Connecticut lawmakers are considering whether the state should become the first in the country to allow police to use drones outfitted with deadly weapons, a proposal immediately met with concern by civil rights and liberties advocates. The bill would ban the use of weaponized drones, but exempt police. Details on how law enforcement could use drones with weapons would be spelled out in new rules to be developed by the state Police Officer Standards and Training Council. Officers also would have to receive training before being allowed to use drones with weapons. "Obviously this is for very limited circumstances," said Republican state Sen. John Kissel, of Enfield, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee that approved the measure Wednesday and sent it to the House of Representatives.

Google is soothing its agitated advertisers with more powerful AI tools. The search giant came under fire recently when top brands claimed ads were appearing on YouTube propaganda vids. Understandably not wanting to fund extremism, even inadvertently, several of the companies pulled their ads. Gary Vaynerchuk was so impressed with TNW Conference 2016 he paused mid-talk to applaud us. Google is now ramping up the power of its AI to combat this.

West firms have been given a unique glimpse of the top tech themes for this year – and the impact they are likely to have on business – at a special event staged by accountancy firm Deloitte. Ever-greater use of smartphones, digital navigation, machine learning and – on the downside – the growth in cyber crime were outlined by Deloitte's technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) practice. The firm's head of TMT Paul Lee led the briefing staged at the Engine Shed, Bristol, and discussed key trends for this year as highlighted in the 16th edition of the firm's widely-respected TMT Predictions 2017 launched in January. He said the predictions particularly resonated with the West of England's digital tech ecosystem as it continued to be among the UK's most innovative and fastest-growing. Deloitte's key technology predictions for 2017 are: Deloitte predicts that one in 20 uses of digital navigation in 2017 will be indoors.

Innovation in artificial intelligence and robotics could force governments to legislate for quotas of human workers, upend traditional working practices and pose novel dilemmas for insuring driverless cars, according to a report by the International Bar Association. The survey, which suggests that a third of graduate level jobs around the world may eventually be replaced by machines or software, warns that legal frameworks regulating employment and safety are becoming rapidly outdated. The competitive advantage of poorer, emerging economies – based on cheaper workforces – will soon be eroded as robot production lines and intelligent computer systems undercut the cost of human endeavour, the study suggests. "A production robot is thus cheaper than a worker in China," the report notes. Nor does a robot "become ill, have children or go on strike and [it] is not entitled to annual leave".

Tech leaders found yet another reason to denounce President Trump today after federal immigration officials released seemingly stricter guidelines for the country's high-skilled H-1B worker visa program. The backlash quickly built on social media as claims circulated that the Trump administration was preparing to limit the number of visas for computer programmers. But the threat doesn't seem likely to live up to the hype. Both critics and supporters of the H-1B program say these reports are overblown. In fact, they say, panicking about the putative changes plays right into the president's hands.

Databases are widespread, yet extracting relevant data can be difficult. Without substantial domain knowledge, multivariate search queries often return sparse or uninformative results. This paper introduces an approach for searching structured data based on probabilistic programming and nonparametric Bayes. Users specify queries in a probabilistic language that combines standard SQL database search operators with an information theoretic ranking function called predictive relevance. Predictive relevance can be calculated by a fast sparse matrix algorithm based on posterior samples from CrossCat, a nonparametric Bayesian model for high-dimensional, heterogeneously-typed data tables. The result is a flexible search technique that applies to a broad class of information retrieval problems, which we integrate into BayesDB, a probabilistic programming platform for probabilistic data analysis. This paper demonstrates applications to databases of US colleges, global macroeconomic indicators of public health, and classic cars. We found that human evaluators often prefer the results from probabilistic search to results from a standard baseline.

This paper presents an algorithm for the unsupervised learning of latent variable models from unlabeled sets of data. We base our technique on spectral decomposition, providing a technique that proves to be robust both in theory and in practice. We also describe how to use this algorithm to learn the parameters of two well known text mining models: single topic model and Latent Dirichlet Allocation, providing in both cases an efficient technique to retrieve the parameters to feed the algorithm. We compare the results of our algorithm with those of existing algorithms on synthetic data, and we provide examples of applications to real world text corpora for both single topic model and LDA, obtaining meaningful results.

Delivering a rover to the surface of a distant icy world like Jupiter's moons Europa and Titan is only half the challenge. Once on the surface, the robotic explorers will have to contend with intense space radiation, plunging temperatures that drop to hundreds of degrees below zero and miles upon miles of ice before hitting the subsurface oceans that astronomers suggest may contain life. But NASA has a plan. "Robotic systems would face cryogenic temperatures and rugged terrain and have to meet strict planetary protection requirements," Hari Nayar, of NASA's jet propulsion laboratory, said in a statement. "One of the most exciting places we can go is deep into subsurface oceans -- but doing so requires new technologies that don't exist yet."

In Brexit Britain, robots are booting up to fill jobs held by European migrants as Prime Minister Theresa May's government prepares to cut immigration.

A quick, hassle-free way to stay on top of robotics news, our robotics digest is released on the first Monday of every month. Sign up to get it in your inbox. March is a month for change and new beginnings. The new UK Budget promised hundreds of millions of pounds to scientists and researchers to develop solutions to hi-tech challenges, including artificial intelligence and robotics, next generation batteries and new techniques for manufacturing medicines. The government is expected to allocate more than £500 million from the National Productivity Investment Fund so that UK companies might lead the way in the new technologies set to transform the world.