Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about today:

If you are among the scant 33% of U.S. adults who believe that humans and other living things evolved solely by a process of natural selection, it might be time to put your money where your mouth is. No, this is not a political fundraising pitch. It's a notice of the impending sale, by auction, of a piece of scientific history -- a signed manuscript page from the concluding chapter of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species." Written in the compressed, right-slanting script of Darwin himself, the sheet is numbered "245" in the upper right-hand corner, and would go on to become page 514 of the latest, 3rd edition of his landmark tome. It was likely written in 1859, when the English biologist was about 50 years old.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin last week made a dangerously ignorant prediction. When asked about the future of artificial intelligence, automation and the workforce, this was his reply: "It's not even on our radar screen," he said at a media event, adding that significant workforce disruption due to AI is "50 to 100" years away. "I'm not worried at all" about robots displacing humans in the near future, Mnuchin said. The Trump administration has repeatedly rejected evidence-based research and objective analysis on issues that include climate and human biology. When confronted with a complicated technology, like machine learning, administration officials now appear to be rejecting curiosity, too.

The U.S. military is developing a fairy-tale-inspired "Gremlin" program that aims to launch and retrieve drones in midair. "Gremlins" are a swarm of drones that can be deployed from a manned aircraft, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. military charged with developing new and innovative technologies for the nation's war fighters. The Gremlin program will allow aircraft pilots to launch the drones as needed, and call them back to the transport plane while both are still in flight. DARPA announced the Gremlin concept in 2015, when the agency called for proof-of-concept designs for the first phase of the project. Now, DARPA is moving on to the second phase, which will see the continued development of two ideas, according to Scott Wierzbanowski, DARPA program manager.

The Smart Dubai Office and Smart Dubai Government Establishment launched an artificial intelligence (AI) smart laboratory to begin training of 200 people in April and later it will be open for visits to the general public too, the Khaleej Times newspaper reported. "To move towards the future, we have to redefine government and embed AI in our services. We have no choice but to embrace technology … We want to replace call centers and help parents choose schools for their children using cognitive computing," Aisha bint Butti bin Bishr, the director-general of Smart Dubai Office, was quoted as saying by the newspaper. According to the city officials, the artificial intelligence will not replace regular jobs and will not be responsible for the human interactions, but instead will be focused on helping people to fulfill their duties better by performing quick search through the archives and other operations, where the influence of human factor is likely to cause mistakes. Earlier in January, the Japanese Mitsubishi Research Institute said that the introduction of artificial intelligence machines in Japan is expected to create 5 million workplaces by 2030.

WASHINGTON – The world's largest manufacturer of civilian drones is proposing that the craft continually transmit identification information to help government security agencies and law enforcement figure out which might belong to rogue operators. DJI, a Chinese company, said in a paper released Monday that radio transmissions of an identification code, possibly the operator's Federal Aviation Administration's registration number, could help allay security concerns while also protecting the operator's privacy. The paper suggests steps that can be taken to use existing technologies to develop an identification system, and that operators could include more identification information in addition to a number if they wish. Anyone with the proper radio receiver could obtain those transmissions from the drone, but only law enforcement officials or aviation regulators would be able to use that registration number to identify the registered owner. Law enforcement agencies and the U.S. military raised security concerns last year after FAA officials proposed permitting more civilian drone flights over crowds and densely populated areas.

In 2014 I optimistically wrote for the Knight Foundation blog that libraries could reinvent themselves in the digital era, tracing my own collaborations with the Internet Archive over the prior year and drawing from my opening keynote address to the 2012 IIPC General Assembly at the Library of Congress. Yet, reflecting back three years later, looking at just how adrift and leaderless so many research libraries have become in the digital era, unsure of how to reinvent themselves and often too arrogant and insular to reach out beyond the communities they have worked with for centuries, I am no longer so certain that research libraries and the academic communities that work most closely with them can genuinely reimagine themselves on their own. Community libraries have found great success reinventing themselves to better fit into modern lifestyles, from collaborative spaces to free wifi to ebooks to and even 3D printers and virtual reality systems, but research libraries as a whole seem to be struggling to find their footing in the digital era. What might they learn from the world of the commercial cloud and indeed the broader technological future of Silicon Valley? The commercial cloud has truly transformed how we think about computing in the modern era, from the shift from hardware to services and experts, the rise of seamless security and unimaginable deep learning systems accessible by a single API call.

We present a hybrid method for latent information discovery on the data sets containing both text content and connection structure based on constrained low rank approximation. The new method jointly optimizes the Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) objective function for text clustering and the Symmetric NMF (SymNMF) objective function for graph clustering. We propose an effective algorithm for the joint NMF objective function, based on a block coordinate descent (BCD) framework. The proposed hybrid method discovers content associations via latent connections found using SymNMF. The method can also be applied with a natural conversion of the problem when a hypergraph formulation is used or the content is associated with hypergraph edges. Experimental results show that by simultaneously utilizing both content and connection structure, our hybrid method produces higher quality clustering results compared to the other NMF clustering methods that uses content alone (standard NMF) or connection structure alone (SymNMF). We also present some interesting applications to several types of real world data such as citation recommendations of papers. The hybrid method proposed in this paper can also be applied to general data expressed with both feature space vectors and pairwise similarities and can be extended to the case with multiple feature spaces or multiple similarity measures.

The New York Police Department is reportedly in the process of acquiring state-of-the-art facial recognition technology that it will use to scan the faces of drivers commuting to and from New York City, according to the New York Daily News. The acquisition will be handled by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Once in place, the technology will be installed on the nine bridges and tunnels connecting New York City's five boroughs and will be used to scan 800,000 cars per day. The program was announced by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo last October as part of a "plan to reimagine New York's bridges and tunnels for the 21st century." The adoption of the technology was noted at the time to be a response to an increasing number of "threats to security" that New York City faces.

Stephen Hawking made an appearance in Hong Kong to discuss President Donald Trump and Brexit and he did it without having to travel anywhere. The Brief History of Time author, cosmologist and Cambridge professor appeared to the audience of hundreds at an "Evening with Stephen Hawking" event on Friday as a "HumaGram," or human hologram, to deliver his remarks, according to the Independent. The HumaGram is 3D interactive holographic technology developed by the company ARHT Media. The technology can be used life or can be prerecorded and is then only visible to audience members wearing a special pair of glasses. Hawking, who has ALS, used his speech aiding computer to discuss Donald Trump and Brexit saying that between the two, "we are witnessing a global revolt against experts," according to the Independent.