BMW, Intel and computer vision firm Mobileye have signed a deal to develop autonomous vehicles. The three firms will collaborate on the systems needed to make cars that can navigate without any help from a human driver. The vehicles will be capable of driving safely along major roads as well as in suburban and inner city areas. BMW said it hoped the collaboration would mean it could put robot cars into production by 2021. The research partnership was announced on the day when US officials begin an investigation into a fatal car crash involving a Tesla Model S, to which self-driving technology could have contributed.

Picture the scenario: you've been asked to prepare an analysis on whether you have the best people in the right roles in your company and identify where there may be knowledge gaps within the organisation. If your company has offices in New York, London, Berlin and Singapore, that's a huge HR challenge. But what if an artificial intelligence tool can produce in minutes a detailed "knowledge map" based on analysis of employee skills and interests to pinpoint gaps where new hires are needed to fill those holes. British companies are now being offered such "brain technology". Computer software, called Starmind, uses machine learning to understand queries – even anonymously – then source answers from previous staff conversations on a subject or track down experts within the company who are able to help.

WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO – Tesla Motors Inc. says the self-driving feature suspected of being involved in a fatal crash on May 7 is experimental, yet it's been installed on all 70,000 of its cars since October 2014. For groups that have lobbied for stronger safety rules, that's precisely what's wrong with U.S. regulators' increasingly anything-goes approach. "Allowing automakers to do their own testing, with no specific guidelines, means consumers are going to be the guinea pigs in this experiment," said Jackie Gillan, president for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a longtime Washington consumer lobbyist who has helped shape numerous auto-technology mandates. "This is going to happen again and again and again." Tesla's use of a technology still in development, while common in its Silicon Valley home, contrasts with the cautious method of General Motors Co. and other automakers that have restricted their semi-autonomous cars to test tracks and professional drivers.

The problem of how to defend a country changes when your attacker isn't acting rationally. Terrorists put their causes above their home country and don't necessarily fear death or retaliation. So shortly after 9/11, Milind Tambe, a professor of computer science and engineering at USC, proposed a radical new style of protection: Why not use artificial intelligence to make your own targets harder to attack? By matching predictive algorithms with machine learning and some massive processing power, you could create a computer program capable of figuring out how to deploy limited security forces around sensitive places most effectively. The trick would be for those schedules or formations to remain unpredictable.

A burger-flipping robot invasion is headed to the Bay Area. A few years ago, startup Momentum Machines unveiled a robot that could churn out 400 burgers an hour, and now, Tech Insider reports, the company is creating a restaurant concept around it. The robot can slice toppings, grill a patty, assemble, and bag the burger without any help from humans. A Craigslist job ad says the restaurant will open at 680 Folsom St. in the SoMa (South of Market) neighborhood; the ad doesn't specifically mention robots, instead reading, "This location will feature the world-premiere of our proprietary and remarkable new advances in technology that enable the automatic creation of impossibly delicious burgers at prices everyone can afford." The restaurant will still need to employ a human for tasks such as payroll and taking out the trash, however.

United States President Barack Obama's administration said Friday that up to 116 civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and other countries where America is not at war. Obama's goal for the release of the numbers is reportedly to create greater transparency about the actions of the U.S. military and CIA in counterterrorism measures against militants plotting attacks against the United States. The announcement covered strikes from the day Obama took office in January 2009 through Dec. 31, 2015. The report by National Intelligence Director James Clapper said the U.S. conducted 473 counterterror strikes, including those by unmanned drones, in this period. Even though the report does not mention the countries where the attacks were carried out, the Associated Press (AP) reported that the Defense Department and CIA have pursued targets in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya.

The legal media has lately had a mania for tech headlines. Many commentators claim that tech, especially artificial intelligence (AI), will do something to Big Law. Tech more likely will do something in it: incremental change. I start with the case against disruption, then look at four headline-grabbing technologies: AI, Bots, Big Data, and Blockchain. By the late 1980s, a few law firms had most of their lawyers using PCs.

WASHINGTON – The United States on Friday lifted the lid on one of the most controversial tactics of President Barack Obama's secretive counterterrorism campaign, detailing for the first time the number killed in airstrikes in countries like Pakistan and Libya. The White House also released an executive order outlining the steps that should be taken to reduce civilian casualties in America's battle against violent extremism. In a much-anticipated report, National Intelligence Director James Clapper provided fatality estimates for the 473 strikes between 2009 and 2015 that were conducted outside America's principal war zones in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. He said between 64 and 116 civilians were killed, and up to 2,581 combatants. Such attacks are typically conducted via drones, though manned warplanes and missiles have also been used.

The World Economic Forum has put together a list of the top 10 emerging technologies that will change our lives. The list includes nanosensors that will circulate through the human body, a battery that will be able to power an entire town and socially aware artificial intelligence that will track our finances and health. These are not far-flung visions, according to the forum. They are technologies that are on the cusp of having a meaningful impact. "Horizon scanning for emerging technologies is crucial to staying abreast of developments that can radically transform our world, enabling timely expert analysis in preparation for these disruptors," said Bernard Meyerson, chairman of the World Economic Forum council that compiled the list of the top 10 emerging technologies in 2016.

This letter presents the sparse vector signal detection from one bit compressed sensing measurements, in contrast to the previous works which deal with scalar signal detection. In this letter, available results are extended to the vector case and the GLRT detector and the optimal quantizer design are obtained. Also, a double-detector scheme is introduced in which a sensor level threshold detector is integrated into network level GLRT to improve the performance. The detection criteria of oracle and clairvoyant detectors are also derived. Simulation results show that with careful design of the threshold detector, the overall detection performance of double-detector scheme would be better than the sign-GLRT proposed in [1] and close to oracle and clairvoyant detectors. Also, the proposed detector is applied to spectrum sensing and the results are near the well known energy detector which uses the real valued data while the proposed detector only uses the sign of the data.