USA TODAY tech reporter Marco della Cava takes his hands off the wheel of a Tesla Model S sedan while driving down the 280 Freeway north of the Tesla's headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. Pressure is building on Tesla Motors in Europe to stop using the name "Autopilot" to designate its partial self-driving system -- and the concerns could reverberate to the U.S. The issue is that Tesla's designation can encourage drivers to put too much reliance on Autopilot to protect them from crashing and not pay proper attention behind the wheel. Although Tesla says it repeatedly tells drivers that they need to stay in charge, a Tesla owner was killed in May when his car broadsided a tractor-trailer that turned in front of him. The Autopilot system was engaged at the time. Over the weekend, it was reported that Germany's Transport Ministry sent a letter to the California-based automaker telling it to stop using the name in advertising.

MediaGamma has announced the launch of a new Audience Prediction product, which is set to make a major impact on the ad tech market. By applying deep learning to unique data sets, coupled with MediaGamma's unique AI Decision Support Engine, the product is set to provide players in the ecosystem with over 90% certainty about a user's interests and demographic profile. The new product will help people to navigate uncertainty to make better decisions, and a major telecoms company has already signed up. The Audience Prediction product is the latest in a broad portfolio of products created by MediaGamma (http://www.mediagamma.com/), The start-up's world-renown team of data scientists deliver bespoke real time, prediction-based data science solutions focusing on online user behaviour.

More recently, research has suggested that quantum effects could offer similar advantages for the emerging field of quantum machine learning (a subfield of artificial intelligence), leading to more intelligent machines that learn quickly and efficiently by interacting with their environments. In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, Vedran Dunjko and coauthors have added to this research, showing that quantum effects can likely offer significant benefits to machine learning. "The progress in machine learning critically relies on processing power," Dunjko, a physicist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, told Phys.org. "Moreover, the type of underlying information processing that many aspects of machine learning rely upon is particularly amenable to quantum enhancements. As quantum technologies emerge, quantum machine learning will play an instrumental role in our society--including deepening our understanding of climate change, assisting in the development of new medicine and therapies, and also in settings relying on learning through interaction, which is vital in automated cars and smart factories."

Anesthesiologists' jobs look safer than radiologists' jobs. In H. G. Wells's classic The War of the Worlds, the narrator pauses a moment to rue the fact that he didn't react sooner to the arrival of an "intelligence greater than man's"--in his case, Martians landing on earth. Comparing himself to a comfortable dodo in its nest, he imagined those ill-fated birds also dithering as hungry sailors invaded their island: "We will peck them to death tomorrow, my dear." As intelligent technologies take over more and more of the decision-making territory once occupied by humans, are you taking any action? Are you sufficiently aware of the signs that you should?

UK spying agencies illegally stored data about the country's citizens for more than a decade, according to a new judgement. The collection of data on everyone's communications was illegal between 1998 and 2015, according to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the watchdog for intelligence agencies. But spying agencies will be able to continue collecting data on citizens because of small tweaks to the law that allow them to get around the ruling. In recent months, computer specialists of the project MV-IT systems have built a Boeing 737-800 cockpit and reconstructed part of the cabin with 15 seats. The simulator will be officially opened on October 19, 2016 and able to'land' at over 20,000 airfields in different weather conditions and at all times and seasons Customers make a line to buy Sony PlayStation's virtual reality (PSVR) headset at an electronics retail shop in Tokyo People try Alibaba's new payment system, VR Pay, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China An employee checks exchanged Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Note 7 at company's headquarters in Seoul, South Korea In time for Wimbledon, Virgin Active is trialling'The Drone-ovic' – a drone that drops tennis balls from above to achieve that perfect serve at its Northwood club tennis courts An imitation of Facebook apparently set up for North Koreans has already been hacked and sent offline, just days after it was discovered.

This is a follow up to an article Per wrote last year, Machine Learning in a Week, on how he kickstarted his way into machine learning (ml) by devoting five days to the subject. Follow him on Medium and check out his archive. My interest in ml stems back to 2014 when I started reading articles about it on Hacker News. I simply found the idea of teaching machines stuff by looking at data appealing. At the time I wasn't even a professional developer, but a hobby coder who'd done a couple of small projects.

Drones won't replace proper sailors anytime soon because, believe it or not, they need more manpower to operate, a Royal Navy admiral has insisted. Naval drones are "not about reducing the requirement for people", Rear Admiral Paul Bennett told a press briefing attended by El Reg on Friday. Instead, they are for putting people into positions where they add "real value". At present, unmanned systems - drones - require on average something like four or five operators each, we understand. Rather than enabling cuts in manpower, if anything they require ever more personnel aboard ships to operate them; not a good situation to be in when the Navy is already critically short of heads.

Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological hardware – you're using it now. Science and technology seem to be converging, from several directions, on the possibility of similar intelligence in non-biological systems. It is difficult to predict when this might happen, but most artificial intelligence (AI) specialists estimate that it is more likely than not within this century. Freed of biological constraints, such as a brain that needs to fit through a human birth canal (and that runs on the power of a mere 20W lightbulb), non-biological machines might be much more intelligent than we are. What would this mean for us?

That's just one takeaway from a new 48-page report White House AI report it released to policy makers this week, according to Jim Hendler, AI expert, researcher and coauthor of the new book, Social Machines: The Coming Collision of Artificial Intelligence, Social Networking and Humanity. Addressing such concerns, the report says that fears about super-intelligent and evil computers, shouldn't have much impact on current US policy toward AI. "And it gets that part right … we all need to cut past the hype and look at what's really on in AI," he said, "so we can pay attention to the real risks and opposed to the science fiction risks," he said. The things to worry about aren't the frightening HAL 9000 or Skynet scenarios, Hendler says, "but the very real economic, societal ethical and safety concerns AI poses for the foreseeable future." The report does a fair job of addressing such issues overall, he says, "and it is good as far as it goes," Hendler says.

On Monday, the European Schiaparelli lander is descending to the surface of Mars. The 1,272-pound vehicle is expected to touch down on Wednesday after gliding through the Red Planet's thin atmosphere at 13,000 mph, before being slowed by atmospheric drag and then a parachute, before thrusters finally bring it to a soft landing. Schiaparelli, named for the Italian astronomer who made the first crude maps of Mars in the 19th century, will photograph Mars and carry out scientific measurements on its surface for only a few days, until its battery runs dry. Its most critical mission is to test the technology that will allow the European Space Agency (ESA) to send a sophisticated rover to Mars in 2020, this one with the capability to drill and with instruments to study the chemistry of the planet's surface. So far, only the United States has successfully landed operational rovers on Mars: most recently Curiosity, a self-driving cart loaded up with lasers, cameras, and detectors that has been traversing the Red Planet in the name of science since 2012.