Heathrow is apparently a magnet for drone pilots fond of flying their devices near planes. According to the latest report from the UK Airprox Board, three planes narrowly missed drones roaming the skies near the airport last year. They're separate incidents from the British Airways plane that struck what authorities believe was an unmanned flying vehicle in April. These particular near-misses happened within a three-week period from October to November 2016. Two of the three were classified as "category A" or the most serious of near-misses.

The artificial intelligence (AI) industry is undergoing unprecedented growth. AI development is finding its way into all areas of business and, increasingly, into creative endeavors. Despite the obvious difficulties, Canva, The Grid, and Autodesk have all tried to market AI design algorithms, with varying degrees of failure. Adobe is understood to be working on AI enhancements to its Creative Cloud product range. Eventually, someone will arrive at a mathematical formula that approximates the creative process.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said he's "not worried at all" about artificial intelligence replacing human workers because it's "50-100 more years" off. In reality, data shows this is already happening -- with an estimated 38 percent of existing U.S. jobs at risk of being turned over to machines by 2030, according to research from PwC. Another study put out by the University of Oxford last year had similar estimates: The researchers found that 47 percent of US jobs were at risk of automation in the next two decades. But despite justified fears of obsolescence in the West, it is actually developing economies that are poised to be hit the hardest by fourth Industrial Revolution, or "Industry 4.0," where machines are networked together in "smart factories" that have little need for human input. This is already evident in China, where the domestic economy exploded in the last two decades thanks to Western companies that moved their manufacturing operations there.

British workers must be trained in how to handle and program robots to prevent their jobs becoming redundant and the country's economy being left behind, one of the UK's leading experts in the field has said.

"This is nice, it tickles me," Kaspar the social robot tells four-year-old Finn as they play together at an autism school north of London. Kaspar, developed by the University of Hertfordshire, also sings song, imitates eating, plays the tambourine and combs his hair during their sessions aimed at helping Finn with his social interaction and communication.

As society enters an era where AI will take life or death decisions--spotting whether moles are cancerous and driving us to work--trusting these machines will become ever more important. The difficulty is that it's almost impossible for us to understand the inner workings of many modern AI systems that perform human-like tasks, such as recognizing real-life objects or understanding speech. The models produced by the deep-learning systems that have powered recent AI breakthroughs are largely opaque, functioning as black boxes that spit out a result but whose operation remains mysterious. This inscrutability stems from the complexity of the large neural networks that underpin deep-learning systems. These brain-inspired networks are interconnected layers of algorithms that feed data into each other and can be trained to carry out specific tasks.

SAP Labs in India is the second largest R&D centre for the company after its centre in Walldorf, Germany and among the three hubs in the SAP Labs network of 19 Labs across 16 countries. Dilipkumar Khandelwal, MD for SAP Labs in India, has a dual role as he is also the EVP and Global Head of Enterprise Cloud Services for SAP. In an exclusive interview with Ayushman Baruah, Khandelwal talks about their India focus, latest technologies, and their emphasis on innovation. Excerpts: What is the SAP Lab's focus here? Over a period of 19 years, SAP Labs India has evolved to become an integral part of SAP's global strategy.

An asteroid as big as a bus came closer to Earth than the moon last night. The object, dubbed 2017 FJ101, zoomed passed within 202,000 miles (325,087 km) of our planet. But the near-Earth asteroid posed no threat to our planet or the moon, scientists said. An asteroid as big as a bus came closer to Earth than the moon last night. According to an asteroid-impact simulator called'Impact Earth!' by Purdue University, if a porous rock asteroid of 111 feet (34 meters) long hit Earth at a 45-degree angle, the simulator found, it would have exploded as an air burst.

How would you feel if, desperate for somewhere to live, you had to bid against other prospective renters? Some people were perturbed when Rentberry - a website that runs rental auctions - launched last year. In fact, in an article its own boss highlights, one tenant rights lawyer described the site as "callous". "We made a huge splash," chief executive Alex Lubinsky recalls. The site allows landlords to set a preferred rent.

Since the events of the Arab Spring, there has been increased interest in using social media to anticipate social unrest. While efforts have been made toward automated unrest prediction, we focus on filtering the vast volume of tweets to identify tweets relevant to unrest, which can be provided to downstream users for further analysis. We train a supervised classifier that is able to label Arabic language tweets as relevant to unrest with high reliability. We examine the relationship between training data size and performance and investigate ways to optimize the model building process while minimizing cost. We also explore how confidence thresholds can be set to achieve desired levels of performance.