My first drone flight experience was with the DJI Phantom 2 Vision, and as much as I appreciated its advanced capabilities at the time, I longed for something more compact -- a device so small that I wouldn't need to carry a separate bag or case for it, preferably without sacrificing performance. Eventually, a Chinese startup called Zero Zero Robotics released the $599 Hover Camera Passport, which comes in the unique form of a foldable cage while packing cool features like body tracking, face tracking and orbiting. I got to spend some time with the Passport over the past few weeks, and eventually it got to the point where I rarely leave home without it, lest I find time to take it for a quick spin. Compared to higher-end foldable drones like DJI's Mavic Pro and GoPro's Karma (assuming GoPro issues a fix for random power losses), the Passport's major advantages are its size, weight and caged propellers. At just 242 grams, or 0.53 pounds, the Passport is exempt from the FAA's mandatory registration and is also unlikely to hurt anyone should something go wrong, as its propellers are shielded by a carbon fiber enclosure.

For her second feature documentary, "National Bird," director Sonia Kennebeck puts a face on the victims of drone warfare who are both in the United States and abroad. Part of the technology's appeal is the distance -- both physical and emotional -- between the U.S. armed forces and their targets, but the film argues that military personel are affected, even if they are never in the same country as the people considered collateral damage. At the heart of "National Bird" are three whistle-blowers. Heather is a former drone imagery analyst who struggles with PTSD and takes her story to the Guardian. Daniel is a former government contractor and signals intelligence analyst who worries about what he can and cannot share with everyone in his life.

Machine learning is on a steep adoption curve and making its inroads in our daily lives and work. The application of the technology won't be an issue at all. There's an abundance of meaningful value propositions for many functional areas, business processes and roles across multiple industries. Software vendors of enterprise business solutions are focusing their product development on machine learning and other related artificial intelligence technologies. CEO Bill McDermott of SAP said that intelligent applications will fundamentally change the way you do work in the enterprise in the next decade.

Google isn't the only company looking to cash in on the augmented reality craze. Business Insider reports that Apple plans to integrate augmented reality tech directly into the iPhone's camera app. The new feature would reportedly take the form of computer vision. Apple's work-in-progress camera app will be able to identify objects in-frame and recognize faces, according to the report. And it will be made available to developers in the form of a software development kit.

"When I go to a Broadway show, I'm not very happy that scalpers have bought up all the tickets," says Andrew Ng, chief scientist of Baidu Research, the Silicon Valley branch of the tech company often described as the Google of China. Baidu has proposed a new artificial intelligence solution not only to thwart scalpers but to speed up the wait at any place where checking tickets or IDs leads to long lines. Today the tech giant announced new face recognition technology that it says is up to 99.77% accurate--able to distinguish people even better than a human can. Baidu published two peer-reviewed research papers and tested the technology using popular methodologies, so it's making more than empty claims. But beyond questions over how and how well these technologies work are questions of how they will be used.

With most of the year finished and a new one coming up fast, and a slew of new compute and networking technologies ramping for the past year and more on the horizon for a very exciting 2017, now is the natural time to take stock of what has happened in the HPC business and what is expected to happen in the coming years. The theme of the SC16 supercomputing conference this year is that HPC matters, and of course, we have all known this since the first such machines were distinct from enterprise-class electronic computers back in the 1960s. HPC not only matters, but the growing consensus at the conference is that HPC will possibly be returning to its roots as a sector for innovation and specialization to solve very specific and computational intensive and complex problems. We could be seeing the waning of the Era of General Purpose HPC even as the simulation, modeling, analytics, and machine learning workloads that comprise modern HPC continue to evolve at a rapid pace. It takes money to make HPC happen, and HPC also makes money happen, and it is supposed to be a virtuous cycle where more innovation in HPC systems drives more innovation in product design and various kinds of simulation such as weather forecasting or particle physics or cosmology, just to name a few.

For the last several years, we've been following closely (and somewhat uncomfortably) the development of robot cockroaches. Depending on your perspective, it's either good news or bad news that they seem to be spreading. Chen Li was a researcher at Berkeley's Poly-PEDAL Lab and Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, where he gave little legged robots cockroach-inspired shells to help them push through obstacles. Li now has his own lab at Johns Hopkins University: the Terradynamics Lab studies "movement science at the interface of biology, robotics, and physics." At IROS 2016, he presented a paper demonstrating a new trick for legged robots with shells: Ground-based dynamic self-righting, or flipping over using wing covers like a real insect does.

Who needs tickets when you have a face? From today, the ticketed tourist town of Wuzhen in China is using face-recognition technology to identify people staying in its hotels and to act as their entry pass through the gates of the attraction. The system, which is expected to process 5000 visitors a day, has been created by web giant Baidu – often referred to as the "Chinese Google". Wuzhen is a historic town that has been turned into a tourist attraction with museums, tours and traditional crafts. When people check in to hotels in the tourist area, they will now have their pictures taken and uploaded to a central database.

The 30 nominees for Japan's top buzzwords of 2016 were announced Thursday by the Jiyukokuminsha publishing house, covering a variety of new popular terms ranging from the "Shin Godzilla" film to the "Zika fever." Comedian Pikotaro was just in time to make the list with his "PPAP," music video going viral on social media since September. The finalists for the 2016 U-Can Shingo Ryukogo Taisho (2016 U-Can New Words and Buzzwords Awards) included many phrases that highlighted the year's cultural trends. The augmented reality phone app "Pokemon Go," released in Japan in July, of course made the cut. But so did "aruki-sumaho," or literally, "smartphone walking," a term describing the act of walking while looking down at a smartphone screen.

KOBE – A drone crashed into World Heritage-listed Himeji Castle on Thursday following a similar incident last year, local government officials said. The small drone hit two parts of the main Daitenshu donjon and fell to the ground at around 12:45 p.m. Two groups of people preparing to fly drones had been seen at the castle site earlier, but their whereabouts were unknown, the officials said, adding no one was injured in the incident. The Himeji city government in Hyogo Prefecture collected the drone wreckage and reported the matter to police, and is checking whether the 17th century castle, a national treasure and one of the first UNESCO World Heritage sites in the country, was damaged. A guard saw a group of four people between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. and around 10 people between noon and 1 p.m. Both groups packed up their equipment after being warned, according to a city government liaison office at the site.