Eighty-five per cent of senior executives plan to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020, according to a new survey of UK digital leaders by Deloitte. The findings come from the first edition of a new regular report from Deloitte, the Digital Disruption Index. The index will track investment in digital technologies and create a detailed picture of their impact on the largest and most influential business and public sector bodies. The first edition includes responses from 51 organisations with a combined market value of £229bn. Over half of survey respondents expect that by 2020, they will invest more than £10 million in digital technologies and ways of working – such as AI, cloud, robotics, blockchain, analytics, the IoT, and virtual and augmented reality.

An asteroid NASA has called "potentially hazardous" was caught whizzing by Earth shortly before Christmas, showing astronomers the dark void at its heart. The Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico used its radio telescope to keep an eye on asteroid 3200 Phaethon during its close approach to the planet, creating radar images that revealed new features of the space rock. According to NASA, the asteroid is roughly shaped like a ball and "has a large concavity, or depression, at least several hundred meters in extent near its equator, and a conspicuous dark, circular feature near one of the poles." Arecibo is in an area that was battered by Hurricane Maria earlier this year, and returned to its asteroid-watching activities this month. Astronomers at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico took radar images of the large asteroid Phaethon as it passed close to Earth this month.

The Federal Aviation Administration has a few words of warning for anyone who unwrapped a drone this holiday season. Drones were a popular holiday gift this year -- Statista estimates that Americans spent $1.2 million on the airborne machines in 2017 -- but they're also prone to crashes and accidents in the hands of amateur pilots. The FAA set out to curtail those mishaps with a video posted on Monday. If you receive a #drone this #holidayseason, you're now part of the #aviation community. Learn how to be a #safe #drone #pilot with these basic #FAA safety tips.

We owe a lot to 9th century Persian scholar Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi. Centuries after his death, al-Khwarizmi's works introduced Europe to decimals and algebra, laying some of the foundations for today's techno-centric age. The latinized version of his name has become a common word: algorithm. In 2017, it took on some sinister overtones. Take this exchange from the US House Intelligence Committee last month.

PARACHINAR, Pakistan (Reuters) - A suspected U.S. drone attack along the Pakistani-Afghan border killed an Islamist militant commander and one of his associates on Tuesday, a Pakistani official in the remote area said.

JOHANNESBURG – A group that monitors extremist organizations says the Islamic State group has posted what is thought to be the first video from IS-affiliated fighters in Somalia. The video posted online Monday calls on supporters to "hunt down" what it calls nonbelievers and attack churches and markets. The SITE Intelligence Group says the video urges supporters to take advantage of people's "drunkenness" over the holiday season to attack. The United States last month launched its first drone strikes against Islamic State group-affiliated fighters in Somalia. The Horn of Africa nation has a small but growing presence of the fighters, many of them defectors from the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group.

The United States last month launched its first drone strikes against Islamic State group-affiliated fighters in Somalia. The Horn of Africa nation has a small but growing presence of the fighters, many of them defectors from the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab extremist group.

We wouldn't trust a doctor employed by a tobacco company. We wouldn't let the automobile industry set vehicle-emissions limits. We wouldn't want an arms maker to write the rules of warfare. But right now, we are letting tech companies shape the ethical development of AI. In an attempt to help shape the future of AI, in October 2017, DeepMind, the world-leading AI company acquired by Google in 2014, launched a new ethics board "to help technologists put ethics into practice, and to help society anticipate and direct the impact of AI so that it works for the benefit of all."

Reconstruction of structure and parameters of an Ising model from binary samples is a problem of practical importance in a variety of disciplines, ranging from statistical physics and computational biology to image processing and machine learning. The focus of the research community shifted towards developing universal reconstruction algorithms which are both computationally efficient and require the minimal amount of expensive data. We introduce a new method, Interaction Screening, which accurately estimates the model parameters using local optimization problems. The algorithm provably achieves perfect graph structure recovery with an information-theoretically optimal number of samples, notably in the low-temperature regime which is known to be the hardest for learning. The efficacy of Interaction Screening is assessed through extensive numerical tests on synthetic Ising models of various topologies with different types of interactions, as well as on a real data produced by a D-Wave quantum computer. This study shows that the Interaction Screening method is an exact, tractable and optimal technique universally solving the inverse Ising problem.

The British Government is spending unprecedented amounts of money on encouraging the development of cars that drive themselves. But the UK is little prepared for the disruptive and potentially devastating changes that such cars could bring to our streets, experts have warned. While huge amounts of work is being done in the UK and elsewhere on such technology, towns and cities are continuing to work largely as they have with private, driven vehicles – by both governments and private car and tech companies – little is being done to change the cities they will drive around. That could become a problem if autonomous vehicles truly take over, as the government has both predicted and supported. That's because little is being done by either the Government or other bodies to ensure that the country is ready to embrace the challenges brought by such technology.