Earlier this year Alsup, who is hearing the civil action brought by Waymo, asked federal prosecutors to investigate whether criminal theft of trade secrets had occurred. That probe is being handled by the intellectual property unit of the Northern California U.S. Attorney's office, sources familiar with the situation said. No charges have been filed.

Anyone buying a drone will soon have to pass a safety test under a new Government crackdown. The blitz announced today will also ban drones from flying near airports, require larger gadgets to be officially registered and tighten up rules on flying them too high. Police will be given new powers to ground drones flown by rogue operators and seize them for evidence. The move comes after The Mail on Sunday highlighted the security threat posed by the gadgets, and after a series of potentially catastrophic near-misses with aircraft. Drones are set to be one of the hottest-selling gifts again this Christmas, but Ministers have raised safety and privacy concerns as their cost comes down and their use becomes more widespread.

Drone users in the UK will be required to do safety awareness tests as part of planned new legislation on their usage. Police will also be given new powers to crack down on illegal use of the unmanned aerial vehicles. The government hopes to harness new drone technology which could see them used on oil rigs, in construction, for organ transport and parcel deliveries. The bill has been welcomed by the pilots' union, which has warned of near misses involving drones and aircraft. Balpa said there had been 81 incidents so far this year - up from 71 in 2016 and 29 in 2015.

Last week in Atlanta, the College of Law Practice Management's (COLPM) 2017 Futures Conference, "Running With the Machines," explored the current state of artificial intelligence in law practice -- and provided a glimpse into the future. We asked College Fellows Andy Daws, Susan Hackett, Patrick Lamb, Marc Lauritsen, Sharon Nelson, Mark Tamminga, Courtney Troutman, John Simek and Greg Siskind to share their perspectives and top takeaways. We are in the earliest stage of the implementation of this new class of tools. And while a number of use cases are apparent (e-disco, due diligence, research, advice bots), we have barely scratched the surface of how cognitive computing and learning machines will affect our professional lives. What is clear is that "artificial intelligence" is rapidly improving in capability and reach, sometimes spectacularly (translation services come to mind).

It's no secret that bots flooded the FCC with comments supporting its plans to kill net neutrality. But just how many comments were fraudulent? He recently conducted a study that used natural language processing to conclude that "at least" 1.3 million of the anti-net neutrality comments were fakes originating from a central source. They appear to have come from a giant mail merge that made the messages appear superficially unique, but was really just swapping in synonyms for what was clearly the same core statement. The language sounds familiar, too, mimicking that of a giant telecom or lobbying group than everyday people.

Kidney exchange, where candidates with organ failure trade incompatible but willing donors, is a life-saving alternative to the deceased donor waitlist, which has inadequate supply to meet demand. While fielded kidney exchanges see huge benefit from altruistic kidney donors (who give an organ without a paired needy candidate), a significantly higher medical risk to the donor deters similar altruism with livers. In this paper, we begin by exploring the idea of large-scale liver exchange, and show on demographically accurate data that vetted kidney exchange algorithms can be adapted to clear such an exchange at the nationwide level. We then propose cross-organ donation where kidneys and livers can be bartered for each other. We show theoretically that this multi-organ exchange provides linearly more transplants than running separate kidney and liver exchanges. This linear gain is a product of altruistic kidney donors creating chains that thread through the liver pool; it exists even when only a small but constant portion of the donors on the kidney side of the pool are willing to donate a liver lobe. We support this result experimentally on demographically accurate multi-organ exchanges. We conclude with thoughts regarding the fielding of a nationwide liver or joint liver-kidney exchange from a legal and computational point of view.

The federal government is considering allowing private companies to use its national facial recognition database for a fee, documents released under Freedom of Information laws reveal. The partially redacted documents show that the Attorney General's Department is in discussions with major telecommunications companies about pilot programs for private sector use of the Facial Verification Service in 2018. The documents also indicate strong interest from financial institutions in using the database. The government has argued that the use of facial recognition is necessary for national security and to cut down on crimes such as identity fraud. The Attorney General's Department says private companies could only use the service with the person's consent.

From smart factories to connected homes, see how new security and privacy risks affect businesses and consumers. The smart factory is at the heart of Industry 4.0. Here, advanced software enables machines to communicate and make decisions, while artificial intelligence, robotics, and 3-D printing transform the way products are made and people perform work. But Industry 4.0 also creates new risks and requires companies to integrate security and privacy safeguards into their businesses--and throughout their ecosystem, extending to the companies and consumers who buy their products.

One of the few bright spots this past year was supposed to be the revival of journalism. And to be sure, it's been a great time for muckraking, with newsrooms bringing home scoop after scoop on the Trump administration. Subscriptions to everything from the New York Times to Mother Jones are up. And for the first time in decades, trust in news media is rising too: Today, 54 percent of the public have confidence in journalists to tell the truth, while only 36 percent trust the president. Here's where the story turns more complicated.

Have you often felt that no matter what you asked politicians, they'd automatically reply with a stock response? Now you can address a real robot that plans on running for office -- or at least, that's what its creators intend. SAM is an AI chatbot'representing' New Zealand's constituents that you can talk with on Facebook Messenger right now. Of course, SAM doesn't currently hold any office -- nor could it likely legally run for one, under current laws -- and her (yes, yer) conversations are still very limited. But she's an experiment to create a representative that listens to people and responds to their questions with facts and policy positions.