GoPro CEO Nick Woodman introduces the foldable Karma drone during a press event in Olympic Valley, Calif. in September. Six days after the release of GoPro's first-ever drone in October, Brian Warholak was itching to get airborne. As an employee at a Chesapeake, Va.-based government contractor, Warholak, 43, had few opportunities during the workweek to fly his new toy. But on Friday, he left his desk early, unpacked his GoPro Karma from its carrying case and set it on a manicured lawn near the company parking lot. In the video of Warholak's aeronautic excursion, the drone lurches upward, pausing for its master to pan the attached camera.

Automated machine learning has become a topic of considerable interest over the past several months. A recent KDnuggets blog competition focused on this topic, and generated a handful of interesting ideas and projects. Of note, our readers were introduced to Auto-sklearn, an automated machine learning pipeline generator, via the competition, and learned more about the project in a follow-up interview with its developers. Prior to that competition, however, KDnuggets readers were introduced to TPOT, "your data science assistant," an open source Python tool that intelligently automates the entire machine learning process. For scikit-learn-compatible datasets, TPOT can automatically optimize a series of feature preprocessors and machine learning models that maximize the dataset's cross-validation accuracy, and outputs the optimal model as Python code leveraging scikit-learn.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is conquering the world. At the center of networking the devices are Big Data, which brings in one of the challenges to IoT. It is becoming increasingly important to process data as early as possible. "The amount of data related to the Internet of Things is enormous – they have to be filtered. A processing directly in the device is already often more efficient. To achieve this, new analytics solutions are needed ", said Dr. Joachim Schaper, the Vice President & Head of AGT International, a pioneer in IoT and Social data management, Big Data integration and advanced analytics.

From left, Dr Michael Tompsett (UK), Professor Eric Fossum (USA) and Professor Nobukazu Teranishi (Japan) are announced as the winners of the 2017 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering at Carlton House Terrace on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2017 in London. Taking a selfie is one of the easiest and quickest things you can do on your smartphone. But as with any landmark invention, it took decades and plenty of graft to develop the camera technology that lives in your pocket. A trio of engineers behind the invention of the image-sensing technology found in billions of smartphones, camera phones, PCs and hospital scanning technology, won the £1 million ($1.3 million) Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering on Wednesday, and spoke about where the image-sensor technology they developed should go in the future. "I feel gobsmacked and very thankful to the Queen Elizabeth prize for this honor," said one of the engineers, Eric Fossum.

SYS-CON Events announced today that SD Times BZ Media has been named "Media Sponsor" of SYS-CON's 20th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY. BZ Media LLC is a high-tech media company that produces technical conferences and expositions, and publishes a magazine, newsletters and websites in the software development, SharePoint, mobile development and commercial UAV markets. All major researchers estimate there will be tens of billions devices - computers, smartphones, tablets, and sensors - connected to the Internet by 2020. This number will continue to grow at a rapid pace for the next several decades. With major technology companies and startups seriously embracing Cloud strategies, now is the perfect time to attend @CloudExpo @ThingsExpo, June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY and October 31 - November 2, 2017, Santa Clara Convention Center, CA.

Angling to pre-empt complaints over Japan's perennial trade surplus with the U.S., Prime Minister Shinzo Abe reportedly plans to propose a sweeping economic cooperation initiative meant to create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. when he meets with President Donald Trump later this month. Abe and Trump are expected to meet on Feb. 10. Major Japanese newspapers cited a draft of the proposal that calls for cooperation on building high-speed trains in the U.S. northeast, Texas and California. Japan would share technology on artificial intelligence, robotics, small-scale nuclear power plants, space and Internet technology. The reports Thursday said the proposed public-private initiative would create several hundred thousand jobs, reports said, and involve $450 billion in new investment.

It's a fact of nature that a single conversation can be interpreted in very different ways. For people with anxiety or conditions like Asperger's, this can make social situations extremely stressful. But what if there was a more objective way to measure and understand our interactions? Researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) say that they've gotten closer to a potential solution: an artificially intelligent wearable system that can predict if a conversation is happy, sad or neutral based on a person's speech patterns and vitals. "Imagine if, at the end of a conversation, you could rewind it and see the moments when the people around you felt the most anxious," says graduate student Tuka Alhanai, who co-authored a related paper with PhD candidate Mohammad Ghassemi that they will present at next week's Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) conference in San Francisco.

Mechanical masterminds have spawned the Bat Bot, a soaring, sweeping and diving robot that may eventually fly circles around other drones. Because it mimics the unique and more flexible way bats fly, this 3-ounce (85-gram) prototype could do a better and safer job getting into disaster sites and scoping out construction zones than bulky drones with spinning rotors, said the three authors of a study released Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics. For example, it would have been ideal for going inside the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan, said study co-author Seth Hutchinson, an engineering professor at the University of Illinois. The bat robot flaps its wings for better aerial maneuvers, glides to save energy and dive bombs when needed. Eventually, the researchers hope to have it perch upside down like the real thing, but that will have to wait for the robot's sequel.

The 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical cleric and U.S. citizen who was killed in a drone strike in 2011, was reportedly among those killed Sunday during a raid in Yemen. The Guardian reported that Nawar al-Awlaki was killed after suffering a gunshot wound to the neck. The girl's grandfather told the paper that he did not believe the girl was targeted. "I don't think this incident was intentional," the former government minister said. He told the paper that the location of the strike was confusing because it was not a hotbed for Al Qaeda, rathera tribal sheikhs fighting the government, which is supported by Iran-backed Houthis.

Artificial Lawyer recently caught up with Michael Kholodenko, co-founder of Seattle, US-based start-up, Binadox, which makes use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to provide a compliance tool for software licences that can prevent costly legal violations. At first you may think this does not sound that world-changing, but sometimes it is the very precise uses of AI technology that end up creating a very successful and useful product for lawyers and legal departments. This would appear to be doubly so, as Bindox points out, because getting your software licences in a mess, or just allowing staff to click'Yes – Accept Terms' can open a Pandora's box of legal problems. Bindadox seeks to meet this problem head on in an automated way. Fundamentally the software seeks to answer two questions: what happens when an employee downloads new software or subscribes to a cloud service (SaaS) and clicks on the little'Yes' box that agrees to the licence terms, with all the legal issues that suddenly connects to?