If you're hoping for a DJI drone this Christmas, be prepared for one teeny-tiny roadblock as you rush into the back garden with controller in hand. Today, the company has announced a mandatory "Knowledge Quiz" for all of its customers in the UK. It will live in the DJI GO 4 app -- which is basically required to use the company's snap-on controller -- and pose eight questions about safe, common sense flying. In short, you won't be able to fly until you've answered them all successfully. DJI launched a similar quiz for US pilots earlier this year.

University of Maryland and Capital One on Tuesday announced a partnership to develop a workforce pipeline in data analytics, machine learning and cybersecurity. Capital One is investing $3 million through an endowment gift to advance machine learning and the two plan to create an innovation lab where students will apply classroom lessons to real-world problems. "This partnership will not only help attract and retain top faculty and students, but will also propel UMD to national prominence and excellence in these critically important fields," said Mary Ann Rankin, senior vice president and provost at University of Maryland. Just over $2 million of Capital One's gift will be used to endow a faculty chair in the department of computer science. The remaining $900,000 will support research and educational initiatives in machine learning, data analytics and cyber security.

A robust, timely census is vital to democracy. Most crucially, they influence how resources and political power are doled out: Cities use census data to set budgets and the Constitution mandates a national census to apportion congressional seats. But taking a census is both expensive and slow--the annual American Community Survey (ACS) represents data collected over a five-year period, creating one hell of a lag. A team of Stanford AI researchers believe we can use computer vision to speed up the process, a radical approach to a centuries-old practice. In a new paper, the researchers described how they fast-tracked census data collection by using object recognition on 50 million Google Street View images from 200 cities.

Sophia, an artificially intelligent (AI) human-like robot, pictured during the'AI for Good' Global Summit It's been a busy year in artificial intelligence. Kicking off with DeepMind beating a world champion at his own game and reaching an impressive crescendo with a realistic humanoid that wants a baby, this was the year that AI breakthroughs – and our fears about them – went mainstream. On October 11, 2017, Sophia was introduced to the United Nations. That same month, she was granted citizenship in Saudi Arabia; becoming the first robot to have a nationality and simultaneously raised a lot of eyebrows, and even more questions on robot rights. It was also somewhat ironic that a robot was granted rights in a country where women were only recently allowed to drive.

The long search is over for Uber's chief operating officer. Former Orbitz CEO Barney Harford has formally accepted the position today. Looking fwd to working w @dkhos again to help @Uber achieve its full potential https://t.co/gdnXJfFrjS In early March, former CEO Travis Kalanick disclosed he would be searching for someone to fill the position amidst allegations he had fostered a culture of sexism and achievement at any cost. The company continued to suffer a number of setbacks in the months following, including Kalanick's resignation, a lawsuit from Alphabet's self-driving car company Waymo and a Department of Justice investigation.

Cyber attacks have become more sophisticated, happen faster and cause more business disruption than ever before. Preventative tools like anti-virus and IDS, have not kept pace. This is a problem, because if we are not going to make any progress at all in defending against cyber attacks we will need both automation and artificial intelligence to help win the fight. For far too long, the key strategy in defending networks has been prevention, or not allowing bad things to happen in the first place. This strategy involves defending every single ingress and egress point and protecting against all threats to these points at all times.

One of the most important issues that Congress will face in 2018 is how and when to regulate our growing dependence on artificial intelligence (AI). During the U.S. National Governors Association summer meetings, Elon Musk urged the group to push forward with regulation "before it's too late," stating that AI was an "existential threat to humanity." Hyperbole aside, there are legitimate concerns about the technology and its use. But a rush to regulation could exacerbate current issues, or create new issues that we're not prepared to deal with along the way. To begin with, one of the biggest issues in the world of AI is the lack of clear definition for what the technology is -- and is not.

When Britain leaves the European Union, many immigrants will be forced out of the country. But many of those people provide much-needed labor, and calls to automate the jobs they leave behind are impractical. Eighteen months after the U.K. voted to leave the EU, many details of the exit remain unnegotiated. But the process is broadly expected to have one big impact: a clampdown on immigration from EU countries. In fact, immigration has already declined since the vote, with the U.K.'s Office of National Statistics reporting that net migration into the U.K. is down from 336,000 in the 12 months preceding June 2016 to 230,000 in the 12 months preceding June 2017.

During his report to the 19th CPC National Congress, President Xi Jinping disclosed his plans for the future of the People's Liberation Army (PLA): "We will make it our mission to see that by 2035, the modernisation of our national defence and our forces are basically complete; and that by the mid-21st century our people's armed forces have been fully transformed into world-class forces." The Chinese media announced: "As chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), Xi is tasked with ensuring the world's largest military take a "crucial leap" in the new era from being simply large to being strong." A few weeks earlier, The South China Morning Post wrote about "China building giant facial recognition database to identify any citizen:". The project is to achieve an accuracy rate of 90 per cent, though it faces formidable technological hurdles and there are serious concerns about privacy. The powerful facial recognition system should be able to identify 1.3 billion citizens within three seconds Chen Jiansheng, of the department of electrical engineering at Tsinghua University, told the Hong Kong newspaper that the government would use this system to track wanted suspects as well as for public administration.

NASA has called a press conference to reveal a breakthrough discovery from its alien-hunting Kepler telescope. The discovery was driven by Google's machine-learning artificial intelligence software. The announcement will be live-streamed on NASA's website, according to a press release. It will take place Thursday, December 14, at 1 p.m. EST. NASA's Kepler space telescope has been searching for habitable planets since 2009.