WASHINGTON – The Trump administration is nearing completion of new "buy American" rules to make it easier to sell U.S.-made military drones overseas and compete against fast-growing Chinese and Israeli rivals, senior U.S. officials said. While President Donald Trump's aides work on relaxing domestic regulations on drone sales to select allies, Washington will also seek to renegotiate a 1987 missile-control pact with the aim of loosening international restrictions on U.S. exports of unmanned aircraft, according to government and industry sources. At home, the U.S. administration is pressing ahead with its revamp of drone export policy under heavy pressure from American manufacturers and in defiance of human rights advocates who warn of the risk of fueling instability in hot spots including the Middle East and South Asia. The changes, part of a broader effort to overhaul U.S. arms export protocols, could be rolled out by the end of the year under a presidential policy decree, the administration officials said on condition of anonymity. The aim is to help U.S. drone makers -- pioneers in remote-controlled aircraft that have become a centerpiece of counterterrorism strategy -- reassert themselves in the overseas market, where China, Israel and others often sell under less cumbersome restrictions.

Intelligence analysts, policy makers, and first responders around the world rely on geospatial land use data to inform crucial decisions about global defense and humanitarian activities. Historically, analysts have manually identified and classified geospatial information by comparing and analyzing satellite images, but that process is time consuming and insufficient to support disaster response. The Functional Map of the World (fMoW) Challenge seeks to foster breakthroughs in the automated analysis of overhead imagery by harnessing the collective power of the global data science and machine learning communities. The challenge will publish one of the largest publicly available satellite-image datasets to date, with more than one million points of interest from around the world. The dataset contains satellite-specific metadata that researchers can exploit to build a competitive algorithm that classifies facility, building, and land use.

Robots are taking our jobs. Almost everything you can learn in our current education system will be automated soon. Supply chains are in upheaval as production moves closer to the consumer and products are made by individual robots rather than rows of underpaid workers. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are threatening thousands of white-collar jobs. As manufacturing shifts away from the traditional Asian hubs, shipping lines now suffer from massive overcapacity that will probably stay for a long time. We are aware of all of these trends.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, at 8:46 an airliner carrying 10,000 gallons of fuel crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. A few minutes later, at 9:03 a second plane hit the south tower. Both structures collapsed in less than 90 minutes. On the same morning, at 9:37 a third airliner slammed into the Pentagon and at 10:03 a fourth plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania, its target never reached due to the heroic actions of passengers with knowledge of the previous attacks. The human death toll from these events amounted to nearly 2700 (9/11 Commission, 2004). Nineteen young Arab men, implementing the plans of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, committed these acts of terrorism. Some had been in the United States for over a year and blended into the population. While four had training as pilots, the rest were not well educated and spoke English poorly. In small groups, they were able to carry knives, box cutters, Mace, or pepper spray onto the hijacked jetliners and convert them into deadly weapons (9/11 Commission, 2004). How were they organized and financed? How did the authorities fail to anticipate and prevent this tragedy? Those events highlight the inability of law enforcement and the intelligence community to effectively share information. The 9/11 Commission Report found that the United States, while having access to vast amounts of data and information, is ill equipped to process the data that it has.

We propose a dynamic edge exchangeable network model that can capture sparse connections observed in real temporal networks, in contrast to existing models which are dense. The model achieved superior link prediction accuracy on multiple data sets when compared to a dynamic variant of the blockmodel, and is able to extract interpretable time-varying community structures from the data. In addition to sparsity, the model accounts for the effect of social influence on vertices' future behaviours. Compared to the dynamic blockmodels, our model has a smaller latent space. The compact latent space requires a smaller number of parameters to be estimated in variational inference and results in a computationally friendly inference algorithm.

Molecular machine learning has been maturing rapidly over the last few years. Improved methods and the presence of larger datasets have enabled machine learning algorithms to make increasingly accurate predictions about molecular properties. However, algorithmic progress has been limited due to the lack of a standard benchmark to compare the efficacy of proposed methods; most new algorithms are benchmarked on different datasets making it challenging to gauge the quality of proposed methods. This work introduces MoleculeNet, a large scale benchmark for molecular machine learning. MoleculeNet curates multiple public datasets, establishes metrics for evaluation, and offers high quality open-source implementations of multiple previously proposed molecular featurization and learning algorithms (released as part of the DeepChem open source library). MoleculeNet benchmarks demonstrate that learnable representations are powerful tools for molecular machine learning and broadly offer the best performance. However, this result comes with caveats. Learnable representations still struggle to deal with complex tasks under data scarcity and highly imbalanced classification. For quantum mechanical and biophysical datasets, the use of physics-aware featurizations can be more important than choice of particular learning algorithm.

Astronaut Mark Vande Hei made fast work of greasing the big robot arm's new hand. Vande Hei and station commander Randy Bresnik replaced the latching mechanism on one end of the 58-foot robot arm last Thursday. "I finish six months on the space station," Vande Hei replied. As the space station approached Italy early in the spacewalk, Mission Control urged Bresnik and Vande Hei to take some photos for their crewmate, Paolo Nespoli.

His Twitter post came only two days after Trump sent an immigration overhaul wish-list of legislative proposals to congressional leaders, including a requirement that Congress agree to a host of border security improvements and make significant changes to the green card program.

Astronaut Mark Vande Hei made fast work of greasing the big robot arm's new hand. Vande Hei and station commander Randy Bresnik replaced the latching mechanism on one end of the 58-foot robot arm last Thursday. Tuesday's work involved using a grease gun, which resembles a caulking gun, to keep the latching mechanism working smoothly. Vande Hei got a jump ahead in some greasing chores, but the two-part job still will spill into next week, in a third and final spacewalk. "Why don't we wash, rinse, repeat. Do it again in a week," Bresnik said as the 6 ½-hour spacewalk came to a close.

Japan just fulfilled a key part of its space ambitions -- and it'll have important ramifications for everything from self-driving cars to self-defense. The country has launched its fourth Michibiki satellite, which expands a "quasi-zenith" system designed to provide greater access to GPS in urban'canyons' where buildings tend to block signals from lower-orbit satellites. Needless to say, that's vital for autonomous vehicles that need GPS to get their bearings in a country dominated by sprawling cities. The military might want it, too. While Japan's armed forces are largely focused on defense, this fourth quasi-zenith satellite could help those calling on the nation to buy cruise missiles as a deterrent to North Korea.