On the roster: The scariest stat you'll see all day -Trump tries outreach to Dems on DREAMers - Dems set demands on taxes - Flynn pushed plan that profited his client - 'You're my boy, Blue' THE SCARIEST STAT YOU'LL SEE ALL DAY When you consider the fact that a third of American adults cannot name a single branch of their federal government, you cease to wonder why things are so bad and begin to wonder why they are not already worse. In a poll conducted for the Annenberg Public Policy Center ahead of this weekend's celebration of the 229th anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution, only 26 percent of respondents could identify the executive, legislative and judicial branches, while 40 percent could name only one or two. Americans talk openly and often about the dumbing down of our culture, what we refer to as "The Big Stupid." It is a lament, but also something of a brag for people not clutched by ignorance of this magnitude. But it's easy to be an intellectual elite in a nation where not even half of the people know what kind of government they have.

Moscow-based Kaspersky makes anti-virus software for computers. On Wednesday, the U.S. government banned federal agencies from using it over concerns about the company's ties to the Kremlin and Russian spy operatives. Kaspersky has denied any unethical ties with Russia or any government.

The "rapid" growth of a police facial recognition database could lead to innocent people being unfairly targeted, a watchdog has warned. Biometrics Commissioner Paul Wiles said the Police National Database (PND) now had at least 19 million custody photographs on it. However, it is thought that hundreds of thousands of these could be of innocent people. The Home Office said police should delete images of unconvicted people. In a government review published in February, the Home Office concluded that those who are not convicted should have the right to request that their custody image is deleted from all police databases.

Machine learning is a hot topic across the technology spectrum today. From self-driving cars, to catching nefarious content in the fight against terrorism, to apps that automatically retouch photos before you even take them, it is popping up just about everywhere. Each innovation is creating a new wave of business opportunity while simplifying and automating tasks that are generally beyond the reach of how much data we human beings can process at once, or even in a lifetime. While machine learning might seem a newly emerging trend – which it most certainly is – it is also a breakthrough that has been a long time coming. Back in 1959, computer science and gaming pioneer Arthur Samuel defined machine learning as giving "computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed."

More than a decade back while joining a large US Credit Cards company, it was surprising to see that Predictive Analytics was limited to multivariate regression and logistic models. This was in contrast to previous stints at Start-Ups funded by NASA / NIST where a broader set of Machine Learning (ML) methods including SVMs, NNs, Random or Gradient Boosting Trees were regularly applied. There were a number of good reasons for using the simpler models in Retail Lending. Firstly, Decision Frameworks were already in place that made input feature selection a relatively simpler exercise. For e.g., for Credit Decisioning, one could think in terms of 5Cs of Credit (Character, Capacity, Capital, Collateral, Conditions), and search for Data variables that catered to them.

The most exciting aspect of this transformative advancement is the potential to save thousands of lives every year on our nation's highways,

Two multi-million pound British Army drones crashed after taking off from a base in mid Wales, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed. The unmanned Watchkeeper aircraft were lost in the Irish Sea earlier this year, leading commanders to temporarily ground the entire fleet. Flight trials resumed at Aberporth Airport in Ceredigion in early July. The crashes are the latest in a series of accidents and delays to have hit the Army's new spy planes. The MoD ordered 54 Watchkeepers in 2005 as part of an £847m deal.

In three minutes, the Scout drone is assembled. One minute more, and it's airborne, tossed by a Marine. The flight is short, maybe 20 minutes at the most, but the information gained is valuable, a real-time video of just who or what, exactly, is behind that building a mile down the road. With the area surveilled, the aptly-named Scout drone flies back, and suffers a rough landing, snapping a wing. The squad can print another back at company HQ after the mission, and have it ready to go in a couple hours.

Deep learning is cutting edge artificial intelligence. It's what Google used to build AlphaGo, which beat the world champion of board game Go earlier this year in China. And it's being used by many of the world's top tech companies as the basis for recommender systems, fraud detection and cybersecurity. Government should be using deep learning, because it is a sophisticated tool that can help agencies fulfill their mission for use cases as diverse as risk profiling, cost forecasting and the analysis of satellite imagery. An additional benefit that supports both recent governmentwide policy and tight budgets is that most of the best deep-learning algorithms are open source.

Swamped by too much raw intel data to sift through, US spy agencies are pinning their hopes on artificial intelligence to crunch billions of digital bits and understand events around the world. Dawn Meyerriecks, the CIA's deputy director for technology development, said this week the CIA currently has 137 different AI projects, many of them with developers in Silicon Valley. These range from trying to predict significant future events, by finding correlations in data shifts and other evidence, to having computers tag objects or individuals in video that can draw the attention of intelligence analysts. Officials of other key spy agencies at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington this week, including military intelligence, also said they were seeking AI-based solutions for turning terabytes of digital data coming in daily into trustworthy intelligence that can be used for policy and battlefield action. AI has widespread functions, from battlefield weapons to the potential to help quickly rebuild computer systems and programs brought down by hacking attacks, as one official described.