President Emmanuel Macron is rolling out France's strategy to close an artificial-intelligence gap with the U.S. and China, saying it'll require Europeans to get more comfortable with sharing data. After a buildup that includes naming one of the world's top mathematicians as his point man, Macron is expected to propose higher government funding for research and updated rules on data use in his speech Thursday at a former 13th-century Cistercian college in Paris. He also plans to tout incentives for scientists and companies to move to France. "With the digital revolution, we must be at the side of French industrial companies in the disruptive dynamic of innovation," Macron told French business executives this week. European powers risk falling behind in the global competition for future technologies as Google, Apple, Facebook and China's AI companies plow ahead.

On a crisp Saturday morning in Orsay, a southwestern suburb of Paris with some 16,500 inhabitants, the rue de Paris was bustling. But while many residents were doing their usual weekend shopping at the fishmonger or the butcher shop, further up the street, in a small former chateau that is now the town's cultural center, about 80 people had set aside their late-morning hours to hear the "voeux" of their legislative representative to the National Assembly, Cédric Villani. The voeux, or "new year's wishes," are a standard exercise of French politicians from the president on down, in which they review activities of the past year and lay out projects for the year to come. Villani, a mathematician and Fields Medal winner (often shorthanded as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in mathematics), was new to the practice; only six months earlier, he was still an academic. He was dressed as always -- winter or summer -- in a black three-piece suit, a shirt with cufflinks, a spider brooch on his lapel, and a large, floppy tie called a lavallière (today's version in purple).

Uber is facing some intense scrutiny after one of its self-driving cars struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona ten days ago. The company (along with it's partner, NVIDIA) has stopped testing its autonomous vehicle in cities across the US, and the Arizona governor suspended the tests specifically in that state. According to a report by Reuters, Uber allegedly scaled back on the number of safety sensors used to detect objects in the road, resulting in a blind zone on the Volvo SUV model involved in the accident. Autonomous cars use radar, cameras and LiDAR to detect obstacles and pedestrians in their path. Reuters reports that Uber scaled back to a single LiDAR sensor on the Volvo test cars the company currently uses in its fleets.

Despite being commercially available, drones can be a real threat. They can barge into no-fly zones, engage in mid-air crashes, reconnaissance missions, or even conduct deadly air-strikes. The risk of such attacks never wears off but in order protect its critical installations against rogue UAVs, United States military is working on some lethal counter-drone weapons. The service, in collaboration with defense manufacturer Raytheon, has produced two Counter-Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAV) -- one that uses high power microwave (HPM) to disable the target and other that deploys a high energy laser (HEL) to disintegrate it. The two systems were put to test in a recent Maneuver Fire Integrated Experiment and were able to take out as many as 45 different drones out of the sky, along with a few stationary mortal projectiles, Popular Mechanics reported.

Military officials say no civilians appear to be injured in the strike. A U.S. drone strike killed a "high ranking" official in the Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb terror cell in Libya on Saturday, the Pentagon disclosed Wednesday. Musa Abu Dawud was one of two AQIM terrorists killed in the airstrike in southwest Libya near the city of Ubari in the Sahara desert. "Dawud trained AQIM recruits in Libya for attack operations in the region. He provided critical logistics support, funding and weapons to AQIM, enabling the terrorist group to threaten and attack U.S. and Western interests in the region," U.S. military's Africa Command said in a statement.

The race to perfect robot cars continues despite fears kindled by the death of a woman hit by a self-driving Uber vehicle while pushing a bicycle across an Arizona street. Uber put a temporary halt to its self-driving car program in the US after the fatal accident this month near Phoenix, where several other companies including Google-owned Waymo are testing such technology. While the Uber accident may be used to advance arguments of those fearful of driverless cars, it does not change the fact that'transformative technology is coming whether we like it or not,' according to Adie Tomer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. Pilot models of the Uber self-driving car, pictured in 2016 before one of the autonomous vehicles killed a woman in Arizona. 'There certainly will be calls to stop all autonomous vehicle testing, not just Uber's program,' Tomer said in a post on the institution's website.

The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched investigators to examine a fatal crash last week in California of a Tesla Inc. TSLA -8.22% electric vehicle and determine whether its semi-automated driving system was engaged. The NTSB, obliged increasingly to address questions surrounding the safety of driverless-car technologies, said Tuesday it was conducting a "field investigation" of the Friday crash near Mountain View, Calif., that resulted in the vehicle later catching fire. "Unclear if automated control system was active at time of crash," the NTSB said in a social-media posting, in a reference to Tesla's Autopilot feature. "Issues examined include: post-crash fire, steps to make vehicle safe for removal from scene." A man died in the accident after his Tesla Model X sport-utility vehicle traveling south on Highway 101struck a barrier and was struck by two other vehicles, according to the California Highway Patrol.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society. Last week, a pedestrian was killed by one of Uber's self-driving cars in Arizona. The Grand Canyon State has an incredibly lax regulatory oversight of autonomous vehicles as it works to attract Silicon Valley companies. But almost every state thinking about regulating autonomous vehicles is doing so incorrectly. They are bringing a 19th-century mindset to a 21st-century problem.

Tesla has defended its Autopilot driver-assist technology after a probe was launched into a fatal crash involving a Tesla Model X SUV. The accident took place on the afternoon of Friday 23 March on a motorway in Mountain View, California. The 38-year-old driver died at a nearby hospital shortly after the crash. Tesla vehicles have a system called Autopilot which runs some driving tasks but it is not clear if Tesla's automated control system was driving the car. According to the National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) and police, the accident involved two other cars.

'After more than a year of thorough planning, development and safety reviews, we transitioned most operations to having a single vehicle operator, without a second person to collect feedback for our engineers using a laptop in the passenger seat,' the company said in the statement. 'This transition happened slowly as we worked with our vehicle operators to make sure they were well-trained and felt comfortable with this new job. Arizona governor Doug Ducey suspended Uber's self-driving vehicle testing privileges on Monday in the wake of a pedestrian fatality in a Phoenix suburb last week. Mr Ducey said in a letter to CEO Dara Khosrowshahi that video footage showed the company's'unquestionable failure'. The crash raised concerns about the San Francisco-based company's ability to safely test its technology in Arizona, he warned.