Self-driving cars could account for 21 million new vehicles sold every year by 2035. Over the next decade alone such vehicles -- and vehicles with assisted-driving technology -- could deliver $1 trillion in societal and consumer benefits due to their improved safety. For autonomous vehicles to make good on that promise they will need onboard artificial intelligence (AI) technology able to link them to highly detailed maps that reflect every change in the status of lanes, hazards, obstacles, and speed-limits in real time. Researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering are making this critical machine-to-machine handshake possible. Yi Fang, a research assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a faculty member at NYU Abu Dhabi, and Edward K. Wong, an associate professor in the NYU Tandon Department of Computer Science and Engineering, are developing a deep learning system that will allow self-driving cars to navigate, maneuver, and respond to changing road conditions by mating data from onboard sensors to information on HERE HD Live Map, a cloud-based service for automated driving.

The US Air Force is spending $15m on a mysterious drone killing system from an Israeli firm. The contract for'counter-unmanned aerial systems' will supply 21 kits, which are believed to be earmarked for dealing with the growing threat of drones from ISIS. However, details of the kits and how they will work have not been revealed, although it is believed to be a modified version of the firm's existing'drone shield' The deal is with ELTA North America, a U.S. subsidiary of Israeli Aerospace Industries which does produce a'drone buster' called Drone Shield, pictured here. It is believed the new system mixes scanning systems with a system to disable drones mid flight, or cause them to return to their base, allowing them to be tracked. According to Army documents, 'ELTA North America Inc., Annapolis Junction, Maryland, has been awarded a $15,553,483 firm-fixed-price letter contract for counter-unmanned aerial systems.

Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Abstract Recently, two-dimensional canonical correlation analysis (2DCCA) has been successfully applied for image feature extraction. The method instead of concatenating the columns of the images to the one-dimensional vectors, directly works with two-dimensional image matrices. Although 2DCCA works well in different recognition tasks, it lacks a probabilistic interpretation. In this paper, we present a probabilistic framework for 2DCCA called probabilistic 2DCCA (P2DCCA) and an iterative EM based algorithm for optimizing the parameters. Experimental results on synthetic and real data demonstrate superior performance in loading factor estimation for P2DCCA compared to 2DCCA. For real data, three subsets of AR face database and also the UMIST face database confirm the robustness of the proposed algorithm in face recognition tasks with different illumination conditions, facial expressions, poses and occlusions. Keywords Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) · Two-dimensional CCA · Probabilistic Feature extraction · Dimension Reduction · Face recognition 1 Introduction Although many real-world applications encounter high dimensional data, the most informative part of the data can be modeled in a low dimensional space. Moreover, processing high-dimensional data is a time consuming process and requires lots of resources. To tackle these problems, feature extraction has been used as a tool for finding a compact and meaningful data representation. For single-mode source data, some subspace learning methods are conducted to learn more semantic description subspaces.

Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) has recently reported Q4 results, beating earnings estimates but with a slight miss on revenue. Shares fell 5% after the news mainly due to the relatively weak guidance. The good news is that the effects of new regulation on online advertising is mostly gone and the core search business will soon be growing again, helped by the integration of AI. Baidu's core search results were actually better than I thought. I expected the biggest impact of the new regulation to have its greatest impact on Q4 results, and I was expecting a bigger contraction.

As tech companies continue to dump mountains of cash into artificial intelligence (AI) development, the technology promises to greatly improve our digital lives. However, the AI ecosystem still has major problems to solve before it can advance, a new report said. The report, released Friday from Edison Investment Research, said that AI has the potential to be a major differentiator but it is still in the early stages of its development. Most of what is referred to as AI, currently, is "simply advanced statistics," the report claims. According to the Edison Investment Research report, there are three goals that must be solved for AI to move out of its infancy.

The latest robot attempting to find the 600 tons of nuclear fuel and debris that melted down six years ago in the wrecked Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant met its end in less than a day.

Science fiction likes to depict robots as autonomous machines, capable of making their own decisions and often expressing their own personalities. Yet we also tend to think of robots as property, and as lacking the kind of rights that we reserve for people. But if a machine can think, decide and act on its own volition, if it can be harmed or held responsible for its actions, should we stop treating it like property and start treating it more like a person with rights? What if a robot achieves true self-awareness? Should it have equal rights with us and the same protection under the law, or at least something similar?

Robotics undoubtedly has the potential to improve lives in the developing world. However, with limited budgets and expertise on the ground, putting this technology in place is no small task. Step forwards WeRobotics, a new Swiss/American NGO dedicated to meeting this goal through the creation of in-country'flying labs'. Co-founder Adam Klaptocz explains all. Let's start with this: what is WeRobotics?

Drones are emerging as one of the asymmetrical threats in the battle for Mosul. A series of Islamic State drone attacks on Iraqi forces fighting to retake the northern Iraqi city have resulted in casualties and a heightened state of alert as ISIS fighters supplement deadly car-bomb attacks with harassing drone strikes using off-the-shelf quad-copters rigged to drop munitions.

Telecommunications firm Verizon has acquired Skyward, a drone operations management company. Skyward develops software for drone operators to manage flight tracking and logging, maintenance scheduling, and contract management. The drone startup will join Verizon's Internet of Things portfolio. Kenya's government has implemented regulations for commercial drone use. The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority will begin allowing businesses to import and use drones for a range of operations.