An automated army of pro-Donald J. Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at Oxford University. The chatbots -- basic software programs with a bit of artificial intelligence and rudimentary communication skills -- would send messages on Twitter based on a topic, usually defined on the social network by a word preceded by a hashtag symbol, like #Clinton. Their purpose: to rant, confuse people on facts, or simply muddy discussions, said Philip N. Howard, a sociologist at the Oxford Internet Institute and one of the authors of the report. If you were looking for a real debate of the issues, you weren't going to find it with a chatbot. "And a lot of what they pass around is false news."

The 20th century gave birth to the Nuclear Age as the power of the atom was harnessed and unleashed. Today, we are on the cusp of an equally momentous and irrevocable breakthrough: the advent of computers that draw their computational capability from quantum mechanics. US representative Will Hurd (R-Texas) (@HurdOnTheHill) chairs the Information Technology Subcommittee of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and serves on the Committee on Homeland Security and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The potential benefits of mastering quantum computing, from advances in cancer research to unlocking the mysteries of the universe, are limitless. But that same computing power can be used to unlock different kinds of secrets--from your personal financial or health records, to corporate research projects and classified government intelligence.

The Chinese military, Thursday, strongly condemned and opposed the trespassing of an Indian Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) into Chinese airspace. India, on the same day, claimed that the UAV "lost control" and entered into Chinese territory through the Sikkim (a state in India) border. According to a report by the Hindustan Times, an Indian news website, India replied to the incident, Thursday, claiming that the UAV was on a "regular training mission," lost control and crossed the border area from Sikkim. A statement by the Indian Defense Ministry said: "An Indian UAV which was on a regular training mission inside the Indian territory lost contact with the ground control due to some technical problem and crossed over the LAC [Line of Actual Control] in the Sikkim Sector. As per standard protocol, the Indian border security personnel immediately alerted their Chinese counterparts to locate the UAV."

Following news of the event, the U.S. military is dispatched to an area where residents speak a little-known language with multiple dialects. En route to the site, the emergency team feeds the location and the region's primary linguistics into a database that deciphers enough conversation to enable military commanders to communicate with local leaders. Such a capability would offer U.S. officials a chance at triage before a humanitarian aid effort begins and, in the process, improve recovery efforts, says John Launchbury, the former director of the Information Innovation Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Pentagon leaders now say this kind of machine learning and data analysis is critical to maintaining military effectiveness. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows technology to evolve as it absorbs new information.

You'll start with an introduction to Spark and its ecosystem, and then dive into patterns that apply common techniques--including classification, clustering, collaborative filtering, and anomaly detection--to fields such as genomics, security, and finance. If you have an entry-level understanding of machine learning and statistics, and you program in Java, Python, or Scala, you'll find the book's patterns useful for working on your own data applications."

IBM is ready to start shipping the first commercial server systems built around its recently released Power9 processor. Dubbed the AC922 Power Systems, these servers will ship by the end of December, and are specifically designed for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, reports Enterprise Cloud News (Banking Technology's sister publication). The AC922 is the commercial version of the same severs that IBM, along with Nvidia and Mellanox Technologies is using to build two new supercomputers for the US Department of Energy. The "Summit" and "Sierra" supercomputers are expected to go online in 2018, and could reinvigorate the US's standing in the world of high-performance computing. At the heart of the AC922 is IBM's recently released Power9 processor.

As drones and their components get smaller, more efficient, and more capable, we've seen an increasing amount of research towards getting these things flying by themselves in semi-structured environments without relying on external localization. The University of Pennsylvania has done some amazing work in this area, as has DARPA's Fast Lightweight Autonomy program. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, they've been working on small drone autonomy for the past few years as part of a Google-funded project. The focus is on high-speed dynamic maneuvering, in the context of flying a drone as fast as possible around an indoor race course using only on-board hardware. For the project's final demo, JPL raced their autonomous drones through an obstacle course against a professional human racing drone pilot.

Shares of AeroVironment Inc., a drone manufacturer based in Monrovia, soared Wednesday after the company reported strong second-quarter earnings, boosted by a growth in sales of unmanned aircraft systems. AeroVironment stock was up as much as 34% on Wednesday morning before losing some of its gains. It was up 26% at $54.49 around noon Pacific time. The company held its second-quarter earnings call with analysts Tuesday afternoon and reported revenue of $73.8 million, a 47% increase compared with the same period last year. AeroVironment attributed the gain to increased sales of unmanned aircraft systems, which includes drones, on-board cameras and sensors and ground control stations.

A leading provider of data science education, Springboard was just named one of the best data science bootcamps in the world by SwitchUp for the second year in a row! Springboard recently overhauled the course to give students an even better learning experience via their online, mentor-led curriculum. They took feedback from students, alumni, and mentors, and combined it with deep industry research to make their courses better--here's how: The curriculum now includes cutting edge teachings in deep learning and machine learning. Dig deep into artificial intelligence with new course modules, and learn one of today's most in-demand skills. They partnered with leaders at Datacamp--experts in teaching R and Python--to update the rest of the curriculum too.

A large majority of federal IT decisions makers (90 percent) think artificial intelligence could help prepare agencies to defend against real-world cyber attacks, according to a new report from MeriTalk, a public-private partnership focused on improving the outcomes of government IT. The study, underwritten by IBM, is based on an online survey of 150 federal IT managers familiar with their agency's AI plans and policies, conducted in September and October 2017. A majority of the respondents (87 percent) also think AI will improve the efficiency of the cyber security workforce and 91 percent note their agency could use AI to monitor human activity and deter insider threats. Federal agencies view cyber security as the best place for government to harness AI today, with 59 percent of the decision makers selecting it as the first AI application, followed by data analytics (45 percent), fraud detection (31 percent), and risk management (26 percent). On the other hand, just 21 percent of the respondents said they are "very comfortable" with their agency enlisting AI for cyber security today.