WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration is preparing to relax Obama-era rules on drone strikes and commando raids, paving the way for more frequent operations against Islamic State and other militant groups, the New York Times reported on Thursday, citing officials familiar with the internal deliberations.

Content-dense news report important factual information about an event in direct, succinct manner. Information seeking applications such as information extraction, question answering and summarization normally assume all text they deal with is content-dense. Here we empirically test this assumption on news articles from the business, U.S. international relations, sports and science journalism domains. Our findings clearly indicate that about half of the news texts in our study are in fact not content-dense and motivate the development of a supervised content-density detector. We heuristically label a large training corpus for the task and train a two-layer classifying model based on lexical and unlexicalized syntactic features. On manually annotated data, we compare the performance of domain-specific classifiers, trained on data only from a given news domain and a general classifier in which data from all four domains is pooled together. Our annotation and prediction experiments demonstrate that the concept of content density varies depending on the domain and that naive annotators provide judgement biased toward the stereotypical domain label. Domain-specific classifiers are more accurate for domains in which content-dense texts are typically fewer. Domain independent classifiers reproduce better naive crowdsourced judgements. Classification prediction is high across all conditions, around 80%.

The community detection problem for graphs asks one to partition the n vertices V of a graph G into k communities, or clusters, such that there are many intracluster edges and few intercluster edges. Of course this is equivalent to finding a permutation matrix P such that, if A denotes the adjacency matrix of G, then PAP^T is approximately block diagonal. As there are k^n possible partitions of n vertices into k subsets, directly determining the optimal clustering is clearly infeasible. Instead one seeks to solve a more tractable approximation to the clustering problem. In this paper we reformulate the community detection problem via sparse solution of a linear system associated with the Laplacian of a graph G and then develop a two-stage approach based on a thresholding technique and a compressive sensing algorithm to find a sparse solution which corresponds to the community containing a vertex of interest in G. Crucially, our approach results in an algorithm which is able to find a single cluster of size n_0 in O(nlog(n)n_0) operations and all k clusters in fewer than O(n^2ln(n)) operations. This is a marked improvement over the classic spectral clustering algorithm, which is unable to find a single cluster at a time and takes approximately O(n^3) operations to find all k clusters. Moreover, we are able to provide robust guarantees of success for the case where G is drawn at random from the Stochastic Block Model, a popular model for graphs with clusters. Extensive numerical results are also provided, showing the efficacy of our algorithm on both synthetic and real-world data sets.

Rolls-Royce released this photo of the concept version of its autonomous naval ship. Rolls-Royce plans to make a self-piloting navy ship, powered by artificial intelligence, sophisticated sensors and advanced propulsion, for sale to military forces around the world. Amid increasing concern among some technologists about the prospect of self-aware artificial intelligence systems becoming a threat to humanity, the company said it was already conducting "significant analysis of potential cyber risks" to "ensure end-to-end security." Rolls-Royce released this photo of the concept version of its autonomous naval ship.

Science fiction is often treated like a genre (and for a good reason), but genre lines can be incredibly blurry, with quite a bit of variation and room to play. One area that's been growing recently is the sub-genre of crime stories and mysteries within sci-fi. Here is a selection worth investigating. This is an exciting novel, with unexpected twists and turns and excellent character development, but it starts small: with a tick. Far into the future, when climate change has taken its toll on our planet, a tick roams the U.S. and carries with it a deadly, incurable disease.

Apple revealed its latest iPhone lineup last week, which includes the iPhone X, and now information on possible features for future smartphones are coming in. Future iPhones (and iPads) could include front and back 3D Touch force detection, according to an Apple patent application published Thursday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, spotted by AppleInsider. The application, called "Detecting backside force in a touch-screen device," says the backside actions with 3D Touch includes "multi-tasking application switches or content or viewport manipulation." The new technology means future iPhones could be thinner. Apple is looking into a "touch-screen device that may be configured to detect when a user applies force to the back side of the device," according to the patent.

A week after its dramatic'death dive' into Saturn's atmosphere, NASA has released Cassini's final images, revealing stunning last looks at the ringed planet and its mysterious moons. From a view of Enceladus setting behind Saturn, to the site where Cassini would make its impact, the new images show just what the spacecraft observed leading up to its demise. Cassini circled the planet for 13 years, helping to transform our understanding of the gas giant – and, thanks to its observations, scientists now know two of its moons have potential to host simple life. From a view of Enceladus setting behind Saturn, to the site where Cassini would make its impact, the new images show just what the spacecraft observed leading up to its demise. Its last image, pictured, is a monochrome look toward Saturn's night side, light by sunlight reflected from the planet's rings In the breathtaking series of photos, NASA shows some of Cassini's final observations.

In the preface to Saint Joan, his play about Joan of Arc, the teenager whose visions of saints and archangels stirred soldiers into battle early in the 15th century, George Bernard Shaw makes a surprisingly compelling argument that following Joan of Arc's mystical visions was at least as rational as following a modern-day general into today's battlefield full of highly technological and incomprehensible weapons of war. In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: We believe it to be round, not because as many as one percent of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific. Hyperbole, for sure, but it is remarkable how much we depend on what we're told to get by in the modern world. So little of what happens to us is understood through direct sensory experience. From the alarm that wakes us up, to the toilet that we wander to, to the smartphone that we turn on (before or after our visit to the bathroom), to the coffee machine that welcomes us into the kitchen, to the tap that we use to fill the coffee machine, nothing is completely within our conceptual grasp. But we use these tools; we even rely on them, because they work (except when they don't and our life goes a little out of balance). We can thank the experts who created them, for we are dependent on their know-how.

Jack Ma: 'It's not made in China, it's made on the internet' Jack Ma knows artificial intelligence will change the world. The Alibaba founder and chairman doesn't think we should be scared. But he does think we should be prepared for major disruptions to the job market. "In the last 200 years, manufacturing [has brought] jobs. But today -- because of the artificial intelligence, because of the robots -- manufacturing is no longer the main engine of creating jobs," Ma said Wednesday in a speech at the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York City.

This story was told to us by Mike Sellers, who was working on some social AI for DARPA in the early 2000s. They were making agents that learned to interact socially together. "For one simulation, we had two agents, naturally enough named Adam and Eve. They started out knowing how to do things, but not knowing much else. They knew how to eat for example, but not what to eat. We'd given them an apple tree (the symbolism of that honestly didn't occur to us at the time), and they found that eating the apples made them happy. They had also tried eating the tree, the house, etc., but none of those worked. There was also another agent named Stan, who wanted to be social but wasn't very good at it, so was often hanging around and kind of lonely. "And of course, there were a few bugs in the system.