The expansive interpretation of legal authority and strong defences of secrecy wielded by a president who at least understood the risks and downsides of drone warfare will now be available to an administration that sees the world in black-and-white, rather than shades of grey. The administration, moreover, continues to resist the release of other legal documents regarding the drone programme and to defend the significant reductions in documents that have been released (whether via government leak or through litigation), including the 11-page factual discussion in the July 2010 Office of Legal Counsel memo regarding the strike that killed American citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi in Yemen. Thus, while Obama has relied primarily on the AUMF for drone strikes, he has interpreted his statutory authority broadly.

DARPA's sophisticated LUKE bionic arm is ready for production, eight years after its development began and a couple of years after it was approved by the FDA. Before the bionic limb makes the transition into a commercial product, though, the military division is giving war veterans access to its initial production run. DARPA's Biological Technologies Office director Justin Sanchez has recently delivered two LUKE arms to the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for use by a couple of vets in need of a prosthetic limb. LUKE, which used to be known as the DEKA Arm System, is the brainchild of Segway creator Dean Kamen. Its name stands for Life Under Kinetic Evolution, but as you can guess, it was also inspired by Luke Skywalker whose hand was replaced with a robotic appendage in The Empire Strikes Back. The arm can understand multiple commands at any one time, giving it the ability to move as naturally as possible.

Working in the field of big data and AI means that I see the leading edge advances that come with it. It also means routinely getting freaked out when you think too closely about the possibilities and implications of those advances and where they might be taking us. Robots and AIs Will Take Our Jobs This isn't just science fiction, it's happening now. Manufacturing are the first places we see robots and automation eliminating human jobs, but it's hard to think of an industry that will be left unaffected as robots and AI become more affordable and widespread. It's estimated that between 35 and 50 percent of jobs that exist today are at risk of being lost to automation.

How do you register your child for primary school? Somewhere, in the millions of pages of your local government website, there are instructions, but how do you find them? She's a "chatbot," a conversational application written by Singapore's government to help citizens navigate its many sites. Jamie's smart, too: Even though our intrepid user (me) was browsing a government tech site, Jamie knew the question was better answered by the Ministry of Education. Jamie's an example of how new conversational interfaces, backed by huge cloud-based knowledge bases and inferencing, promise to change forever how we relate to computers.

When we examine and value companies, we use a lens that is more than five hundred years old. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which dates back to a Venetian Friar who lived in 1500 AD, has long been the determinant of what we how society measures value. According to this now global standard, things and money are valuable assets. People and ideas, and their development, are expenses. This means that investments such as education, healthcare, training, and research actually eat away at value creation.

Uber's self-driving Volvo SUVs are shipped off to Arizona from San Francisco on Dec. 22 (Uber) Uber packed up its fleet of self-driving Volvo XC90 SUVs from its home city of San Francisco on Thursday and shipped them to Arizona following a puzzling standoff with California over a requirement that the ride-hailing giant get a $150 permit before testing the high-tech vehicles on public roads. Seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the matter, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey welcomed the ride-hailing company to his state on Thursday, saying in a statement that "California may not want you, but we do." "Our cars departed for Arizona this morning by truck," Uber said in a statement. "We'll be expanding our self-driving pilot there in the next few weeks, and we're excited to have the support of Governor Ducey." The move came after California's Department of Motor Vehicles revoked registrations for all 16 vehicles Uber started testing in San Francisco on December 14.

A central problem of random matrix theory is to understand the eigenvalues of spiked random matrix models, in which a prominent eigenvector is planted into a random matrix. These distributions form natural statistical models for principal component analysis (PCA) problems throughout the sciences. Baik, Ben Arous and P\'ech\'e showed that the spiked Wishart ensemble exhibits a sharp phase transition asymptotically: when the signal strength is above a critical threshold, it is possible to detect the presence of a spike based on the top eigenvalue, and below the threshold the top eigenvalue provides no information. Such results form the basis of our understanding of when PCA can detect a low-rank signal in the presence of noise. However, not all the information about the spike is necessarily contained in the spectrum. We study the fundamental limitations of statistical methods, including non-spectral ones. Our results include: I) For the Gaussian Wigner ensemble, we show that PCA achieves the optimal detection threshold for a variety of benign priors for the spike. We extend previous work on the spherically symmetric and i.i.d. Rademacher priors through an elementary, unified analysis. II) For any non-Gaussian Wigner ensemble, we show that PCA is always suboptimal for detection. However, a variant of PCA achieves the optimal threshold (for benign priors) by pre-transforming the matrix entries according to a carefully designed function. This approach has been stated before, and we give a rigorous and general analysis. III) For both the Gaussian Wishart ensemble and various synchronization problems over groups, we show that inefficient procedures can work below the threshold where PCA succeeds, whereas no known efficient algorithm achieves this. This conjectural gap between what is statistically possible and what can be done efficiently remains open.

Uber takes its self driving cars to Arizona: Firm abandons... How a long SONG can make you late: Researchers find... Pokemon Go's last gasp? Apple Watch version of hit game... Pandora up close: Nasa releases stunning image from... Uber takes its self driving cars to Arizona: Firm abandons... How a long SONG can make you late: Researchers find... Pokemon Go's last gasp? Apple Watch version of hit game... Pandora up close: Nasa releases stunning image from... The world of Hyrule has come a long way since The Legend of Zelda was first released 30 years ago. Nintendo has revealed a series of sketches from the development of the original game, and they're sure to get the nostalgia flowing Along with the individual illustrations, Nintendo also released a video showing a look at a sketch of the entire map from the iconic game to celebrate its 30th anniversary this year.

More cities are adding smart city features so that Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and other connected technologies can improve the lives of citizens and visitors. As everyone knows, technology moves fast and finding out what's in store next is crucial to stay in the game. Diabetics have been waiting for years for better technology to manage their condition. Some got tired of waiting and hacked together an open source hardware and software solution. The concept of a smart city has been around for more than a decade, but it was only recently that the phrase "smart city" became part of the modern lexicon.

Uber is moving its fleet of self-driving vehicles from San Francisco to Phoenix, Arizona, having failed to gain support from California regulators for its stance that refusing to obtain a permit to test the cars was a matter of "principle". "Our cars departed for Arizona this morning by truck," an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. "We'll be expanding our self-driving pilot there in the next few weeks, and we're excited to have the support of Governor Ducey." Uber's self-driving pilot program lasted just one week in its hometown of San Francisco. Within hours of the pilot's launch, multiple cars were caught running red lights, and state regulators ordered the vehicles off the road until the company had obtained a permit.