They don't transport people around, but drones would fall under Elaine Chao's purview if President-elect Donald Trump's nominee is confirmed as secretary of Transportation. In the role, Chao -- who was Labor secretary under George W. Bush -- would oversee the nation's transportation systems and infrastructure, a wide-ranging job that also encompasses cars, trains and ships. Among the questions she'll have to answer on the drone front: whether the unmanned aerial vehicles will eventually be allowed to fly farther than their operators can see, function autonomously and fly over people on the ground. Silicon Valley voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, but companies working on driverless cars seem overjoyed with President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for transportation secretary, Elaine Chao. Chao will wield great power over how driverless cars and other automated vehicles will be regulated –... Silicon Valley voted heavily for Hillary Clinton, but companies working on driverless cars seem overjoyed with President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for transportation secretary, Elaine Chao.

The United Nations forecasts that the global population will rise from 7.3 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, a big number that often prompts warnings about overpopulation. Some have come from neo-Malthusians, who fear that population growth will outstrip the food supply, leaving a hungry planet. Others appear in the tirades of anti-immigrant populists, invoking the specter of a rising tide of humanity as cause to slam borders shut. Still others inspire a chorus of neo-Luddites, who fear that the "rise of the robots" is rapidly making human workers obsolete, a threat all the more alarming if the human population is exploding. They may be the one thing that can protect the global economy from the dangers that lie ahead.

Cecila Malmstrom publicly speaks of torture. On October 4, when the European politician stood up in parliament to give her support for laws banning the export of items used for implementing the death penalty, there should have been little controversy. But when footage of her speech was posted online, nobody saw it. YouTube removed the video, which had been uploaded by fellow MEP Marietje Schaake. "I did not know whether this decision was made by a human or whether this was the result of an automated decision," the Dutch politician told WIRED.

MIT researchers have unveiled a new way for consumers and businesses to take to the skies -- by designing and developing their own drones. The program, created by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is a prototype computer system (.PDF) which allows users to create a variety of drones. According to the lab, users can design, simulate and build custom drones, altering the size, shape, and structure depending on how they want their drones fabricated and their purpose -- which impacts on factors including payload tolerance, flight time, and battery life. To demonstrate the system, CSAIL created a range of unusual drones, including a five-rotor "pentacopter" and a rabbit-shaped "bunnycopter." MIT says the program could pave the way for businesses and consumers to develop new drones able to perform a wider variety of functions.

A few weeks ago, Montreal-based AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio launched Element AI, a Silicon Valley-style startup incubator dedicated to deep learning. Despite its modest (but growing) startup scene, Montreal is already a hotbed in AI talent, with a trove of deep learning researchers across the city. Bengio -- along with Jean-François Gagné, Nicolas Chapados, Jean-Sébastien Cournoyer, and the rest of their team of tech mavericks -- is hoping to accelerate the proliferation of AI startups and researchers in Montreal to turn the city into an AI center. As a proud Montrealer and bot maker, I couldn't be happier with this news. Surprisingly, though, the launch received some mixed feedback locally.

The new chief spokesman for the Islamic State group (also called ISIS) promised attacks on the United States, Russia, Europe and Iran in his first address to the terrorist outfit's followers, which was released Monday by ISIS's al-Furqan media division. The audio recording named Abu Hassan al-Muhajir as the successor to Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, who was killed in a U.S. drone strike near al-Bab, Syria, on Aug. 30. In a chilling message -- titled "For You Will Remember What I Tell You" -- aimed at the West and ISIS's regional adversaries, Muhajir called on the group's fighters to target its enemies. According to a translation by Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence Group, Muhajir said in the message: "We will attack them in their own countries. Your operations make a difference … change the situation. Attack them in their markets, roads, clubs and any unexpected location and burn the ground under their feet."

Microsoft is taking another shot at giving users a friendly AI-driven bot conversation partner. On Monday, the company released Zo, a chatbot that users can converse with on Kik, the popular messaging platform. Zo is a follow-up to Tay, the tech giant's first foray into friendly, English-speaking chatbots. It's clear that the company has learned from its first attempt, when the friendly chatbot was turned into a font of white supremacist propaganda by malicious users. In contrast, Zo adamantly refuses to discuss political matters.

JPL and National Cancer Institute Renew Big Data Partnership Every day, NASA spacecraft beam down hundreds of petabytes of data, all of which has to be codified, stored and distributed to scientists across the globe. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping to "read" this data as well, highlighting similarities between datasets that scientists might miss. For the past 15 years, the big data techniques pioneered by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been revolutionizing biomedical research. On Sept. 6, 2016, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health, renewed a research partnership through 2021, extending the development of data science that originated in space exploration and is now supporting new cancer discoveries. The NCI-supported Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) is a consortium of biomedical investigators who share anonymized data on cancer biomarkers, chemical or genetic signatures related to specific cancers.

Deportation policies: An article in the Nov. 26 Section A about deportation policies stated that low-level crimes that are considered deportable offenses can include immigration or traffic violations. According to enforcement policies set by the Department of Homeland Security in 2014, minor traffic offenses and any crime for which an essential element is immigration status are excluded and do not make a person eligible for deportation. Also, the article said that Mayra Machado, who has spent a year in immigration detention, had pleaded guilty to one felony charge involving a forged check 12 years ago, when she was 18. She pleaded guilty to three felony charges in the case: forgery, theft by receiving and failure to appear. The victims of the deadly Oakland fire, who's to blame for one of the worst fires in California history, Dakota Access pipeline opponents have claimed a big victory for now, and robots are taking over many warehouse jobs in California.

Cecila Malmstrom publicly speaks of torture. On October 4, when the European politician stood up in parliament to give her support for laws banning the export of items used for implementing the death penalty, there should have been little controversy. But when footage of her speech was posted online, nobody saw it. YouTube removed the video, which had been uploaded by fellow MEP Marietje Schaake. "I did not know whether this decision was made by a human or whether this was the result of an automated decision," the Dutch politician told WIRED.