Uber has hired a former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) official to join its autonomous vehicle team, Reuters reports. Nat Beuse will be joining the company after serving as the NHTSA's associate administrator of vehicle safety research, and he's doing so at a critical time when Uber is working to mend its safety image following a fatal crash involving one of its self-driving cars. "Uber's approach to self-driving vehicles is an opportunity to make a difference in the safe commercialization of this revolutionary technology, which I've spent a considerable amount of time working with in recent years," Beuse said in a statement. "It's clear to me that the team here is dedicated to prioritizing safety." In March, an autonomous Uber SUV, with a safety driver behind the wheel, struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, causing Uber to suspend all of its self-driving tests across the country.

MIAMI – NASA's first-ever mission designed to visit an asteroid and return a sample of its dust back to Earth arrives Monday at its destination, Bennu, two years after launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The $800 million mission, known as OSIRIS-REx, is targeted for a noon (1700 GMT) rendez-vous with the asteroid, and will use its suite of five science instruments to study the asteroid for the next year and a half. Then, in 2020, it will reach out with its robotic arm and touch the asteroid in what NASA has described as a "gentle high-five," aiming to collect about 2 ounces (60 grams) of material from the asteroid's surface, and return it to Earth for further study. Bennu is a carbon-rich asteroid, chosen from some 500,000 asteroids in the solar system because it orbits close to Earth's path around the sun, is the right size for scientific study, and is one of the oldest asteroids known to NASA. Scientists hope it will reveal more about the early formation of the solar system, as well as how to find precious resources like metals and water in asteroids.

SAP has announced its intent to acquire Qualtrics, but the reason may not be what you think. It's not because either company needs to make a strategy change. It's happening because it's emotionally pleasing, SAP CEO Bill McDermott told customers at the recent SAP Select event in Barcelona. SAP Select is where C-level executives get insight into SAP's strategy.SAP Select "We're acquiring Qualtrics so you can combine your customer's experience data with SAP's operational data to transform how you run your business," he explained to a packed room during his'fireside chat.' "Sometimes you need to make bold moves even if everything is going fine. A big idea is terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. You don't do it because it's easy; you do it because it's hard," he said, quoting John F. Kennedy on his reason for sending the first man to the moon in 1969.

Blockchain may have been the obvious choice when one considers the subcategory of fintech that might gain traction this year, but we should have expected that the rise of a more reliable ledger system would pave the way to the rise of companies that would be able to utilise information gleaned from said ledger. Either through newly collected information or utilising data banks that have been sitting idly in data caches of various big corporations, artificial intelligence (AI) has risen and may pave the way for the future of fintech. McKinsey estimates that AI could potentially create between US$3.5 trillion and US$5.8 trillion in value annually across nine business functions in 19 industries. In Asia, Hong Kong's AI sector is getting a slice of a HK$50 billion of budget 2019, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore has a standing US$27 million AI grant named AIDA furthering the island nation's drive into artificial intelligence. With the world waking up to the scene, we have compiled a list of AI companies to watch that have a stake in fintech.

Artificial Intelligence – specifically machine learning and deep learning – was everywhere in 2018 and don't expect the hype to die down over the next 12 months. The hype will die eventually of course, and AI will become another consistent thread in the tapestry of our lives, just like the internet, electricity, and combustion did in days of yore. But for at least the next year, and probably longer, expect astonishing breakthroughs as well as continued excitement and hyperbole from commentators. This is because expectations of the changes to business and society which AI promises (or in some cases threatens) to bring about go beyond anything dreamed up during previous technological revolutions. AI points towards a future where machines not only do all of the physical work, as they have done since the industrial revolution but also the "thinking" work – planning, strategizing and making decisions.

InSight touched down in a region known as Elysium Planitia.

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission has adopted rules permitting commercial wireless networks to share spectrum with federal incumbents in the 3.5~GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service band. These rules require commercial systems to vacate the band when sensors detect radars operated by the U.S. military; a key example being the SPN-43 air traffic control radar. Such sensors require highly-accurate detection algorithms to meet their operating requirements. In this paper, using a library of over 14,000 3.5~GHz band spectrograms collected by a recent measurement campaign, we investigate the performance of thirteen methods for SPN-43 radar detection. Namely, we compare classical methods from signal detection theory and machine learning to several deep learning architectures. We demonstrate that machine learning algorithms appreciably outperform classical signal detection methods. Specifically, we find that a three-layer convolutional neural network offers a superior tradeoff between accuracy and computational complexity. Last, we apply this three-layer network to generate descriptive statistics for the full 3.5~GHz spectrogram library. Our findings highlight potential weaknesses of classical methods and strengths of modern machine learning algorithms for radar detection in the 3.5~GHz band.

A hard or no-deal Brexit threatens to cause serious harm to Britain's gaming industry, which contributes almost £2bn a year to the economy, a report says. Because the industry works across borders and competes for highly skilled international talent with other high-growth areas such as AI research, it stands to suffer in the event of a harsh Brexit that leaves the nation disconnected from the European economy, the campaign group Games4EU argues. "UK interactive entertainment will be harmed by a hard Brexit … and devastated in a no-deal Brexit," said the report's author, Jas Purewal, a digital entertainment lawyer. "This will make it harder to recruit talent into the UK and over the longer term may aid a brain drain of talent out of the UK and into the EU or elsewhere." Ian Livingstone, the founder of Games Workshop and one of the leading lights of Britain's games industry, said in an interview that the games industry "ticks all the right boxes for the knowledge economy – high skills, high tech, high growth, IP-creating, regional, digital, 80% export in a global market worth $120bn per annum".

Two years and two months after it launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, NASA's $800-million mission to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter will reach a pivotal moment Monday, when the agency's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is slated to rendezvous with its scientific target: a dark, round, carbon-rich asteroid named Bennu. At fewer than 500 meters in diameter, Bennu is a small solar-system body with big scientific potential: Astronomers suspect the asteroid's rocky composition has remained more or less unchanged since it formed some 4.5 billion years ago. Collecting and analyzing a sample of the asteroid could tell scientists a lot about the origins of our solar system, its planets, and the source of organic molecules that may have given rise to life on Earth. But before anyone can sift through a sample from Bennu, NASA must first collect and retrieve it. Doing so will require several major steps, the first of which is slated to kick off Monday, at around 9:00 am PT, when OSIRIS-REx (short for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer) will arrive at Bennu and begin its months-long process of surveying the asteroid's surface.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the frontier of a new techno-tsunami that is transforming the way we live and work. "Historically, an AV researcher might see 10,000 viruses in a career. Today there are over 700,000 per day," said Ryan Permeh, chief scientist, Cylance. Could AI be the solution to solving the big data problem, and bridging the widening workforce gap in the Cyber Security industry? Intelligent machines now have the power to make observations, understand requests, reason, draw data correlations, and derive conclusions.