SANAA, YEMEN – Yemeni security officials say a suspected U.S. drone has killed three alleged al-Qaida fighters in an airstrike in the central Shabwa province. The officials said Monday that the overnight attack hit the men's vehicle as they were traveling near the town of Haban. The officials also say that in the onetime al-Qaida stronghold of Mukalla, on Yemen's southern coast, Emirati and other troops from the Saudi-led coalition who are primarily fighting Yemen's anti-government Shiite rebels conducted raids on homes seeking al-Qaida operatives. They say some 150 were detained. Activists close to al-Qaida say the men were being tortured in prisons run by Emirati forces.

Despite the increasing amount of time people spend on their smartphones, the app market is in a lull. Facebook, Snapchat, Uber and other big-name apps get heaps of downloads. But most everyone else is seeing demand level off. That's why appmakers are excited about Apple's expected announcement at its Worldwide Developer's Conference on Monday that apps may integrate with virtual assistant Siri. This would allow developers to build software allowing iPhone users to, say, talk to Siri to request a ride, order their meals or shop.

Although it tends look to the sky, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) came back down to Earth to develop RoBattle, an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that may soon be tasked with the type of risky missions typically assigned to foot soldiers. IAI's UGV is built to be maneuverable, dynamic, and tough. Six wheels with independent suspension enable RoBattle to scale obstacles, such as rubble and small walls, to access areas that would typically be out of reach for other robots. A modular robotic kit allows the machine to be modified and adapted with remote vehicle control, navigation, and real time mapping abilities, depending on its operational needs. RoBattle can operate independently or as support unit for convoy protection, decoy, ambush, attack, intelligence, surveillance, or armed reconnaissance, according to IAI.

Artificial intelligence is one of the most popular topics in IT world. Famous inventors and celebrities Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak are concerned about AI researches and assume that its creation is a real threat to humanity. In fact, science fiction and Hollywood films created many misconceptions about AI. Technology blog Gizmodo decided to penetrate into the topic and find out if AI really poses a danger to us. So what makes us imagine Skynet destroying our planet and can AI trigger unemployment? On the other hand, can it be our way to prosperity?

China's'Doctor Frankenstein' has revealed he is building a team for the world's first full body transplant on a living human being and will operate'when we are ready'. In an interview with the New York Times, Dr Xiaoping Ren spoke about the details for his plan, which involves removing two heads from two bodies and connecting the donor body to the recipient's head. A metal plate would be inserted to stabilise the new neck, while the spinal cord nerve endings would be saturated in a gluelike substance to help regrowth. Earlier this year, Dr Ren shocked the world when it was revealed his team had carried out a successful head transplant on a monkey – and that it lived for 20 hours. Dr Xiaoping Ren has revealed he is building a team for the world's first head transplant on a live human being Although compared to Dr Frankenstein by China's own state media, Dr Ren, who assisted in the first hand transplant in the US in 1999, remains unapologetic in his ambition.

Domestic companies are coming up with a series of new services that leverage the latest in drone technology. MicroAd Inc., a Tokyo-based online advertising company, has unveiled a service called Sky Magic to produce sound-and-light extravaganzas. Drones illuminated with LED lights can project logos, words, shapes and pictures in spaces above large-scale events. At its roll-out event in Chiba in April, five drones flew in a formation depicting an inverted image of Mt. Fuji as a live shamisen performance was held in front of an audience of some 1,300.

Siri is expected to expand beyond the iPhone and iPad to third-party apps and Macs, a move designed to hike the usefulness and IQ of Apple's personal digital assistant. Analysts who cover Apple predict an expanded role for Siri will be one highlight of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, which begins Monday in San Francisco. Apple did not respond to a request for comment. The Cupertino, California company has a big job ahead. Even though Siri was first to bat among digital assistants, it has limited utility and risks putting Apple in second-tier status when it comes to the make-or-break technology of the moment: artificial intelligence and natural-language learning that can simulate human conversation.

Since making its first public appearance last October, Sharp Corp.'s humanoid robot smartphone, RoBoHoN, has created a lot of buzz. But the eye-catching 19.5-cm-tall robot, which can walk, talk and dance but still works as a phone, has also left many people wondering why a phone and a robot should be bundled together, and what Sharp's long game is. As it turns out, Sharp is dead serious about the project. Officials say the firm thinks a robot phone could be the next big thing -- in fact, as big as the smartphone boom. The company is even envisioning a science fiction-like future in which everyone will carry his or her own robot phone that doubles as a personal assistant.

The estimation of class prevalence, i.e., the fraction of a population that belongs to a certain class, is a very useful tool in data analytics and learning, and finds applications in many domains such as sentiment analysis, epidemiology, etc. For example, in sentiment analysis, the objective is often not to estimate whether a specific text conveys a positive or a negative sentiment, but rather estimate the overall distribution of positive and negative sentiments during an event window. A popular way of performing the above task, often dubbed quantification, is to use supervised learning to train a prevalence estimator from labeled data. Contemporary literature cites several performance measures used to measure the success of such prevalence estimators. In this paper we propose the first online stochastic algorithms for directly optimizing these quantification-specific performance measures. We also provide algorithms that optimize hybrid performance measures that seek to balance quantification and classification performance. Our algorithms present a significant advancement in the theory of multivariate optimization and we show, by a rigorous theoretical analysis, that they exhibit optimal convergence. We also report extensive experiments on benchmark and real data sets which demonstrate that our methods significantly outperform existing optimization techniques used for these performance measures.

In his new book, The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling, Adam Kucharski details how trying to understand dice games led one mathematician to develop probability theory, how one of the first wearable computers was designed to covertly predict the fall of a roulette ball, and how poker-playing bots are advancing more quickly than we think. As he shows, science, mathematics, and gambling have long been intertwined, and thanks to advances in big data and machine learning, our sense of what's predictable is growing, crowding out the spaces formerly ruled by chance. At the same time, though, we're letting more of our lives be influenced by algorithms, bits of code whose effects are beyond our full understanding. As in so many other areas, the creations are outpacing their creators. In the lightly edited interview below, Kucharski explains how we got here, what poker-playing bots can show us about being human, and what comes next. In the book you call gamblers the godfathers of probability theory, noting that it's a newer area of mathematics than we might expect.