U.S. airstrikes across eastern Syria have hobbled Islamic State's deadly drone program, U.S. officials say, but commanders warn that proliferation of the inexpensive technology may allow terrorist groups to launch other aerial attacks around the globe. U.S.-backed fighters have reported small drones flown by the militants seven times this month in Iraq and Syria as Islamic State struggles to maintain the crumbling borders of its self-declared caliphate, according to the U.S. military task force in Baghdad. That's down from more than 60 drone sightings earlier this year, especially during the battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul, which was liberated in early July. Dozens of Iraqis were killed or wounded by 40-millimeter grenades and light explosives dropped from remote-controlled devices that one U.S. commander likened to killer bees. The use of camera-equipped quadcopters and model-plane-sized drones, sometimes flying in swarms, had become a signature tactic of Islamic State, much as the growing U.S. fleet of large missile firing Predator and Reaper drones have changed the face of modern warfare.

It'll be close, but it looks like women will be allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia with some time to spare before the automobile industry converts entirely to self-driving cars. A royal decree announced Tuesday that women would finally be allowed behind the wheel, heralding a preposterously overdue end to the most high-profile and infamous of the repressive kingdom's restrictions on women. While there are a few other Middle Eastern and conservative Islamic countries where driving by women is culturally or religiously frowned upon, Saudi Arabia is the last country on the planet that officially prohibited it. The government says it will first form a panel to look into implementing the order, then create the infrastructure it claims is necessary to put the order into effect. However, the order seems likely to be carried out.

Enthusiastic about innovation in health tech and bringing teams of good people together to come up with great ideas. Working to develop data-driven tools to empower health decisions and impact health outcomes. Advice for women in tech: "Go for it! Surround yourself with people who inspire you, ask lots of questions, and never stop learning from your peers." Dr. Rebecca Bilbro is Lead Data Scientist at Bytecubed, where she builds data solutions for government and commercial clients using open source machine learning tools.

BENGALURU: The state government on Wednesday announced it will establish a Centre of Excellence for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (CoE-DS&AI), with Nasscom as the programme and implementation partner. The CoE, being set up at a cost of Rs 40 crore, is said to be first-of-its-kind port based on PPP model, and will accelerate the ecosystem in Karnataka. It will also provide the impetus for development of data science and artificial intelligence across the country. "The state government will further support the initiative with significant share of investment required for initial five years and nonsensitive data which can augment innovation and research in Data Science and Artificial In telligence across the country," the IT & BT department said in a statement. IT and tourism minister Priyank Kharge said the CoE will enable global corporates who plan to set up their global analytics practice in Karnataka and create jobs for 35,000 data science and artificial intelligence professionals over the next five years.

It is available from PublicAffairs, an imprint of Perseus Books LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group Inc. Imagine flying over a major city at night -- say, Chicago or Paris or Beijing -- and it is completely dark below. It is just a void of light akin to nighttime in the middle of the ocean. Then imagine someone flips on the power grid, and you see today's web of human activity light up. Imagine further that someone flips the switch again, and you glimpse a future image of the city. Where you once thought there was nothing, there is a universe of action -- both present and future.

General Motors Co, Alphabet Inc, Ford Motor Co and others have lobbied for the legislation to speed deployment of self-driving cars without human controls by allowing federal regulators to approve their use if they deem them safe and barring states from blocking autonomous vehicles. Current law prohibits vehicles without human controls. Two sources briefed on the matter said the bill would not include larger commercial trucks.

The head of the FBI says we may soon be living in a world where terrorists won't even have to risk their lives to carry out mass murder on innocents. In his first testimony before Congress on Wednesday, new FBI Director Christopher Wray says that one of the main concerns of the bureau currently is the possibility of terrorists using drones in attacks. 'It's a topic that we've been discussing a lot lately. I think we do know that terrorists organizations have an interest in using drones. We've seen that overseas already with some growing frequency and I think the expectation is it's coming here imminently,' Wary said, after being asked a question about drones by Sen. John Hoeven (R-North Dakota).

A Silicon Valley titan who helped create Google Street View and engineered Waymo and Uber's self-driving cars is taking new steps to solidify technology's place in the future. In 2015, Anthony Levandowski, 37, founded a religion called Way of the Future. It has only been revealed now as state officials in California wait for him to respond to the necessary IRS filings he must provide for it. Way of the Future has no website or headquarters but, according to Wired which obtained copies of his original filings, Levandowski is its founder and CEO. The documents give its purpose is to'develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence'.

We consider the problem of clustering noisy finite-length observations of stationary ergodic random processes according to their generative models without prior knowledge of the model statistics and the number of generative models. Two algorithms, both using the $L^1$-distance between estimated power spectral densities (PSDs) as a measure of dissimilarity, are analyzed. The first one, termed nearest neighbor process clustering (NNPC), relies on partitioning the nearest neighbor graph of the observations via spectral clustering. The second algorithm, simply referred to as $k$-means (KM), consists of a single $k$-means iteration with farthest point initialization and was considered before in the literature, albeit with a different dissimilarity measure. We prove that both algorithms succeed with high probability in the presence of noise and missing entries, and even when the generative process PSDs overlap significantly, all provided that the observation length is sufficiently large. Our results quantify the tradeoff between the overlap of the generative process PSDs, the observation length, the fraction of missing entries, and the noise variance. Finally, we provide extensive numerical results for synthetic and real data and find that NNPC outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in human motion sequence clustering.

Word embeddings are a powerful approach for analyzing language, and exponential family embeddings (EFE) extend them to other types of data. Here we develop structured exponential family embeddings (S-EFE), a method for discovering embeddings that vary across related groups of data. We study how the word usage of U.S. Congressional speeches varies across states and party affiliation, how words are used differently across sections of the ArXiv, and how the co-purchase patterns of groceries can vary across seasons. Key to the success of our method is that the groups share statistical information. We develop two sharing strategies: hierarchical modeling and amortization. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach in empirical studies of speeches, abstracts, and shopping baskets. We show how S-EFE enables group-specific interpretation of word usage, and outperforms EFE in predicting held-out data.