A dais stuffed with well-fed lawmakers sure doesn't look like a battlefield, but make no mistake: The long-awaited war between self-driving vehicles and the humans they would replace has begun. And the humans just won the first skirmish. Thursday morning, the Senate released the first version of autonomous vehicle legislation meant to clarify who exactly is in charge of robocar regulations. It comes a few weeks after senators circulated a draft of the rules, and contains a significant difference from the older version: The Senate deleted the original mention of commercial motor vehicles like trucks and buses. Now big vehicles are exempt from the bill--meaning that rules for self-driving trucks are still unclear.

In a week where North Korea insisted that America had declared war and Puerto Rico suffered one of the worst natural disasters in its history, headlines were nonetheless dominated by a war of words between Donald Trump and the National Football League. Speaking in Alabama, the President declared that he would like to see NFL owners whose players knelt during the national anthem to "get that son of a b*tch off the field right now. Trump's comments insisting that players be compelled to stand during the national anthem put a spotlight a handful of NFL players who continued the protest initiated last year by former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick. In response to Trump's comments, every NFL team – and nearly every owner – offered some version of protest in Week 3. The controversy around the NFL protests and Trump's comments raised many questions about the nature of peaceful protest, what the national anthem represents and, what rights are protected by the First Amendment. These are thorny, complicated questions, and researchers at Unanimous AI sought to untangle them by forming a swarm of thirty American voters inside our Swarm AI platform.

The issue is now openly on the table. Today marks a significant moment in the life of Estonian digital society: government officials and advisors shine a light on the opportunities of implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solutions as a further upgrade to the already advanced level of the services provided by private and public organizations for the benefit of Estonian residents. Speaking to Marten Kaevats, adviser for digital innovation at the strategy unit of the Government Office of Estonia, it has emerged that experts at Stenbock House have started to discuss feasibility and legal frameworks for the application of Artificial Intelligence technologies to everyday life tasks of Estonian citizens. The spark was represented by the self-driving vehicles experiment carried out during the last months in Tallinn: summer 2017 has seen the first driverless bus being operative on a small route in the city centre of the capital; this time, Estonia has once again the chance to write a new chapter in the history of technological development through an open discussion on how intelligent machines and algorithms are set to change peoples' lives. Self-driving vehicles are just the beginning: "Working only on traffic laws is kind of unreasonable – Kaevats says – because the issue of Artificial Intelligence is much wider and the scope is quite bigger than just dealing with traffic laws".

This'Top 10' list has been created on the basis of best content, and not exactly the number of views. I have also taken special care to walk you through the world of ML in Finance in a gentle, step-by-step manner. To get you motivated, we first begin with talks on the various applications of ML in Finance. Then, to enable access to free financial data, is a video detailing various sources for the latter. To get your hands dirty, we then move on to R and Python tutorials for specific financial use cases.

The cybersecurity industry has always had a fortress mentality: Firewall the perimeter! But that mindset has failed--miserably, as each new headline-generating hack reminds us. Even if you do patch all your software, the way Equifax didn't, or you randomize all your passwords, the way most of us don't, bad actors are going to get past your heavily guarded gate, into your network. And once they do, they're free to go wild. Scott Rosenberg is an editor at Backchannel.

In the United States, around 200,000 manned U.S. general aviation aircraft have been registered over the last 50 years. By contrast, 750,000 unmanned aircraft systems -- aka drones -- have now been registered, including more than 40,000 in the last two weeks of December 2016 alone. It exemplifies the dramatic influx of "things," which carries unprecedented opportunity for digital disruption. They're typically full of sensors, increasingly connected, produce enormous amounts of data and can be the source of newer, smarter business models that touch every industry. For example, in the past decade, wind turbines have quickly evolved from isolated standalone machines to connected, sensor-laden, intelligent devices.

If tech experts are to be believed, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform the world. But those same experts don't agree on what kind of effect that transformation will have on the average person. Some believe that humans will be much better off in the hands of advanced AI systems, while others think it will lead to our inevitable downfall. How could a single technology evoke such vastly different responses from people within the tech community? Artificial intelligence is software built to learn or problem solve -- processes typically performed in the human brain.

As it prepares to open the new Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, a headquarters in The Hague which will monitor developments in artificial intelligence (AI), the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI) has explained the need for the new center with a warning that robots could destabilize the world. AI, and robots that benefit from it, pose a range of potential threats to humans: from the standard fears of automation and the mass unemployment that follows it, to more dramatic concerns that autonomous killer robots will be deployed by those with nefarious aims -- or that they will be self-directed, for that matter. It will be the task of the UNICRI Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics to second-guess each possible threat. The Guardian reports that UNICRI senior strategic adviser Irakli Beridze said that the team at The Hague will also generate ideas about how AI advances could help achieve UN targets. His point seemed to be that while there are risks associated with developments in AI that needed to be addressed, there is a bigger picture that the center will consider, as the UN's first permanent office focused on AI. "If societies do not adapt quickly enough, this can cause instability," Beridze told the Dutch newspaper de Telegraaf.

September 29, 2017 Adelaide/Sydney, Australia--To cut costs, Elon Musk's SpaceX company has shrunk the size of the rocket ship it is developing to go to Mars, aiming to start construction on the first spaceship in the first half of next year, Mr. Musk said on Friday. SpaceX plans its first trip to the red planet in 2022, carrying only cargo, to be followed by a manned mission in 2024, Musk, who serves as chief executive and lead designer of Space Exploration Technologies, said at a conference in Adelaide. NASA's first human mission to Mars is expected about a decade later. Musk had previously planned to use a suite of space vehicles to support the colonization of Mars, beginning with an unmanned capsule called Red Dragon in 2018, but he said SpaceX is now focused on a single, slimmer and shorter rocket instead. "We want to make our current vehicles redundant," he said.

Moscow's local authorities are giving the city's 170,000 security cameras a power-up. Moscow's extensive network of security cams have been keeping an eye on the city and recording millions of hours of video since 2012. Processing all that footage proved to be a daunting task, however: police officers quickly realized that it was impossible to look through them all to find culprits to arrest. Authorities believe facial recognition is the answer to that problem. The city will use a facial-recognition technology developed by Russian startup Ntechlab.