Terminator, the 1984 film about a time-traveling robot assassin, looms large in the popular understanding of drones. At the core of the Terminator universe is SkyNet, an artificial intelligence that nukes humanity to save itself. I only mention Terminator as a preface to this, weird and true thing about the year 2016: there is a new company making anti-drone weapons, and it calls itself Skynet. Canonically, the name makes no sense: Skynet was a system of robots hunting people, so a stand-alone anti-drone rifle to protect people from robots should really be named something more like John Connor. As for the product itself: the Skynet rifle weighs roughly 12.5 pounds, not counting its backpack power supply.

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it's a little strange how I've ended up now--someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler's equation. It's hard to believe I've flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering. One day, one of my students asked me how I did it--how I changed my brain. I wanted to answer Hell--with lots of difficulty! In fact, I didn't start studying remedial math until I left the Army at age 26. If there were a textbook example of the potential for adult neural plasticity, I'd be Exhibit A. Learning math and then science as an adult gave me passage into the empowering world of engineering.

It starts without warning--or rather, the warnings are there, but your ability to detect them exists only in hindsight. First you're sitting in the car with your son, then he tells you: "I cannot find my old self again." You think, well, teenagers say dramatic stuff like this all the time. Then he's refusing to do his homework, he's writing suicidal messages on the wall in black magic marker, he's trying to cut himself with a razor blade. You sit down with him; you two have a long talk. A week later, he runs home from a nighttime gathering at his friend's apartment, he's bursting through the front door, shouting about how his friends are trying to kill him. He spends the night crouching in his mother's old room, clutching a stuffed animal to his chest. He's 17 years old at this point, and you are his father, Dick Russell, a traveler, a former staff reporter for Sports Illustrated, but a father first and foremost.

Bater Makhabel (LinkedIn: BATERMJ and GitHub: BATERMJ) is a system architect living across Beijing, Shanghai, and Urumqi in China. He received his master's and bachelor's degrees in computer science and technology from Tsinghua University between the years 1995 and 2002. He has extensive experience in machine learning, data mining, natural language processing (NLP), distributed systems, embedded systems, the Web, mobile, algorithms, and applied mathematics and statistics. He has worked for clients such as CA Technologies, META4ALL, and EDA (a subcompany of DFR). He also has experience in setting up start-ups in China.

Large volume of networked streaming event data are becoming increasingly available in a wide variety of applications, such as social network analysis, Internet traffic monitoring and healthcare analytics. Streaming event data are discrete observation occurred in continuous time, and the precise time interval between two events carries a great deal of information about the dynamics of the underlying systems. How to promptly detect changes in these dynamic systems using these streaming event data? In this paper, we propose a novel change-point detection framework for multi-dimensional event data over networks. We cast the problem into sequential hypothesis test, and derive the likelihood ratios for point processes, which are computed efficiently via an EM-like algorithm that is parameter-free and can be computed in a distributed fashion. We derive a highly accurate theoretical characterization of the false-alarm-rate, and show that it can achieve weak signal detection by aggregating local statistics over time and networks. Finally, we demonstrate the good performance of our algorithm on numerical examples and real-world datasets from twitter and Memetracker.

It looks like a Star Trek Bird of Prey, and acts like a drone that terrorists cannot escape: A new military aircraft that's powered by the sun and can conduct missions without landing for 45 days. Airbus Defence and Space calls the new drone the High Altitude Pseudo Satellite (HAPS), but it's been dubbed the Zephyr. It has satellite-type capabilities like extreme surveillance-- but is on demand with the flexibility and versatility of an unmanned aircraft. Unlike a satellite, the Zephyr can be landed, modified with alternative tech, and quickly re-launched to provide different capabilities as required. The Zephyr could fly without landing to provide the military with non-stop high- resolution imagery for a remarkable month and a half, and it could give teams accuracy down to 6-inch resolution. Flying at about 12.5 miles high at a fixed location, Zephyr can see over 250 miles to the horizon and provide imagery in excess of 386 square miles.

Yusuke Sugomori is a creative technologist with a background in information engineering. When he was a graduate school student, he cofounded Gunosy with his colleagues, which uses machine learning and web-based data mining to determine individual users' respective interests and provides an optimized selection of daily news items based on those interests. This algorithm-based app has gained a lot of attention since its release and now has more than 10 million users. The company has been listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange since April 28, 2015. In 2013, Sugomori joined Dentsu, the largest advertising company in Japan based on nonconsolidated gross profit in 2014, where he carried out a wide variety of digital advertising, smartphone app development, and big data analysis.

Two months after auto tech firm Mobileye's partnership with Tesla Motors Inc. dissolved, a Mobileye executive slammed Tesla, saying the design of the automaker's Autopilot semi-autonomous driving feature was "pushing the envelope in terms of safety." Amnon Shashua, chairman and chief technology officer for Jerusalem-based Mobileye, told Reuters that Tesla's Autopilot is "not designed to cover all possible crash situations in a safe manner." The report was published Wednesday after markets closed. Mobileye confirmed to The Times on Thursday morning that Shashua made the comments quoted by Reuters, but it would not comment further. Mobileye develops chips and software for advanced collision-avoidance systems and had worked with Tesla on its Autopilot feature.

According to Nikkei.net, the Riken Center for advanced integrated intelligence research will open near Tokyo railway station and involve 100 researchers from companies including Toyota and NEC. The aim is to create AI that will match the intelligence of an average human being by the middle of this century. While previous attempts to create viable AI have foundered, the wire reports that high capacity computing, processing of big data and automated processing techniques will make it a viable technology. It's reported that an IBM Watson cognitive system can help diagnose treatment for people with cancer that are better than human doctors can devise.

NEW DELHI: Japanese two wheeler manufacturer Kawasaki Heavy Industries is going to develop next-generation motorcycles with ICT (Information and Communications Technology), including AI (Artificial Intelligence). The motorcycles being developed use the Emotion Generation Engine and Natural Language Dialogue System, which is enables man and machine to communicate by imbuing the machine with lifelike feelings and technology capable of recognising emotion by the sound of the speaker's voice. Informing about how the system will function, the company said that "Accessing Kawasaki's bank of analytical chassis and running data stored on a cloud-based data center or referencing the vast amount of information available on the Internet, the system will be able to offer the rider pertinent hints for enhanced riding enjoyment, or relay safety-related or reassuring advice as the situation dictates." The company further said that "Through repeated interaction, this kind of communication between rider and motorcycle will allow the motorcycle to develop a unique personality reflecting the individual idiosyncrasies of the rider. With mutual trust established, both rider and motorcycle will be able to improve and grow, offering an all-new kind of enjoyment."