The UK government could ban kids from owning drones weighing over 250g (0.55 lbs), under rules drawn up by the Department for Transport. The proposals suggest children could fly a heavier drone under adult supervision if someone older owns and has registered it. The age limit could be pegged at 18, partly because that's the minimum age for most insurance policies. Officials are consulting on a number of drone-related proposals, with a view to publishing a Drones Bill later this year. Proposals that are being considered include online safety tests and required registration for drones weighing over 250g -- that falls in line with FAA registration rules in the US.

Arati Prabhakar of Stanford delivers lecture at AAAS Science & Technology Policy Forum. The U.S. scientific research and development enterprise stands at a critical juncture that requires the convergence of basic research and commercial applications to more quickly deliver benefits of nextgeneration technological innovation, said Arati Prabhakar in a lecture at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Forum on Science & Technology Policy. Prabhakar, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and former director of both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, also called on the R&D community to leverage advances in the social sciences to meet challenges of the coming decades. Change was a theme that ran through the 43rd annual S&T Policy Forum on 21–22 June at AAAS headquarters in Washington, D.C., focused on U.S. science, innovation, and competitiveness. The forum featured speakers whose careers span public service, academia, and the private sector, including Susan Hockfield, president emerita of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chair of the AAAS board, and Peter Lee, corporate vice president of artificial intelligence and research at Microsoft.

A century ago, the quantum revolution quietly began to change our lives. A deeper understanding of the behavior of matter and light at atomic and subatomic scales sparked a new field of science that would vastly change the world's technology landscape. Today, we rely upon the science of quantum mechanics for applications ranging from the Global Positioning System to magnetic resonance imaging to the transistor. The advent of quantum computers presages yet another new chapter in this story that will enable us to not only predict and improve chemical reactions and new materials and their properties, for example, but also to provide insights into the emergence of spacetime and our universe. Remarkably, these advances may begin to be realized in a few years.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. The ACLU released a report on Thursday revealing that Rekognition, Amazon's facial recognition tool, had falsely matched 28 members of Congress to mug shots. Members of the ACLU purchased the version of Rekognition that Amazon offers to the general public and ran public photos of every member of the House and Senate against a database of 25,000 arrest photos. The entire experiment costed $12.33, which, as ACLU attorney Jake Snow writes in a blogpost, is "less than a large pizza." Almost 40 percent of the representatives that Rekognition falsely matched were people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress.

As artificial intelligence capabilities continue to grow at a rapid pace, AI technologies are becoming ubiquitous for both protecting against cyberattacks and also as an instrument for launching them. Last year, Gartner predicted that almost every new software product would implement AI by 2020. The advancements in AI and its ability to make automated decisions about cyber threats is revolutionizing the cybersecurity landscape as we know it, from both a defensive and an offensive perspective. AI in Cyber Defense As a subdivision of AI, machine learning is already easing the burden of threat detection for many cyber defense teams. Its ability to analyze network traffic and establish a baseline for normal activity within a system can be used to flag suspicious activity, drawing from vast amounts of security data collected by businesses.

When it comes to adopting the shiniest, newest technologies, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Regulatory Audit Systems and Innovation can't always be on the "bleeding edge of things," its Director Anil Chaudhry says. "At least until we know the market has proven the technologies and that the government has the capacity to absorb that model in a secure manner," he says. Chaudhry's organization is in the "post-entry space," meaning a container has already cleared the port and products have already been sold and distributed before his division gets involved. So, they look at the internal controls and regulatory compliance programs of all the companies, and Chaudhry says some of those companies are using artificial intelligence, but face causation correlation problems where they're building their biases into that AI. Considering the scope of what CBP does, correlating people with places with things and instruments, "you draw the wrong correlations, people's' lives are impacted," Chaudhry says.

The ACLU put Amazon's Rekognition facial scanning software to the test and the results were more than a little troubling. Comparing "every current member of the House and Senate" against a database of 25,000 publicly available mugshots, Amazon's software identified 28 lawmakers as folks who'd been arrested for a crime. Given what we've seen about facial recognition's shortcomings, especially in regards to people of color, the following might not be all that surprising: The false matches included six members of the Congressional Black Caucus. "Nearly 40 percent of Rekognition's false matches were of people of color, even though they make up only 20 percent of Congress," according to the ACLU. We've already seen how the public has reacted to Amazon's face-scanning tech.

The government must fully implement its artificial intelligence (AI) sector deal to ensure that the number of jobs created by AI and automation balance the number of jobs lost, PwC has stated in its latest report. IT organisations in the UK and across Europe are starting to accelerate the move to the cloud. Read more about the key areas in which senior IT managers are planning to invest in over the next 12 months. You forgot to provide an Email Address. This email address doesn't appear to be valid.

Keeping your information technology systems secure isn't as simple as you may think. This generation's digital revolution has brought about countless cyber threats that seemingly evolve along with new advancements in science and technology. However, IT outsourcing services have also evolved to address new forms of threats. Among these new panaceas is Artificial Intelligence, a concept you may have first heard of in the 1999 Robin Williams movie, "Bicentennial Man" or the 2001 Spielberg hit "A.I. While these mainstream movies have successfully brought AI to the consciousness of many, a lot of them have yet to realise the impact of AI to cybersecurity.

The benchmark Nikkei average dropped on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Thursday, dragged down by the weakness of heavily weighted component issues. The 225-issue Nikkei average lost 27.38 points, or 0.12 percent, to end at 22,586.87, after rising 103.77 points Wednesday. But the Topix index of all first-section issues added 12.30 points, or 0.7 percent, to 1,765.78, Declines in drugmaker Eisai Co., mobile phone carrier Softbank Group Corp., clothing retailer Fast Retailing Co. and industrial robot manufacturer Fanuc Corp. pushed down the Nikkei by over 100 points. But investor sentiment improved in the Tokyo market, with concerns over U.S.-Europe trade friction easing to some extent following reports of some positive results from the summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Wednesday, brokers said.