Telecommunications firm Verizon has acquired Skyward, a drone operations management company. Skyward develops software for drone operators to manage flight tracking and logging, maintenance scheduling, and contract management. The drone startup will join Verizon's Internet of Things portfolio. Kenya's government has implemented regulations for commercial drone use. The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority will begin allowing businesses to import and use drones for a range of operations.

Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. To do so, we develop a time evolving random forest classifier which leverages some unique feature engineering to predict more than 240,000 justice votes and 28,000 cases outcomes over nearly two centuries (1816-2015). Using only data available prior to decision, our model outperforms null (baseline) models at both the justice and case level under both parametric and non-parametric tests. Over nearly two centuries, we achieve 70.2% accuracy at the case outcome level and 71.9% at the justice vote level. More recently, over the past century, we outperform an in-sample optimized null model by nearly 5%.

Cognitive computing is an outgrowth of artificial intelligence (AI), which originally set out to make computers more useful and more capable of independent reasoning. But where did AI come from? The field has a long history rooted in military science and statistics, with contributions from philosophy, psychology, math and cognitive science. Most historians trace the birth of AI to a Dartmouth research project in 1956 that explored topics like problem solving and symbolic methods. In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense took interest in this type of work and increased the focus on training computers to mimic human reasoning.

Machine learning is often used to build predictive models by extracting patterns from large datasets. These models are used in predictive data analytics applications including price prediction, risk assessment, predicting customer beha... read more

Get used to hearing a lot more about artificial intelligence. Even if you discount the utopian and dystopian hyperbole, the 21st century will broadly be defined not just by advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, computing and cognitive neuroscience, but how we manage them. For some, the question of whether or not the human race will live to see a 22nd century turns upon this latter consideration. Last month, in a 17-2 vote, the parliament's legal affairs committee voted to begin drafting a set of regulations to govern the development and use of artificial intelligence and robotics While forecasting the imminence of an AI-centric future remains a matter of intense debate, we will need to come to terms with it. For now, there are many more questions than answers.

On December 15, 1791, when the U.S. government passed the first amendment and guaranteed freedom of speech, legislators were not thinking about Alexa, Siri, Cortana, or Google Assistant. People enjoy rights such as free speech in the United State and other countries around the world, and corporations are legally considered people for many purposes. As the field of artificial intelligence continues to grow and engineers pair it with natural language processing, we are increasingly seeing a voice-first future computer interface driven by intelligent assistants. And that matters, because where AI is answering, AI had to be listening. And when AI listens, sometimes it hears sensitive material.

Innovation is exploding into new territories...daily. Artificial intelligence is becoming the crux of sales strategies, facial recognition technology promises to create a seamless digital experience for brick and mortar stores, and self-driving cars will soon be carting us around as we read the news about what's next. And with all that innovation comes the marketing that goes with it. When you are creating anything new, the time will come when you have to find the best way to sell it to the masses. So you get your marketing team in there to bounce around ideas and find the best way to persuade the audience to buy the product.

After a delayed launch and one aborted delivery attempt, SpaceX's caution paid off Thursday when its Dragon capsule stuffed full of food, equipment, and experiments successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS). Now on its 10th re-supply mission, the private space company has become an essential part of the supply lines supporting an increasingly intricate space operation. After a GPS error scuttled its first docking attempt Wednesday, the Dragon capsule smoothly slipped close enough to the ISS for the space station's robotic arm to snag the craft early Thursday morning, along with the 5,500 pounds of goodies on board. "Looks like we've got a great capture," radioed space station commander Shane Kimbrough. In addition to a much needed food refresh, the capsule also contains more than 250 science experiments.

Get used to hearing a lot more about artificial intelligence. Even if you discount the utopian and dystopian hyperbole, the 21st century will broadly be defined not just by advancements in artificial intelligence, robotics, computing and cognitive neuroscience, but how we manage them. For some, the question of whether or not the human race will live to see a 22nd century turns upon this latter consideration. While forecasting the imminence of an AI-centric future remains a matter of intense debate, we will need to come to terms with it. For now, there are many more questions than answers. It is clear, however, that the European Parliament is making inroads towards taking an AI-centric future seriously.

With the use of data-centric business models and big data services on the rise, it is becoming increasingly harder to detect threats and data breaches. Cybersecurity experts are finding themselves hard pressed to keep tabs on the reams of data that are being generated by their companies and organizations. Attackers on the other hand are finding it easier to hide their malicious packets in the flood of data that is being exchanged over corporate networks. A solution to this dilemma might be found in the use of machine learning, the hot trend that is taking the world by storm and is transforming numerous industries in ways that were previously inconceivable. Machine learning can complement and amplify human efforts and help detect and block cyberattacks faster and more efficiently than before.