Atomic and thermonuclear bombs are now things of the past, as self-learning artificial intelligence systems could become the new super weapon of the 21st century, French futurist Jean-Christophe Boon said. "To me, it seems that it will be artificial intelligence systems," Bonn said during a press conference in Kaspersky Lab. "For their function, unlike an atomic bomb, there is no need for uranium, or factories or other hard-to-reach materials. Only silicon and electricity are needed." He further explained that artificial intelligence systems could not be traced, unlike uranium, plutonium, and other radionuclides.

A Tesla car in Autopilot mode warned its driver seven times to put his hands on the steering wheel during the 40 minutes before the crash that ended his life last year, a newly released set of reports from the National Transportation Safety Board revealed. The reports, released this week, contain a cache of details that the federal safety regulator is using in its investigation into the May 2016 crash in Florida that left 40-year-old Joshua Brown dead. The crash -- in which Brown's Tesla Model S sedan drove under the trailer of a big-rig truck that was making a left turn -- drew worldwide attention and raised questions about the safety of Tesla's semiautonomous Autopilot feature. Tesla Inc., which is based in Palo Alto and led by Elon Musk, has repeatedly called Autopilot an "assist feature." It has said that while using Autopilot, drivers must keep their hands on the wheel at all times and be prepared to take over if necessary.

From computer vision systems for autonomous driving to FDA-approved medical imaging, artificial intelligence (AI) is driving public sector innovation. Governments, defense agencies, and other public sector organizations are adding AI into their platform, solutions, and products to perform tasks that usually require human-level intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision making, or translation. In order to change the way services are delivered to the blind or to inspire the next generation of space explorers, organizations need to overcome hurdles related to the scale of data, scale of compute, and variety of devices and platforms that intelligent systems need to ultimately run on. Nonprofits: The Royal National Institute of Blind People is able to change the way services are being delivered to the blind by using AWS. "We are currently using Amazon's Speech-to-Text technology to create and distribute accessible information in the form of synthesized audio content for our many B2B and B2C customers, including utility companies, financial institutions, and media companies, as well as other customer-facing material such as magazines and publications. With the announcement of Amazon Polly, we're excited about the ability to provide an even better experience to these customers by delivering incredibly lifelike voices that will captivate and engage our audience," said John Worsfold, Solutions Implementation Manager, Royal National Institute of Blind People.

An American F-15E fighter jet shot down an Iranian-made armed drone on Tuesday over southeast Syria that was flying toward American-backed Syrian fighters and their advisers, Pentagon officials said. American officials said that the aircraft was a Shahed 129, the same type of Iranian drone that an American warplane blasted on June 8 after it dropped a bomb near American-supported Syrian fighters and their coalition advisers. Tuesday's episode occurred shortly after midnight local time as the drone approached a so-called deconfliction zone the Americans have declared around the town of al-Tanf, the same place where the first drone had ventured. A garrison of Syrian fighters and their American and allied advisers are based near the town, which is near the intersection of the Syrian, Iraqi and Jordanian borders.

This is a class in data visualization. But before we leap into making charts and maps, we'll consider the nature of data, and some basic principles that will help you to "interview" datasets to find and tell stories. This is not a class in statistics, but I will introduce a few fundamental statistical concepts, which hopefully will stand you in good stead as we work to visualize data over the next few weeks -- and beyond. We're often told that there are "lies, damned lies, and statistics." But data visualization and statistics provide a view of the world that we can't otherwise obtain. They give us a framework to make sense of daunting and otherwise meaningless masses of information. The "lies" that data and graphics can tell arise when people misuse statistics and visualization methods, not when they are used correctly. The best data journalists understand that statistics and graphics go hand-in-hand. Just as numbers can be made to lie, graphics may misinform if the designer is ignorant of or abuses basic statistical principles. You don't have to be an expert statistician to make effective charts and maps, but understanding some basic principles will help you to tell a convincing and compelling story -- enlightening rather than misleading your audience. I hope you will get hooked on the power of a statistical way of thinking. As data artist Martin Wattenberg of Google has said: "Visualization is a gateway drug to statistics." Download the data for this session from here, unzip the folder and place it on your desktop.

The U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group said a U.S. F-15 fighter jet shot down the drone "after it displayed hostile intent" while approaching a military camp near the Syria-Jordan border. The U.S. on Sunday shot down a Syrian jet for the first time during the conflict near Raqqa after it dropped bombs near the U.S.-allied Syrian Democratic Forces, which are battling IS. Fighting and bombardment meanwhile resumed early Tuesday between Syrian government forces and rebels in the southern city of Daraa and nearby areas, where a 48-hour truce had gone into effect on Saturday. The push by Syrian government forces in the Daraa area appears headed for the Jordanian border, two weeks after Assad's troops reached the border with Iraq for the first time in years.

The European Commission wants to make it easier for lightweight drones to fly autonomously in European airspace -- with logistics, inspection services and agricultural businesses set to benefit. Simpler regulations will be welcomed by multinational businesses such as gas giant Engie, which is developing drones for tasks such as pipeline or building inspection or for cleaning the insulators on high-voltage overhead power lines. Other businesses, including some exhibiting at the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget this week, will see common rules as a way to simplify the development of drones and related services. While the drone air traffic control rules won't have much effect on its tethered drone, which is intended for inspecting the interiors of large industrial buildings, they could make life simpler for another drone it is developing to clean the insulators on overhead power lines.

A man killed in a crash last year while using the semi-autonomous driving system on his Tesla Model S sedan kept his hands off the wheel for extended periods of time despite repeated automated warnings not to do so, a US government report said on Monday. The National Transportation Safety Board released 500 pages of findings into the May 2016 death of Joshua Brown, a former Navy SEAL, near Williston, Florida. Brown's Model S collided with a truck while it was engaged in the'Autopilot' mode and he was killed. A Tesla Inc spokeswoman Tesla spokeswoman Keely Sulprizio declined to comment on the NTSB report. Lawyers for Brown's family did not return messages seeking comment.

Everybody wants a decent photo ID, but French artist Rafael Fabre took the quest to a new level. Rather than just having someone snap him, he built a 3D model of his head and torso, then created a nearly photorealistic rendering of himself for a new project called CNI. He submitted that to the French authorities, who duly issued him a carte nationale identité, never realizing that the image was, as he put it, "practically virtual, a video game version, a fiction." To create the image, Fabre used "techniques used for special effects in movies and in the video game industry." Specifically, he sculpted his head and torso from a bare cube using the 3D modeling program Blender, then adorned the model with clothing purchased from the Turbosquid 3D marketplace.

A new report from US investigators shows the driver killed in a 2016 crash while using Tesla's Autopilot feature only had his hands on the steering wheel for 25 seconds during a nearly 40-minute drive. The driver killed in the 2016 crash of a Tesla Model S took his hands off the wheel while using autopilot despite repeated warnings not to do so, government investigators have found. The National Transportation Safety Board said the driver had been using the semi-autonomous driver assistance system for extended periods when his car crashed into a 53-foot freight trailer west of Williston, Florida. The NTSB Monday released a large amount of data on the incident, but said it had not determined the cause of the crash. But it is the second agency whose findings have not faulted Tesla's driver-assistance system.