MOGADISHU, Somalia – The United States military said Saturday it has carried out a new drone strike against the al-Shabab extremist group in Somalia, killing "several" militants. A statement by the U.S. Africa Command said the strike was carried out Friday night in Lower Shabelle region, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) north of the capital, Mogadishu. It came a day after another strike in the Bay Region, about 100 miles west of Mogadishu. Friday's airstrike was the 23rd the U.S. military has carried out this year against the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab and the far smaller Islamic State group in Somalia. The Trump administration earlier this year approved expanded military operations against extremists in the Horn of Africa nation. The latest U.S. drone strike was carried out in coordination with Somalia's government, the U.S. statement said.

BDA Goes … continued • "… using Big and Smart Data as well as methods and tools based on semantic technologies will provide more transparency, enable precise and well-founded decisions and improve planning processes, which will result in more efficient and user-centric processes and systems …" • "Integrating things, data and semantic opens opportunities for knowledge discovery, and further makes it possible to provide advanced and intelligent services."

Friday's airstrike was the 23rd the U.S. military has carried out this year against the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab and the far smaller Islamic State group in Somalia. The Trump administration earlier this year approved expanded military operations against extremists in the Horn of Africa nation.

Public perception of artificial intelligence technology, in 2017, seems to lie somewhere at the intersection of existential fear and cautious optimism. Yet there's a growing movement of people who believe AI is crucial to the evolution of our species. Ray Kurzweil, Google's guru of AI and futurism, spoke last week at the Council for Foreign Relations, in an intimate Q&A session. His views on the future of humanity might seem radical to a public that's been cutting its teeth on doomsayer headlines featuring Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warning about World War III. He's quick to point out that today, right now, is the best our species has ever had it.

The use of machine learning to garner insights about the future is one of the benefits of the technology most oft cited by enterprise. For historians, however, its true potential lies in its ability to reveal new things the past - potential that is now being realized on a massive scale. There have been a number of projects conducted by historians in recent years that have leveraged data analytics. Real Clear Politics, for example, applied text mining tools to 34 years of state of the union addresses, starting with Ronald Reagan in 1981, to analyze their political tone. They looked at the language used to chart each speech ideologically (on a left-right political scale) based on its content.

With President Trump's visit to Beijing this week, there's been a lot of nervous talk about China's growing wealth and trade. The country will soon overtake the US to become the world's largest economy, and its government is aggressively pushing innovation in everything from solar power to artificial intelligence to electric cars. But one of China's most important industries is also one of its oldest: rice. It's unclear how much rice the POTUS enjoyed during his visit, but some seems likely--not only given his reported love of the stuff, but also its role in Chinese culture. People began cultivating the grain in China nearly 10,000 years ago. Today, rice is its biggest crop, with farmers growing roughly 200 million tons--more than any other country, and nearly a third of the world's supply--every year.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union's sweeping new data privacy law, is triggering a lot of sleepless nights for CIOs grappling with how to effectively comply with the new regulations and help their organizations avoid potentially hefty penalties. The GDPR, which goes into effect May 25, 2018, requires all companies that collect data on citizens in EU countries to provide a "reasonable" level of protection for personal data. The ramifications for non-compliance are significant, with fines of up to 4% of a firm's global revenues. Companies that do business in Europe have been scrambling to put new processes and platforms in place to improve data security and facilitate GDPR compliance at a time when data volumes are exploding across legacy IT and multi-cloud environments. A logical starting point for GDPR compliance, therefore, is a full understanding of where data is stored and how it is used.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Takahiro Nozaki and colleagues of the Faculty of Science and Technology and Haptics Research Center at Keio University developed a haptic-based avatar-robot with a General Purpose Arm (GPA) that transmits sound, vision, movement, and importantly, highly sensitive sense of touch (force tactile transmission), to a remotely located user in real time. "This'real-haptics' is an integral part of the Internet of Actions (IoA) technology, having applications in manufacturing, agriculture, medicine, and nursing care," says Nozaki.

The Imaging, Signals, and Machine Learning (ISML) group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate with expertise in computer vision/image processing and data analytics. The ISML group conducts applied computer vision research and development addressing important issues of industrial and economic competitiveness, biomedical measurement science, and national security. The group consists of staff members with backgrounds in electrical engineering, computer science, and optical engineering, and frequently collaborates with partners in industry, academia, and other government organizations. To view the job description and apply, please visit bit.ly/ISML-Postdoc. ORNL is an equal opportunity employer.

John Markoff covered technology for The New York Times for 28 years. He is currently a Berggruen Institute fellow at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. "You don't get it," he said. "In China, they'll be lucky if the robots come just in time." For the previous decade, I had been reporting on the rapid expansion of new AI technologies into the workplace and how they were about to displace not only blue-collar manufacturing jobs but, for the first time, white-collar knowledge workers like lawyers and doctors. But that night, Kahneman alerted me to a largely unexamined aspect of the AI-fueled automation debate.