Amazon, UPS, Domino's Pizza and other companies planning drone delivery services may be heading for discord. A preliminary NASA study has discovered that people find the noise of drones more annoying than that of ground vehicles, even when the sounds are the same volume. "We didn't go into this test thinking there would be this significant difference," says study coauthor Andrew Christian of NASA's Langley Research Center, Virginia. It is almost unfortunate the research has turned up this difference in annoyance levels, he adds, as its purpose was merely to prove that Langley's acoustics research facilities could contribute to NASA's wider efforts to study drones. Nonetheless, the results indicate the extra irritation the 38 subjects experienced when listening to drone noises was as if a car were suddenly twice as close as it had been before.

The Association for Advancing Automation (A3) cites that between 2010 and 2016, 136,748 robots were shipped to the US --the most in any seven-year period in the US robotics industry. At the same time, US manufacturing employment increased by 894,000 and the unemployment rate fell from 9.8% to 4.7%. Yet manufacturers, robotics associations, ethicists and media pundits are still fighting the robotics and jobs issue. Brett Brune, Editor in Chief of Smart Manufacturing magazine, argues that "the hand-wringing around robotics and jobs in the US really needs to stop." Manufacturers around the world, including in China, are busy figuring out how quickly to acquire robots.

I've been at every one, from the tiny one with perhaps 100-200 people to this one with 1,400 that fills a large ballroom. Tuesday morning did not offer too many surprises. The first was an announcement by Toyota Research Institute of a $100M venture fund. Toyota committed $1B to this group a couple of years ago, but surprisingly Gil Pratt (who ran the DARPA Robotics Challenge for humanoid-like robots) has been somewhat a man of mixed views, with less optimistic forecasts. Different about this VC fund will be the use of DARPA like "calls."

Pairwise comparison data arises in many domains, including tournament rankings, web search, and preference elicitation. Given noisy comparisons of a fixed subset of pairs of items, we study the problem of estimating the underlying comparison probabilities under the assumption of strong stochastic transitivity (SST). We also consider the noisy sorting subclass of the SST model. We show that when the assignment of items to the topology is arbitrary, these permutation-based models, unlike their parametric counterparts, do not admit consistent estimation for most comparison topologies used in practice. We then demonstrate that consistent estimation is possible when the assignment of items to the topology is randomized, thus establishing a dichotomy between worst-case and average-case designs. We propose two estimators in the average-case setting and analyze their risk, showing that it depends on the comparison topology only through the degree sequence of the topology. The rates achieved by these estimators are shown to be optimal for a large class of graphs. Our results are corroborated by simulations on multiple comparison topologies.

Lida Azizi, right, and other members of the Afghanistan team make a repair to their robot after their first round competing in the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge, Monday, July 17, 2017, in Washington. The challenge is an international robotics event with teams from over 100 countries. Lida Azizi, right, and other members of the Afghanistan team make a repair to their robot after their first round competing in the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge, Monday, July 17, 2017, in Washington. The challenge is an international robotics event with teams from over 100 countries. The challenge is an international robotics event with teams from over 100 countries.

An update from the Wild Wild West of fake news technologies: A team of computer scientists have figured out how to make words come out of the mouth of former President Barack Obama -- on video -- by using artificial intelligence. Soon we may see a wellspring of fake news videos. As a team out of the University of Washington explains in a new paper titled "Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio," they've made several fake videos of Obama. The researchers accomplished this feat not by cutting and pasting his body into different scenes -- but by having a computer system called a neural network study hours and hours of video footage, to see how Obama's mouth moves.

But there is something that really scares Musk: Artificial Intelligence, and the idea of software and machines taking over their human creators. He's been warning people about AI for years, and today called it the "biggest risk we face as a civilization" when he spoke at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island. Musk then called on the government to proactively regulate artificial intelligence before things advance too far. "Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react because it seems so ethereal," he said. "AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it's too late."

Police officers could soon be wearing body-mounted cameras programmed to spot criminals and missing people in real-time, using artificial intelligence. The cameras, built by Motorola and similar to those already used by some US police forces to record an officer's point of view, could also help find missing objects like a stolen car, thanks to machine learning. A prototype of the AI camera is already being developed by Motorola and Neurala, a deep learning startup based in Boston, Massachusetts that recently added its software to drone cameras to help track poachers in Africa. The smart camera will learn while it is used and "automatically search for persons or objects of interest, significantly reducing the time and effort required to find a missing child or suspicious object in environments that are often crowded or chaotic," Motorola and Neurala said in a joint statement. "We see powerful potential for artificial intelligence to improve safety and efficiency for our customers, which in turn helps create safer communities," said Paul Steinberg, chief technology officer of Motorola Solutions.

Adapted from a post originally published on the Cloudera VISION Blog. If your organization collects data about citizens of the European Union (EU), you probably already know about the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR defines and strengthens data protection for consumers and harmonizes data security rules within the EU. The European Parliament approved the measure on April 27, 2016. It goes into effect in less than a year, on May 25, 2018.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk issued a dire warning about artificial intelligence, calling it "the greatest risk we face as a civilization." Speaking at the National Governor's Association, Musk said the government should intervene. "AI's a rare case where we need to be proactive in regulation, instead of reactive. Because by the time we are reactive with AI regulation, it's too late," Musk said. "AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization, in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs, or bad food were not."