The number of incidents in the UK involving drones reported to police has increased more than twelve-fold over the past two years. Complaints, including allegations of snooping, burglary "scoping" exercises, mid-air near-misses and the smuggling of contraband into prisons, rose to almost 10 a day (3,456) last year, compared with 283 in 2014. Last year's figure was almost three times higher than the 2015 total of 1,237 incidents. The true total is likely to be even higher as the data, obtained by the Press Association through freedom of information requests, was not available for all UK forces. Sales of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), available for as as little as £30 and often containing built-in cameras, have risen sharply in recent years but as their popularity has increased so have concerns about their use.

Up to around 30% of existing UK jobs could face automation over the next 15 years, but new AI-related technologies will also boost productivity and generate additional jobs elsewhere in the economy, according to new analysis by PwC in its latest UK Economic Outlook report. This involves looking in detail at the task composition of jobs in different industry sectors and occupations, using machine learning techniques to model the potential impact of AI in the future based on OECD data. The study estimates that the UK (30%) has a lower proportion of existing jobs at potential high risk of automation than the US (38%) and Germany (35%), but more than Japan (21%). PwC's analysis finds the likely impact of automation varies significantly across industry sectors: transportation and storage (56%), manufacturing (46%) and wholesale and retail trade (44%) have the highest proportion of jobs facing potential high risks of automation among the larger sectors. Education and health and social work are estimated to face the lowest risks of automation given the relatively high proportion of tasks that are hard to automate (see table below).

April Fools' Day brings out the pranksters and tomfoolery. Some companies (see: Google) step up their game each year! Here are a few robotics or techie related ones we spotted. Feel free to share in the comments! Google Netherlands can now harness the country's unused windmills to banish rain from the skies: "Google Wind uses Machine Learning to recognise cloud patterns and orchestrate the network of windmills when rain is approaching."

There is nothing surprising about BlackRock's decision to begin replacing human portfolio managers with artificial intelligences, at least not to anyone who has been following the financial industry. And unless you are one of the dozens of human portfolio managers whose jobs are being replaced by AIs, there is nothing wrong with it either -- as long as BlackRock remembers what happened to Knight Capital. In 2012, Knight Capital almost went bankrupt after its new automated trading algorithm made $440 million in bad trades in just 45 minutes. The Knight Capital story is a cautionary tale about what can happen when companies defer too much of their decision making to automated systems, and a textbook example of what cognitive psychologists call automation bias. Automation bias refers to our tendency to stop questioning the results generated by such automated systems once we begin to rely on them.

Canada wants to be an artificial-intelligence hotbed.

The video shows quadrocopters autonomously assembling a rope bridge. This is part of a body of research in aerial construction, a field that addresses the construction of structures with the aid of flying machines. In this work, a rope bridge that can support the crossing of a person is built by quadrocopters, showing for the first time that small flying machines are capable of autonomously realizing load-bearing structures at full-scale and proceeding a step further towards real-world scenarios. Except for the required anchor points at both ends of the structure, the bridge consists exclusively of tensile elements and its connections and links are entirely realized by flying machines. Spanning 7.4 m between two scaffolding structures, the bridge consists of nine rope segments for a total rope length of about 120 m and is composed of different elements, such as knots, links, and braids.

This article is by Featured Blogger Isaac Sacolick from his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation. AI is coming along with artistic impression. There is Paul and e-David that can draw, an AI that can write a Beatles inspired song, followed by an AI that wrote a Christmas song. There's been a lot of work on natural language processing, but natural language understanding remains elusive. It's hard to keep up with all of AI's creative works and how fast AI will go from pattern-based expressions to truly creative ones.

The 30th Annual Workshop of the Swedish Artificial Intelligence Society (SAIS 2017) will take place in Karlskrona, Sweden on May 15-16, 2017. The SAIS workshop provides an ideal forum for contacts among AI researchers and practitioners in Sweden and neighboring countries, as well as for establishing links with related research disciplines and industry.

This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but with a paper clip. In this scenario, the designers of the world's first artificial superintelligence need a way to test their creation. So they program it to do something simple and non-threatening: make paper clips. They set it in motion and wait for the results -- not knowing they've already doomed us all. Before we get into the details of this galaxy-destroying blunder, it's worth looking at what superintelligent A.I. actually is, and when we might expect it.

Last week, on March 23rd, e-Commerce One To One Monaco revealed the vision of Guillaume Bacuvier, VP Advertising Solutions, EMEA at Google. During the keynote organized by Ingrid Fillon, he explained the technical disruption that will impact Google Search, Retail and eCommerce players in the coming years. The Google device (aka Home Assistant) is the web browser of the future as seen in the picture above. Indeed this new technology is able to act like a human personal assistant upon voice requests. The worldwide Search Engine is challenged to think about innovative ways to become more personalized and accurate in facilitating your life like an assistant would do.