The UK government is going to lead a "major review" into what artificial intelligence means for the country's economy as part of its long-awaited Digital Strategy. Officials at the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) say its review will look at how the government and firms can work together to "back the technology" in the coming years. It is claimed, based on figures from Accenture, that AI could add £654 billion to the UK's economy by 2035. While research from the think tank Reform has suggested 250,000 public sector jobs administration jobs could be replaced by chat bots, artificial intelligence, and automation by 2030. The review will be led by the University of Southampton's computer science professor Wendy Hall and Jerome Pesenti from BenevolentAI.

The pledge is part of the government's digital strategy, which will be set out by the culture secretary Karen Bradley on Wednesday. According to the department, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is expected to give a funding boost of £17.3m to support the development of new robotics and artificial intelligence technologies in universities across the UK. Moreover, the government will also launch a major independent review to examine how it can work together with the artificial intelligence sector. Bradley said, "We are already pioneers in today's artificial intelligence revolution and the digital strategy will build on our strengths to make sure UK-based scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs continue to be at the forefront." Research carried out by Accenture found that artificial intelligence could add in the region of £654bn to the UK economy by 2035.

Ken makes a decent living operating a large harvester on behalf of farmer Luke. Ken's salary generates income tax and social security payments that help finance government programmes for less fortunate members of his community. Alas, Luke is about to replace Ken with Nexus, a robot that can operate the harvester longer, more safely, in any weather and without lunch breaks, holidays or sick pay. Bill Gates thinks that, to ease the inequality and offset the social costs implied by automation's displacement effects, either Nexus should pay income tax, or Luke should pay a hefty tax for replacing Ken with a robot. And this "robot tax" should be used to finance something like a universal basic income (UBI).

The UK government is planning to announce new measures to help artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics researchers to commercialise their breakthroughs. The Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) announced on Monday that it will include a number of AI-related proposals in its upcoming Digital Strategy document, which will be unveiled in Parliament on Wednesday. As part of the Digital Strategy, DCMS said it expects to announce an AI review that will be led Southampton University professor Wendy Hall and ex-IBM scientist Jérôme Pesenti, who is now the CEO of London healthcare startup Benevolent.AI. The government is also expected to announce a £17.3 million investment into robotics and AI that will be given to UK universities via the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). "There has been a lot of unwarranted negative hype around AI but it has the ability to drive enormous growth for the UK economy, create jobs, foster new skills, positively transform every industry and retain Britain's status as a world leader in innovative technology," said Hall in a statement.

Police in New York City are looking for the owner of a drone that crashed through a window on a high-rise apartment building. NYPD officials say the drone crash occurred around 3:15 p.m. Saturday into a 27th-floor apartment in the Waterside Plaza tower overlooking the East River in Manhattan's Kips Bay section. Police say a 66-year-old woman living in the apartment was at her computer when the drone crashed through the window and landed just a few feet away from her. Police have recovered the drone, but so far don't know who owns it. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

The US government is researching technology that it hopes will turn soldiers into cyborgs, allowing them to connect directly to computers. The US military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) has unveiled a research programme called Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) which aims to develop an implantable neural interface, connecting humans directly to computers. Human-computer interfaces are not a new research topic, but most have been hampered by slow, limited control, providing movement of robotic prosthetics or allowing humans to input text or similar into a computer by concentrating on certain feelings or thoughts of motions. Phillip Alvelda, NESD manager for Darpa, said: "Today's best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem. Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics."

A new artificial intelligence (AI) SaaS application was introduced at the RSA Conference 2017 courtesy of PatternEx. PatternEx is making the application available as a free trial to enable selected customers to see just how good it really is. AI is a fantastic tool and one that will be used in almost everything soon, and now experts are using it to detect cyber attacks in real time. The new Threat Prediction Platform by PatternEx is human-assisted. It's been proven that this approach produces around five times less false positives while at the same time detecting ten times more the attacks than other detector solutions.

Ahmad Hasan Abu Khayr al-Masri, al Qaeda's second in command, reportedly was killed Sunday in a drone strike in Syria. Israeli broadcaster Arutz Sheva cited unconfirmed reports saying a U.S. drone strike near al-Mastoumeh in Idlib province killed al-Masri, who has been described as the general deputy to al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Video of the aftermath was posted on YouTube by the Smart News Agency. Al-Masri, 59, was in Iranian custody for a dozen years until 2015 when he was released and moved to Syria. Pictures of the car in which al-Masri reportedly was traveling were posted on Twitter.

Bike Sharing Systems (BSSs) are widely adopted in major cities of the world due to concerns associated with extensive private vehicle usage, namely, increased carbon emissions, traffic congestion and usage of nonrenewable resources. In a BSS, base stations are strategically placed throughout a city and each station is stocked with a pre-determined number of bikes at the beginning of the day. Customers hire the bikes from one station and return them at another station. Due to unpredictable movements of customers hiring bikes, there is either congestion (more than required) or starvation (fewer than required) of bikes at base stations. Existing data has shown that congestion/starvation is a common phenomenon that leads to a large number of unsatisfied customers resulting in a significant loss in customer demand. In order to tackle this problem, we propose an optimisation formulation to reposition bikes using vehicles while also considering the routes for vehicles and future expected demand. Furthermore, we contribute two approaches that rely on decomposability in the problem (bike repositioning and vehicle routing) and aggregation of base stations to reduce the computation time significantly. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our approach by comparing against two benchmark approaches on two real-world data sets of bike sharing systems. These approaches are evaluated using a simulation where the movements of customers are generated from real-world data sets.

In 1849 Austria sent unmanned, bomb-filled balloons to attack Venice. UAV innovations started in the early 1900s and originally focused on providing practice targets for training military personnel. UAV development during World War I: the Dayton-Wright Airplane Company invented a pilotless aerial torpedo that would explode at a preset time. The earliest attempt at a powered UAV was A. M. Low's "Aerial Target" in 1916. Nikola Tesla described a fleet of unmanned aerial combat vehicles in 1915.