A US jet has shot down an Iranian-made drone operated by forces backing the Syrian government in the south of the country, American officials say. The F-15 plane downed the drone around 00:30 on Tuesday (21:30 GMT Monday) north-east of Tanf, according to a US military statement. The drone was thought to be armed and threatening US troops on the ground, officials said. Tanf, near the borders with Iraq and Jordan, is home to a coalition base. If confirmed, it is the second downing of a drone this month.

Democrats tie up Senate floor to protest Republicans' secrecy in writing healthcare bill Senate Democrats take to the chamber floor to decry the GOP's secret talks on healthcare bill President Trump's lawyer insists Trump is not under investigation, despite president's own tweets Trump and the Goldwater Rule: Should mental health pros weigh in on the president? Often seen but not heard, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner speaks at White House tech event. Senate Democrats take to the chamber floor to decry the GOP's secret talks on healthcare bill President Trump's lawyer insists Trump is not under investigation, despite president's own tweets Trump and the Goldwater Rule: Should mental health pros weigh in on the president? Often seen but not heard, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner speaks at White House tech event. U.S. forces shoot down Iranian drone over Syria as fighting escalates A U.S. fighter jet Tuesday shot down an armed Iranian drone supporting Syrian government forces in southern Syria, marking the third American air-to-air shoot-down this month.

The ambitious Hyper Chariot concept uses roller coaster-type technology to catapult car-sized capsules through airless concrete tubes at five times the speed of sound - and more than five times faster than Elon Musk's Hyperloop. The hypersonic public transport system, presided over by Hollywood actor Matthew Modin, will be fully operational by 2040 with test centres opening next year, the founders claim. The hypersonic public transport system (pictured) which looks straight out of a sci-fi movie could be fully operational by 2040 and will connect'cities and even countries in a way never before possible' the company claims The founders claim the Hyper Chariot uses roller coaster-type technology to catapult car-sized capsules through airless concrete tubes at five times the speed of sound. The apparent public transport of the future will accelerate from 0 to 1,000mph (1,600 km/h) in just 60 seconds and will reach an astonishing top speed of 4,000mph (6,400 km/h). A spokesman for Hyper Chariot said tickets for the eight minute journey would be'highly competitive', with fares for London to Edinburgh costing around £100 ($127).

RobotX Space is the leading global Artificial Intelligence community, coworking space in Silicon Valley. We help entrepreneurs bring concepts to market and provide them with resources to succeed. Based on our mother company, GWC's global connections and strong relationships with China, RobotX Space is a powerful cross-border platform connecting China and US as well.

While several U.S. banks are developing or piloting virtual assistants based on artificial intelligence, Singapore's largest bank has been using an AI-powered chatbot to run its digital-only bank in India for about a year. The results so far are impressive: Eighty-two percent of all customer support for digibank by DBS is handled through the bot, helping the company run the unit at about a fifth of the cost of running a traditional bank. A look at how this bot is working in other parts of the world gives a sense of how the technology is likely to play out in the U.S., as banks like Bank of America, Capital One and Wells Fargo experiment in the space. Indeed, according to Sandeep Lal, group head of digital bank at DBS, the company's goal in pioneering the chatbot is to shape the future of banking. The bank is using Kasisto's virtual assistant, which started life in 2010 as a project of SRI (the research institute where Siri was developed) and BBVA called Lola, where it was trained to answer questions the way a human customer service representative would.

Alibaba is using artificial intelligence (AI) to create tailor-made shopping experiences for consumers and targeted marketing for brands as it seeks to "empower people in the virtual economy". Alibaba's principal engineer Rong Jin, told The Drum, that Alibaba is using AI technology within Taobao and Tmall through features such as smart product search and recommendation, customer-service chat-bots and image matching, which enables users to take a photo of a product and search for similar looking items. "AI plays a crucial role in delivering the best customer experience across a wide spectrum of our services inside the Alibaba ecosystem," said Jin. "Besides leveraging the AI technology to support our platforms, we are also starting to transfer AI services to empower more and more businesses. "We believe that as mobile commerce becomes the trend, an increasing amount of data will be available online. We can then develop smart business intelligence through data analysis, which will then help better predict demand and optimise the entire supply chain system." Jin, who leads Alibaba's AI development, said the team was also working on developments in cutting-edge technologies, such as speech recognition and interaction, visual analysis of videos and 3D modeling of shopping items. "Data-driven technologies, such as AI and VR, will play a key role in advancing the company's business forward and creating tremendous values to our customers, merchants and the larger society as a whole." Jin said AI technology will transform Alibaba's business in the future by enabling the company to connect the data generated across the company's ecosystem to better understand its consumers and better optimise the shopping process for them. AI technology will also enable Alibaba to enhance product recommendations and help identify the most effective stages of the process to target consumers to influence their final purchasing decisions. Alibaba this week launched its Uni Marketing framework, a collection of data tools which enable brands to control brand marketing across the entire Alibaba ecosystem. Jin said this sort of data analysis and data pattern mapping will also help inform data models that Alibaba can apply to other sectors, beyond ecommerce. Alibaba has begun using AI technology to upgrade business sectors such as finance, shipping, healthcare and entertainment. Alibaba's cloud computing business, Alibaba Cloud, has developed a number of initiatives to help China's healthcare industry, including the development of AI-based tumor diagnosis and data-driven production systems. "The advancement of our AI technology is supported by two of our key strengths, data and cloud computing.

Boeing is set to start testing self-flying planes, the company has revealed. It says it wants to develop autonomous aircraft, which would be capable of navigating themselves without any input from a human pilot. Planes can already take off, cruise and land with minimal human assistance, but Boeing wants to go a step further. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Sci-fi level Artificial Intelligence (AI) like HAL 9000 it was promised since 1960s, but PCs and robots kept dumb until recently. Now, tech giants and startups are announcing the AI revolution: self-driving cars, robo doctors, robo investors, etc. "AI" it's the 2017 buzzword, like "dot com" it was in 1999. Is this a marketing bubble or real? Machine learning (ML), a subset of AI, make machines learn from experience, from examples of the real world: the more the data, the more it learns. A software is said to learn from experience with respect to a task, if its performance at doing the task improves with experience. Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is only one approach to ML, others include decision trees, regression etc. Deep learning is an ANN with many levels of abstraction. Despite the "deep" hype, popular ML methods are "shallow" too.

Conferences and trade shows, held in interesting locations around the world, can be entertaining, informative and an opportunity to explore new places, meet new people and renew acquaintances. Three recent examples: Xponential, the mostly defense-related unmanned land, sea and air show, held in Dallas; Innorobo, focused on service robotics, in Paris; and ICRA, the IEEE's premier robotics conference, in Singapore. The 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the IEEE's principle forum for robotics researchers to present their work, was held this year at the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and Convention Center in Singapore. ICRA continues to have the highest number of cited research papers in the robotics field of all the various global conferences (including IROS). In an IEEE/Spectrum review of that portion of the conference that was biomedical-related, a swallowable capsule robot capable of needle aspiration, guided by magnets, and an autonomous snake-like colonoscopy robot were two of the hits. Another reviewer found the rehab exoskeletons, haptic interfaces, modular robot components and many of the ROS-enabled solutions of merit.

BBC iPlayer has started forcing people to sign in, in order to use the catch-up service. The corporation announced the move was coming last month, has now started putting its plans into action. Previously, iPlayer users were being notified by a pop-up message reading, "You'll soon need to sign in to watch. And we'll keep you signed in." Options to sign in and register appeared alongside that note, but users could also skip the process by clicking "I'll do it later". The option to skip has now vanished, meaning you'll be locked out of the BBC's online service unless you enter your details.