The military is launching tests on the world's largest unmanned surface vessel. Dubbed the'Sea Hunter', the 132ft ship is designed to travel thousands of miles out at sea without a single crew member on board. Experts say the vessel has the potential to revolutionise not only the military's maritime service but also commercial shipping. The 132ft-long (40-metre) unarmed prototype, dubbed Sea Hunter, is the naval equivalent of Google's self-driving car, designed to cruise on the ocean's surface without a crew. The ship's projected 20 million ( 14.2 million) price tag and its 20,000 ( 14,300) daily operating cost make it relatively inexpensive for the navy The 132ft-long (40-metre) unarmed prototype, dubbed Sea Hunter, is the naval equivalent of Google's self-driving car, designed to cruise on the ocean's surface without a crew.

Network analysis offers a new set of techniques to tackle the persistent and growing problem of complex fraud. Network analysis supplements traditional techniques by providing a mechanism to bridge investigative and analytics methods. Beyond base visualization, network analysis provides a standardized platform for complex fraud pattern storage and retrieval, pattern discovery and detection, statistical analysis, and risk scoring. This article gives an overview of the main challenges and demonstrates a promising approach using a hands-on example. With swelling globalization, advanced digital communication technology, and international financial deregulation, fraud investigators face a daunting battle against increasingly sophisticated fraudsters.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are capable of learning to identify shapes, so "we're on the right track in developing machines with a visual system and vocabulary as flexible and versatile as ours," say KU Leuven researchers. "For the first time, a dramatic increase in performance has been observed on object and scene categorization tasks, quickly reaching performance levels rivaling humans," they note in an open-access paper in PLOS Computational Biology. Categorization accuracy for models created by three DNNs (CaffeNet, VGG-19, and GoggLeNet) for three types of images (color, grayscaled, silhouette). For each type, mean human performance is indicated by a gray horizontal line, with the gray surrounding band depicting 95% confidence intervals. Error bars (vertical black lines) depict 95% confidence intervals.

Over the last two decades, California and the federal government have faced harsh criticism for failing to take stronger actions to stop a highly contagious disease that has killed millions of trees along coastal regions from Big Sur to portions of Oregon. Now, a new computer modeling study suggests that the "sudden oak death" epidemic, which emerged in 1995, has grown too big and is spreading too fast to eradicate statewide. The analysis is the first to integrate knowledge of the pathogen with topography, weather and resources like government budgets to predict the likely effects of various management strategies over such a large area -- in this case, California's 163,707 square miles of land. The results are somewhat hopeful: Because the epidemic's growth rate increases with its size, focusing on restoring and treating small, local forests is now the most practical and cost-effective option for managing the destructive fungus, Phtophthora ramorum. The findings were published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The military is launching tests on the world's largest unmanned surface vessel -- a self-driving, 132-foot ship designed to travel thousands of miles out at sea without a single crew member on board. The so-called "Sea Hunter" has the potential to revolutionize not only the military's maritime service but commercial shipping -- marking the first step toward sending unmanned cargo vessels between countries, according to military officials, who showed off the ship in San Diego on Monday before it was put in the water. The Pentagon's research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, developed the ship along with Virginia-based Leidos. DARPA will test it in conjunction with the Navy over the next two years off California's coast. The tests will largely focus on its ability to react on its own to avoid collisions with seafaring traffic.

Researchers have developed a computer system that can train dogs without the help of a human. The team from North Carolina State University developed a harness which contains an array of sensors to monitor posture and body language. Using a small built-in computer to transmit data, the system can give out rewards for correct behaviour by releasing a treat from a nearby dispenser. The team from North Carolina State University developed a harness which contains an array of sensors to monitor posture and body language. Researchers from North Carolina State University developed a harness which contains an array of sensors to monitor posture and body language.

As expected, the European and Russian space agencies have delayed their next mission to Mars from 2018 to 2020. It is a decision that has been well telegraphed in recent months, with both officials and industry chiefs expressing their doubts that all the hardware could be made ready in time. The mission would see a rover landed on the Red Planet. Capable of drilling up to 2m below the surface, it would search for signs of past or present life. It is the second part of the so-called ExoMars programme. The first part - a satellite to study the atmosphere of the planet - was launched successfully in March and should arrive in October.

Facebook's annual F8 conference is an opportunity for the social media giant to showcase its latest technologies and developments to attendees from the developer community. One of the key announcements made at this year's conference was that Facebook will be developing its Facebook Messenger platform in order to cater to its growing business audience. Facebook Messenger will now allow third parties to interact with Facebook's one billion active users, and vice versa, via'chatbots'. A chatbot is a piece of software that is designed to simulate a conversation with a human user, in the interest of providing information or helping to complete a transaction. Chatbots use natural language processing, a type of artificial intelligence, to respond to commands or requests for information, which is a step-up from previous bots that simply scanned for keywords and sent users the most relevant reply from a database.

This is the leading international symposium where the Ibero-American AI community comes together to share research results and experiences with researchers in Artificial Intelligence from all over the world. The conference will feature a pre-conference program of workshops. The main technical program will consist of invited talks by leading scientists working in the area, presentations of technical papers, as well as system demonstrations. The Proceedings of IBERAMIA 2016 will be published, as in past editions, by Springer in its Lecture Notes in Computer Science/Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence LNCS/LNAI series. IBERAMIA 2016, the XV edition of IBERAMIA, welcomes submissions on mainstream AI topics, as well as novel cross cutting work in related areas.

A fearless Frenchman, Franky Zapata, thinks one day people will be able to ride his hoverboard to pick up bread in the morning (it's a French thing). The jet ski champion on Saturday set a new Guinness World Record for the farthest hoverboard flight – yes, just like in the movies – off the coast of Sausset-les-Pins in the south of France. Mr. Zapata rode the 1,000 horsepower drone, standing on top of it, for 7,388 feet, or more than a mile. He hovered 165 feet above the surface of the water, "trailed by a fleet of boats and jet skis," as Guinness reports. His feat shattered the previous hoverboard travel record of 905 feet and 2 inches, set last year by Canadian inventor Catalin Alexandru Duru.