In April, a group of Finnish farmers outfitted a spindly black drone with a remote-controlled chainsaw and filmed it decapitating snowmen. They called it "Killer Drone." More formally, it was a DJI S1000. This spring, marine biologists flew a drone over the Sea of Cortez to capture samples of the fluid sprayed from the blowholes of blue whales. It was a DJI Inspire 1.

Welcome to California Inc., the weekly newsletter of the L.A. Times Business section. When trading resumes Tuesday, investors will be watching whether the stock market can retain the momentum it had at the end of last week when U.S. stocks had almost completely recovered from the losses suffered after British citizens voted to leave the European Union. The Bank of England has promised to take steps to boost the British economy, but U.S. investors may be looking close to home when the latest national jobs report is released Friday. Zombies released: Universal Studios Hollywood will open its "The Walking Dead" attraction Monday, one of several new attractions this summer at Southern California theme parks. "Walking Dead" will rely on a combination of animatronics and real-life actors playing zombies who chase and lunge at park visitors.

In a recent project, we found which of 700000 property parcels in Adelaide, Australia, contain swimming pools. We used a combination of crowdsourcing and supervised machine learning in order to harness the inherent ability of humans to identify objects in imagery and the speed of machines, which can perform this task much faster than humans, once trained sufficiently. Our initial approach consisted of training a random forest classifier with a set of crowdsourced labels, then using the machine classifications to present to the crowd only the parcels that were likely to contain swimming pools. Since only a small percentage of the parcels actually contain pools, the efficiency gain of this approach is huge compared to a pure crowdsourcing campaign. At first glance, identifying a pool in a high-resolution satellite image might appear to be a simple task for a human and a machine alike.

When I first spotted Shift Technology with their focus on fraud detection for insurance, I assumed I would find a venture in Israel (which is known for smarts in finding the bad guys in cyberspace, as we outlined when we went to Israel on our Fintech global tour). So I was surprised to find that Shift Technology is a Paris based venture. There is a lot more tech innovation in France than the image of economic sclerosis would lead you to assume. The next thing that jumps out at you is that they recently closed a 10m Series A round in a tough market from a top tier VC (Accel Partners). So they must be doing something right.

With machine learning at the centre of our business platforms, we've been exploring the future of AI. Like many people, I start most mornings digging myself out of an inbox that often feels like more trouble than it's worth thanks to the seemingly infinite amount of newsletters I receive. And although these newsletters cross verticals as varied as marketing, technology, advertising and the agency world, lately each one has a headline that includes artificial intelligence. Not surprisingly, all of us are curious to know how this growing field of technology is going to infiltrate our professional and personal lives. Across every industry, people are afraid that AI is going to steal jobs.

Founded in 2008, Rocket Fuel Inc (NASDAQ:FUEL) is a marketing company that primarily offers a new approach to promoting products and services via its innovative programmatic marketing platform. Rocket Fuel Inc's unique platform utilizes big data and artificial intelligence algorithms to improve the marketing ROI. Rocket Fuel Inc's proprietary Moment Scoring offers a fully data driven marketing approach that aids the programmatic marketing decisions across channels, devices, and objectives for agencies and marketers. Rocket Fuel Inc's platform offers their clients various marketing services, including Data Management Platform (DMP) and Demand Side Platform (DSP). Customers can use these innovative tools themselves, via their own marketing agencies. Rocket Fuel Inc also offers a managed service themselves.

Thanks to the rise of mobile texting and messaging apps, 'chatbots' or "chatter robots" are causing a stir in the world of customer service. Business Insider UK[i] recently wrote that the most powerful tech companies think chatbots are the next best thing since the iPhone. In fact Facebook now allows businesses to deliver automated customer support, e-commerce guidance, content and interactive experiences through chatbots on Facebook Messenger. The company is rumoured to be launching a "bot store" – a move which could be as revolutionary for technology as when Apple launched the App Store. Chatbots are computer programmes that mimic conversations with people using artificial intelligence.

Blackboard Inc. and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a collaborative agreement for IBM to manage Blackboard's datacenters and cloud infrastructure. The two companies will also work together to develop innovative educational solutions, taking advantage of IBM Watson's cognitive computing technology and Blackboard's broad capabilities suite. Under the agreement, IBM will manage much of Blackboard's technology infrastructure, including the company's 28 global data centers and its existing public cloud footprint. IBM will also provide support for Blackboard's expanding use of the public cloud. Blackboard will leverage IBM's expertise and software to offer customers some of the most flexible, reliable, security-rich and resilient environments available.

At WebRTC Argentina we covered a number of topics, including an introduction to WebRTC with coding demonstrations, demos of WebRTC use cases, and design/UX for WebRTC. We concluded the mini-conference with this talk, where we wanted to stretch people's minds a little bit about WebRTC. WebRTC is not simply about 1-1 video chats or business conferencing tools. WebRTC can be one part of larger technological change in our society, and in this talk we give updates on WebRTC in the short term as well as one vision for how WebRTC and Artificial Intelligence may intersect in the future. You can see the complete presentation below, and we've included the transcript below the video.

As we approach the celebration of the 4th of July, I thought it might be interesting to share a request for information made to the US Federal Register and a post on the Whitehouse blog. The US government is interested in what Artificial Intelligence might mean to the people of the United States, and how we could learn about it more. To find out, they are asking for comments by July 22, 2016. Ed Felton, Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer wrote the following blog post about what the government would like to learn: How to Prepare for the Future of Artificial Intelligence. Broadly, OSTP is interested in developing a view of AI across all sectors for the purpose of recommending directions for research and determining challenges and opportunities in this field.