A fatal accident that occurred while Tesla's Autopilot technology was engaged may have a significant bearing on the future of automated driving. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said yesterday that it is investigating the accident, which occurred near Williston, Florida, last month when a Model S crashed into a trailer making a left turn in front of it. NHTSA's investigation does not mean the agency believes the technology contributed to the accident or is defective. But the incident will inevitably raise questions about the performance of the technology and the way drivers treat it. The auto industry will certainly watch closely to see how it may shape regulations and influence the public perception of automated-driving technology.

The Obama administration announced on Friday that the United States has killed a much lower number of civilians in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia than have been previously estimated by outside researchers. A report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said that airstrikes (overwhelmingly by drones) killed between 64 and 116 civilians in those four countries from 2009 to 2015. The numbers excluded "areas of active hostilities" such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. The report is the first time the Obama administration has provided official estimates of the death toll in the secretive drone war. President Barack Obama also issued an executive order on Friday that requires the government to deliver an unclassified report on drone strikes each year that includes the number of combatants and non-combatants killed.

The White House has said that up to 116 civilians have been killed by drone and other US strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya since Barack Obama took office in 2009, a figure that has been slammed by watchdog groups as an undercount, which suggests that the real figure could be as high as 1,100. Published by the Director of National Intelligence on Friday, the report said that between January 20, 2009, and December 31, 2015, the US carried out 473 strikes, which killed up to 2,581 "combatants" and anywhere from 64 to 116 civilians. The civilian casualties disclosed in the report were from nations not recognised as "battlefields," and did not reflect US air attacks in "areas of active hostilities" such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. Watchdog and rights groups have long claimed that the US administration does not know how many civilians it has killed and does not do enough to prevent civilian casualties when carrying out counterterrorism operations. Reprieve, an international human rights organisation, said the US government's previous statements about the drone programme have proven to be false by its own internal documents. It said the Obama administration has "shifted the goalposts on what counts as a'civilian' to such an extent that any estimate may be far removed from reality".

The White House said Friday that as many as 116 civilians have been killed by drone and other U.S. strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. In its first public assessment, the administration said the death toll was between 64 and 116 civilians between January 2009 and December 2015, which is significantly lower than civilian casualty estimates by various human rights groups. The number of combatants killed in those 473 strikes was between 2,372 and 2,581. Seeking to create a precedent for his successor, Obama signed an executive order that details U.S. policies to limit civilian casualties and makes protecting civilians a central element in U.S. military operations planning. The order requires an annual release of casualty estimates.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your unibrowed Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. We don't usually lead Video Friday with a long talk, but Nic Radford was at Campus Party in Mexico to talk about Valkyrie and the DRC. It's a tremendous talk, with lots of candid detail and video that we've never seen before.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House said Friday that as many as 116 civilians have been killed by drone and other U.S. strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Africa since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. In its first public assessment, the administration said the death toll was between 64 and 116 civilians between January 2009 and December 2015, which is significantly lower than civilian casualty estimates by various human rights groups. The number of combatants killed in those 473 strikes was between 2,372 and 2,581. Seeking to create a precedent for his successor, Obama signed an executive order that details U.S. policies to limit civilian casualties and makes protecting civilians a central element in U.S. military operations planning. The order requires an annual release of casualty estimates.

Between 64 and 116 civilians have died in U.S. drone strikes against foreign terrorists in places like Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa, according to new numbers released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Strikes in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan were not included in these newly released numbers, as the Department of Defense has its own procedures for releasing such information in active U.S. war zones, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Friday, shortly before the information's release.

U.S. transportation authorities are investigating the deadly collision of a Tesla Model S car. And many reports say the fatal crash has heightened concern about self-driving cars. As NPR's Sonari Glinton points out, what Tesla's Model S has are self-driving features, autonomous elements meant to assist drivers rather than replace them. Virtually all major car and tech companies are pursuing self-driving technology as the future of transportation. But Tesla and Google are the earliest innovators, taking very different approaches.

More than 1.5 billion people use Facebook. And only half speak English. The rest speak so many dozens of other languages, effectively silo'd off from the English speakers and, in many cases, from each other. If you stumble onto a Facebook post in a foreign language, Facebook lets you instantly translate it--in a semi-effective way. And beginning today, millions of people will have the option of instantly translating their own posts into any one of 44 other languages, so that they will automatically show up in your News Feed in your native tongue.

Walk into a conference room on the 16th floor of an Uber Engineering building on Market Street in San Francisco. You enter an intense discussion around a table with software and data engineers, data scientists, modeling experts, and even a product manager. How to determine a fraudulent user. Fraud prevention is one of the fastest growing areas of research and development at Uber. As our platform has grown, so has the international underworld that tries to undermine it.