A trio of spacecraft blasted off from California early on the morning of 5 May and are now en route to Mars. At least, that's the best explanation I have for that rolling growl that rattled my bones at Vandenberg Airforce Base in California. I never saw the rocket. At 4:05 am local time on Saturday, Mars InSight launched aboard an Atlas V rocket, marking the first interplanetary launch from the west coast of North America.

The White House on Thursday plans to convene executives from Amazon, Facebook, Google, Intel and 34 other major U.S. companies as it seeks to supercharge the deployment of powerful robots, algorithms and the broader field of artificial intelligence. The Trump administration intends to ask academics, government officials and AI developers about ways to adapt regulations to advance AI in such fields as agriculture, health care and transportation, according to a draft schedule of the event. And they're set to discuss the U.S. government's power to fund cutting-edge research into such technologies as machine learning. For the White House, the challenge is to strike a balance between the benefits of computers that can spot disease or drive cars and the reality that jobs – or lives – are at stake in the age of AI. "Whether you're a farmer in Iowa, an energy producer in Texas [or] a drug manufacturer in Boston, you are going to be using these techniques to drive your business going forward," Michael Kratsios, deputy chief technology officer at the White House, said in a recent interview. Among those expected to be in the room for that private gathering Thursday will be representatives from tech giants like Microsoft, Nvidia and Oracle, as well as other businesses like Ford, Land O'Lakes, Mastercard, Pfizer and United Airlines, according to the White House.

LONDON – For a quarter century, the U.S. and its allies owned the skies, fighting wars secure in the knowledge that no opponent could compete in the air. Rapid technological progress in China's aerospace industry, particularly air-to-air missile systems fired from an aircraft, is changing the game for Western air forces and the global arms trade. Russia took the lead in modernizing its air force, and has been more willing to use it. In the longer term, however, China's roughly $13 trillion economy and growing wealth mean it is likely to pose the greater strategic challenge for the U.S. and its allies. In 2017, Chinese defense spending rose by 5.6 percent in constant U.S. dollar terms, while Russia's fell by 20 percent, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Science fiction movies (think, for instance, "Blade Runner") often depict cities of the future where the sky is a maze of invisible roads, chock-a-bloc with aerial vehicles that sometimes drive themselves. But unless you have been living like a hermit, cut off from the world, you would know that sort of a scenario is not entirely in the realm of fiction any more. While companies like Tesla, Uber and Waymo (among many others) have already been testing cars that drive themselves, there are others, including Airbus, Boeing and Toyota, who are working on flying cars. Even NASA is onboard with this vision for the future, and has an Urban Air Mobility (UAM) research team working toward this goal, which the agency calls "a safe and efficient air transportation system where everything from small package delivery drones to passenger-carrying air taxis operate over populated areas, from small towns to the largest cities." While a lot more research needs to be done to create the necessary technology that is both safe and efficient, not to mention the framing of rules and regulations to govern its use, it is certainly not just a pipedream.

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is coming up with a law that'll require hobbyist and commercial drone pilots to acquire license before taking the drone flights. Plus, this new law will come in effect in 2019. The pilots have to sit for internet-based course and on the successful completion of the course will be provided with drone license. According to Bundesamt fur Zivilluftfahrt (BAZL), the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation, Switzerland and EU will apply these laws. "You ought to learn, where and how high you are allowed to fly your drone or what influence temperature and wind can have," stated BAZL communications Chief Urs Holderegger.

Manufacturers saw many interesting developments in the realm of industrial security in 2017. There were tremendous shifts in how to guard against threats with ransomware like WannaCry, Nyetya, and now the Trisis/Triton/Hatman incident impacting organizations and making headlines across the globe. Safeguarding against those risks and more were captured in the recently released Cisco 2018 Annual Cybersecurity Report. The report highlights some of the key trends in the evolution of malware and its impact on systems and data. The role of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its effect on security architectures and processes are also analyzed, as well as how artificial intelligence (AI), automation and machine learning technologies are in place as a way to mitigate malicious activity.

Uber is ready to rethink its safety approach in the wake of its fatal self-driving car crash. The ridesharing firm told Reuters it has hired former NTSB Chairman Chris Hart as an advisor on its broader safety efforts alongside a "top-to-bottom" review of safety in its autonomous vehicle program. Hart is no stranger to self-driving technology: he oversaw the NTSB while it investigated a Tesla crash where Autopilot was involved, and has seen autonomy as just a matter of time. The review will cover everything from the self-driving system itself to training for the operators. Uber isn't saying more at the moment, but promised additional info soon.

Facial recognition technology is likely to be among innovations on the agenda when bankers, financial regulators and officials from across Asia gather in Hong Kong on Wednesday for a landmark summit. The high-powered meeting comes as the race to regulate the fintech (financial technology) revolution is intensifying amid fears that a regulatory "vacuum" could be exploited by money launderers, fraudsters and underground bankers whose activities threaten national, regional and international financial stability. Organisers of the summit to launch the Alliance for Financial Stability with Information Technology, also known as AFS-IT, say speakers and guests will include top-level representation across the banking, financial, technology and regulatory sectors as well as government officials from China, Hong Kong, Macau, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar, Vietnam and Singapore. A key focus will be the fostering of innovation in regulation technology, or regtech, a new field in which information technology is used to enhance regulation. Innovative fintech can be used and adapted to benefit both service providers and regulators, and it includes know-your-customer facial recognition technology recently installed across the ATM network of casino hub Macau as part of an ongoing crackdown on money laundering and capital flight from China.

This post outlines the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) opportunity for Microsoft partners in Canada. In March of 2017, the Canadian government announced a $125 million investment in artificial intelligence. The Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy (what a name!) strives to position Canada as a world leader in AI. These dollars will help attract and retain top academic talent and promote collaboration amongst AI teams. "Technology is changing fast, and with it comes opportunity. By encouraging cutting-edge technology like AI while at the same time creating a culture of lifelong learning, we will be with Canadians every step of the way as they lead us into a future filled with possibility."

Remote sensing lacks methods like the word vector representations and pre-trained networks that significantly boost performance across a wide range of natural language and computer vision tasks. To fill this gap, we introduce Tile2Vec, an unsupervised representation learning algorithm that extends the distributional hypothesis from natural language -- words appearing in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings -- to geospatial data. We demonstrate empirically that Tile2Vec learns semantically meaningful representations on three datasets. Our learned representations significantly improve performance in downstream classification tasks and similarly to word vectors, visual analogies can be obtained by simple arithmetic in the latent space.