I look down and start gliding toward a dilapidated skate park below. Once I'm near the ground I pull my nose up and look level with the horizon. Spotting two trees, I race toward them, pass between them, then turn on a dime, skirting some shipping containers on my left. It's like every dream I've ever had about flying, but faster. I take off a pair of video goggles, and I see the shipping containers come into focus, this time directly in front of me, as my eyes adjust to the sunlight. This is my third "First Person View" flight with the Draco drone, and it's more exciting every time.

Join IBM November 1 at 21st Cloud Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA, and learn how IBM Watson can bring cognitive services and AI to intelligent, unmanned systems. In this session we will build a chatbot powered by IBM Watson, connect it to third-party APIs, and share best practices of chatbots co-existing with humans. Cognitive analysis impacts today's systems with unparalleled ability that were previously available only to manned, back-end operations. Thanks to cloud processing, IBM Watson can bring cognitive services and AI to intelligent, unmanned systems. Imagine a robot vacuum that becomes your personal assistant that knows everything and can respond to your emotions and verbal commands!

The increasing number of satellites and advancements in climate models has improved the weather forecasting over the last many years. Weather forecasting, is not a perfect science; it still needs a lot of improvement in terms of timing, location, and intensity of forecast weather. The same goes for analyzing climate change. And, the prime reason behind this is lack of data to make more accurate forecasts. Global warming researchers face lack of important data.

NEW YORK – The foreign ministers of Japan, the United States and India agreed Monday in New York to work together to develop strategically important ports and other infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific region, apparently seeking to balance China's bid to strengthen its regional influence. Foreign Minister Taro Kono said he, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj "completely agreed to coordinate with each other toward the realization of a free and open Indo-Pacific." They agreed to work to spread and establish their shared basic values of the rule of law and the freedom of navigation and overflight in the region, Foreign Ministry officials said. The ministers affirmed that they will strengthen connectivity in the region through investment in infrastructure and work together to assist strategically important coastal nations in the region with maritime capacity-building, centering on key ports. According to the U.S. State Department, the ministers "discussed the importance of a free and open Indo-Pacific region underpinned by a resilient, rules-based architecture that enables every nation to prosper."

As datasets capturing human choices grow in richness and scale--particularly in online domains--there is an increasing need for choice models that escape traditional choice-theoretic axioms such as regularity, stochastic transitivity, and Luce's choice axiom. In this work we introduce the Pairwise Choice Markov Chain (PCMC) model of discrete choice, an inferentially tractable model that does not assume any of the above axioms while still satisfying the foundational axiom of uniform expansion, a considerably weaker assumption than Luce's choice axiom. We show that the PCMC model significantly outperforms both the Multinomial Logit (MNL) model and a mixed MNL (MMNL) model in prediction tasks on both synthetic and empirical datasets known to exhibit violations of Luce's axiom. Our analysis also synthesizes several recent observations connecting the Multinomial Logit model and Markov chains; the PCMC model retains the Multinomial Logit model as a special case.

Snuffling through the underbrush, the shaggy little creature wanders through the sylvan night, sticking its nose in one place, then another, seeking the aroma of its soft-bodied dinner. The forest is dark and the pixie's eyesight poor, but long whiskers and a keen sense of smell allow it to get around. Threatened, it takes off at breakneck speed, barreling through the vegetation, ducking through holes, soon lost from sight. Many animals spend their nights cruising the forest floor, searching for small prey in a similar fashion: Hedgehogs, shrews, weasels, to name a few, and bigger ones, too, like opossums and even pigs. The world is full of them. But this one is different. All the others are hairy. This one's pelage is also soft, made up of millions of thin strands. All the others move about on four legs and bear live young. And as the male calls, he identifies himself: "Kee-wee, kee-wee."

Deep sea explorers sent a drone to the ocean floor to beam back stunning images of the USS Indianapolis, a naval gunship that lies three miles beneath the surface of the Philippine Sea 72 years ago, in a dramatic live broadcast on Wednesday. Findings from the footage enabled experts to piece together the final moments of the WWII ship, which was discovered by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen last month. The ship was sunk by a Japanese torpedo in the final days of World War Two, more than 18,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, the Navy said. From the new drone footage, researchers have concluded that two Japanese torpedoes hit the ship, one of them striking an area near a chamber with crew members that likely would have died immediately upon impact. Researchers also discovered guns, torpedo remnants and parts of aircraft that were preserved thanks to the extremely cold temperatures at the bottom of the sea.

During the past several years, in my capacity as deputy director and then acting director of national intelligence, I have participated in National Security Council meetings about immediate challenges, from North Korea's aggressive missile and nuclear development programs to Russian military operations along its borders, and from ISIS threats to the homeland to Chinese activity in the South China Sea. Michael Dempsey is the national intelligence fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former acting director of national intelligence. The author is an employee of the US government on a sponsored fellowship, but all opinions are those of the author and do not reflect the official views of the US government. Even in instances in which the threat the US confronted was especially complex, there was at least a familiar policy playbook of options, as well as a shared understanding of how to approach these crises. However, in today's dynamic security landscape, it's fair to ask whether US policymakers might soon be forced to grapple with a new series of threats for which we have no common understanding or carefully considered counter-measures.

With the release of Core ML by Apple at WWDC 2017, iOS, macOS, watchOS and tvOS developers can now easily integrate a machine learning model into their app. This enables developers to bring intelligent new features to users with just a few lines of code. Core ML makes machine learning more accessible to mobile developers. It also enables rapid prototyping and the use of different sensors (like the camera, GPS, etc.) to create more powerful apps than ever. Members of the MXNet community, including contributors from Apple and Amazon Web Services (AWS), have collaborated to produce a tool that converts machine learning models built using MXNet to Core ML format.

Alex takes us to Houston, where Hurricane Harvey wrecked as many as a million cars. Some Houstonians will rent, others will head to car dealerships. But roughly 15 percent of Texas car owners don't have insurance, making it difficult for the most vulnerable to replace a waterlogged vehicle. So maybe it's time to push the city government to invest in public transit. Jack was in Las Vegas this week, where Nissan unveiled its 2018 Leaf, the second generation of the first mainstream EV.