al-Shabaab and help achieve stability and security throughout the region," the statement said. The strikes were carried out under new authorities that President Trump granted the Pentagon in March.

Armies of content moderators are working to scrub social networks of the worst content humanity has to offer -- violence, gore, hardcore sexual imagery -- and they can't keep up. The disturbing litany of murders, suicides and assaults have already become macabre technological milestones. These include Robert Godwin Sr., the 74-year-old father of nine and grandfather of 14 who was selected by a gunman at random and then murdered in a video posted to Facebook in mid-April. One week later, a man in Thailand streamed the murder of his 11-month old daughter on Facebook Live before taking his own life. The beating and torture of an 18-year-old man with intellectual and development disabilities was live-streamed on the service in January, and the tragic shooting death of two-year-old Lavontay White Jr. followed a month later on Valentine's Day.

Flyers may get a big discount off their flight tickets in the future, but there's a catch -- no pilot. Within the decade, several airlines could be on their way to rolling out pilotless flights, reports Fox Business. But, according to a new study conducted by Swiss bank UBS, consumers aren't as excited for the automated flights. Out of 8,000 people surveyed internationally, more than half said they would not be willing to travel in a pilotless plane, even if the ticket was cheaper. In the entire group, only 17 percent said they would fly on an unmanned flight.

Matrix factorization is one of the best approaches for collaborative filtering, because of its high accuracy in presenting users and items latent factors. The main disadvantages of matrix factorization are its complexity, and being very hard to be parallelized, specially with very large matrices. In this paper, we introduce a new method for collaborative filtering based on Matrix Factorization by combining simulated annealing with levy distribution. By using this method, good solutions are achieved in acceptable time with low computations, compared to other methods like stochastic gradient descent, alternating least squares, and weighted non-negative matrix factorization.

A new book shedding light on the top-secret life of a drone pilot in the US military is being turned into a film financed by Hollywood director Michael Bay. Drone Warrior: An Elite Soldier's Inside Account of the Hunt for America's Most Dangerous Enemies is a book following the nearly decade-long career of Brett Velicovich, a drone pilot with America's most elite military unit, Delta Force. Co-written by Pulitzer Prize winning former Wall Street Journal author Christopher S Stewart, the book charts Velicovich's career as he traveled across the world hunting down some of the United States' most wanted terrorists. Brett Velicovich, a former drone pilot with America's most elite military unit, Delta Force, has released a book detailing his time with the force Co-written by Pulitzer Prize winning former Wall Street Journal author Christopher S Stewart, the book charts Velicovich's career The book tells stories of Velicovich's time traveling the world and hunting down some of the United States' most wanted terrorists. He's pictured above with Somali forces in Burundi Featuring missions in Somalia, Burundi, Afghanistan and more, Drone Warrior pulls no punches in its portrayal of modern-day warfare, with Velicovich being particularly candid in his assessment of US military operations.

A secret spy plane operated by the US Marshals hunted drug cartel kingpins in Mexico. A military contractor that tracks terrorists in Africa is also flying surveillance aircraft over US cities. In two stories published last week, BuzzFeed News revealed the activities of aircraft that their operators didn't want to discuss. These discoveries came not from tip-offs from anonymous sources, but by training a computer to recognize known spy planes, then setting it loose on large quantities of flight-tracking data compiled by the website Flightradar24. Here's how we did it.

LONDON, July 28 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A new technique using artificial intelligence to predict where deforestation is most likely to occur could help the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) preserve its shrinking rainforest and cut carbon emissions, researchers have said. Congo's rainforest, the world's second-largest after the Amazon, is under pressure from farms, mines, logging and infrastructure development, scientists say. Protecting forests is widely seen as one of the cheapest and most effective ways to reduce the emissions driving global warming. But conservation efforts in DRC have suffered from a lack of precise data on which areas of the country's vast territory are most at risk of losing their pristine vegetation, said Thomas Maschler, a researcher at the World Resources Institute (WRI). "We don't have fine-grain information on what is actually happening on the ground," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Aramex, the Dubai-based international logistics and transportation company, on Monday launched its new artificial intelligence-enabled chatbot on Facebook Messenger. Named "Aramex Bot", the service enables personalised, scalable conversations with customers about shipment-related queries and different service offerings. "Aramex Bot provides users with a convenient way to easily find Aramex nearest locations, track shipments and share preferred delivery location. It also offers enables customers in the UAE to schedule a delivery for personalised shipments and e-commerce parcels.," "The chatbot service will soon be available to all Aramex customers across the Middle East."

The world around us is changing at a furious pace. It's left many established businesses shaken, with executives questioning their organisations' longevity. To participate in a digital future, business transformation is critical and increasingly urgent. A strategic approach is essential. To help businesses chart the way forward, Accenture has partnered with the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) to provide insight into digital technologies and the future of business. Click Here to view the complete white paper.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox. From wacky talking Einsteins to clumsy security'bots, from speedy drones to the underwater operations at Fukushima, it's been another busy month. So let's kick off our July review with a look at robots in action! You'd be forgiven for missing this first one.