Ford announced it will plans to start testing its autonomous vehicles on European roads by next year as it ramps up its robot car strategy. According to Digital Trends the U.S. car manufacturing goliath is moving ahead with European testing as it pursues its ambitious strategy to introduce fully autonomous vehicles for ride-hailing by 2021. "It is important that we extend our testing to Europe," said Ford of Europe's manager for Automated Driving Thomas Lukaszewicz. "Rules of the road vary from country to country here, traffic signs and road layouts are different, and drivers are likely to share congested roads with cyclists." Testing will begin at Ford's Engineering Center in Essex, U.K. After this, trials will be expanded to its Germany-based Research & Advanced Engineering facilities in Cologne and Aachen.

I'm going to get around to Watch Dogs 2, but it's going to be by way of a semi-lengthy tangent into Assassin's Creed--particularly, what Assassin's Creed II meant to that now-juggernaut of a series. It's easy to forget, with almost a decade of sequels under our belt, that there was a time when Assassin's Creed could've conceivably died off. After garnering quite a bit of hype, the original Assassin's Creed released in 2007 to middling reviews. "Disappointing," said many, or "Repetitive." It had some great ideas, but was a boring mess of a game.

As in the global survey, we are concerned with platform business models and the design choices that allow these business models to grow. We find the term platform, which is well-established in economic and management literature, offers a more useful and accurate term than some of the terms that have been used such as "share economy companies," "internet companies" or, even more broadly, "tech companies." Network effects are a key characteristic that distinguish platforms from other business models. As more users engage with a platform, the more attractive the platform becomes to potential new users. When more users attract more users, a dynamic is created that in turn triggers a self-reinforcing cycle of growth.

In one corner of John Knoll's office at Lucasfilm stand three racks of imposing black computer servers. The sleek 6-foot-tall towers, complete with mechanical switches and fans, flash blue LEDs. Each bears the insignia of the Galactic Empire from Star Wars and a name--Death Star 748, Death Star 749. As impressive and menacing as the machines appear, they aren't real. They're just faceplates wired with Arduino controllers to make the lights blink and flutter like actual computers. They are, in other words, visual effects--and a look into the mind of Knoll, the 54-year-old chief creative officer of Industrial Light & Magic, Lucasfilm's famed VFX arm. They're what made the movies. They come from the machines that spent roughly 13,000 hours rendering digital effects for the three Star Wars prequels, on which Knoll was a lead effects supervisor. The march of Moore's law turned the server farm that created those movies into scrap. "It took a few weeks," Knoll says, shrugging.

Employees of Datatonic, a Europe-based data analytics consultancy, recently participated in a week-long hackathon ("Data in Motion Hack Week") organized by Traffic for London (TfL), that city's official transport authority. As you might expect, the goals of the hackathon included stimulating developer creativity to overcome, through innovative use of public-cloud infrastructure and open data, high-priority TfL challenges such as limited overall transport capacity, endemic road congestion and air-quality degradation. Most of the other teams chose to focus on data mashups or visualizations to give London residents information for making better route decisions during their commutes. The Datatonic hackers, in contrast, looked to machine learning (ML). By augmenting real-time data visualization with an ML model, they found they could predict areas of congestion during the morning and evening commutes, which currently stand at 30 million daily journeys, and more than 1 million net-new journeys expected by 2018.

A child can learn from a picture book to associate images with sounds, but building a computer vision system that can train itself isn't as simple. Using artificial intelligence techniques, however, researchers at Disney Research and ETH Zurich have designed a system that can automatically learn the association between images and the sounds they could plausibly make. Given a picture of a car, for instance, their system can automatically return the sound of a car engine. A system that knows the sound of a car, a splintering dish, or a slamming door might be used in a number of applications, such as adding sound effects to films, or giving audio feedback to people with visual disabilities, noted Jean-Charles Bazin, associate research scientist at Disney Research. To solve this challenging task, the research team leveraged data from collections of videos. "Videos with audio tracks provide us with a natural way to learn correlations between sounds and images," Bazin said.

Britain may be about to spend just over £800 million ($1 billion) on 26 Predator drones. The deadly drone, with a 79 feet (24 metres) wingspan, can fly for 40 hours at a time, carrying two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles or other munitions. If the deal goes through, 26 Predator unmanned aircraft will be built as early as 2018. Britain is looking to spend £803.92 million (1 billion US dollars) on American Predator drones (pictured), equipment and training. The Predator was first conceived in the early 1990s as an aerial reconnaissance vehicle, and carries cameras and other sensors.

From sashimi to tartare, tuna is in demand year-round. More than half of the world's high-grade fish supply comes from the central and western Pacific Ocean, a region that accounts for a $7 billion market. The popularity of tuna sustains small fishing communities in distant places like Palau. But it also threatens an aquatic population that has been dwindling at an alarming rate. Over the past few years, unregulated fishing practices in tuna-rich Pacific regions have threatened to wipe out rich species like the bluefin and bigeye.

Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn gestures as he arrives at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York. FILE- In this file photo taken on Thursday, Dec. 10, 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin, center right, with retired U.S. Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, center left, and Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, obscured second right, attend an exhibition marking the 10th anniversary of RT (Russia Today) 24-hour English-language TV news channel in Moscow, Russia. Flynn is widely reported Thursday Nov. 17, 2016, to be a potential contender to become national security advisor to U.S. president elect Donald Trump, although his appointment may be controversial. Retired Lt. Gen Michael Flynn walks through the lobby at Trump Tower, Thursday, Nov. 17, 2016, in New York.

We got lucky with the weather in Washington State. It's a clear afternoon with a few scattered clouds, low wind speeds--ideal flying conditions. Mike Dubbury's calm briefing helps, too. Honeywell's senior test pilot talks me through the upcoming trip in the Beechcraft King Air C90, which I'll be piloting. I can't quite relax, though.