The US Air Force is spending $15m on a mysterious drone killing system from an Israeli firm. The contract for'counter-unmanned aerial systems' will supply 21 kits, which are believed to be earmarked for dealing with the growing threat of drones from ISIS. However, details of the kits and how they will work have not been revealed, although it is believed to be a modified version of the firm's existing'drone shield' The deal is with ELTA North America, a U.S. subsidiary of Israeli Aerospace Industries which does produce a'drone buster' called Drone Shield, pictured here. It is believed the new system mixes scanning systems with a system to disable drones mid flight, or cause them to return to their base, allowing them to be tracked. According to Army documents, 'ELTA North America Inc., Annapolis Junction, Maryland, has been awarded a $15,553,483 firm-fixed-price letter contract for counter-unmanned aerial systems.

A new study has found that humans aren't the only one's fighting about Wikipedia revisions. Researchers have discovered that software robots designed to improve articles on the site were'fighting' over content and undoing each other's edits for 10 years. The findings have shown that even simple autonomous algorithms can produce complex interactions that result in unintended consequences. Researchers discovered that software robots designed to improve articles on Wikipedia were'fighting' over content and undoing each other's edits for 10 years. Researchers have discovered that software robots designed to improve articles on Wikipedia have been'fighting' over content and undoing each other's edits.

In mobile marketplaces like the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store, there are thousands of apps that help track or care for personal health. And by and large, consumers have been big fans of these apps. According to an estimate from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), more than 500 million smartphone users are actively using a health care-related application. And, according to the FDA's projections, more than 1.5 billion smartphone users will have downloaded a mobile health app by 2018. While these apps may enable users to take better care of their personal health, because they are designed for use by a mass audience, they often lack the personalization and one-on-one experience that health care typically requires.

Editor's note: We're proud to bring NextDraft--the most righteous, most essential newsletter on the web--to WIRED.com. Every Friday you'll get a roundup of the week's most popular must-read stories from around the internet, courtesy of mastermind Dave Pell. As it becomes increasingly clear that artificial intelligence and other technologies are going to be history's most aggressive job killers, more people (in Silicon Valley and elsewhere) are re-examining the possibility that a universal basic income could provide a solution. But as NYT Mag's Annie Lowrey reports, "No experiment has been truly complete, studying what happens when you give a whole community money for an extended period of time -- when nobody has to worry where his or her next meal is coming from or fear the loss of a job or the birth of a child." But now, in a few villages in Kenya, a non-profit is looking to run the biggest such experiment yet.

Robotics undoubtedly has the potential to improve lives in the developing world. However, with limited budgets and expertise on the ground, putting this technology in place is no small task. Step forwards WeRobotics, a new Swiss/American NGO dedicated to meeting this goal through the creation of in-country'flying labs'. Co-founder Adam Klaptocz explains all. Let's start with this: what is WeRobotics?

Drones are emerging as one of the asymmetrical threats in the battle for Mosul. A series of Islamic State drone attacks on Iraqi forces fighting to retake the northern Iraqi city have resulted in casualties and a heightened state of alert as ISIS fighters supplement deadly car-bomb attacks with harassing drone strikes using off-the-shelf quad-copters rigged to drop munitions.

Telecommunications firm Verizon has acquired Skyward, a drone operations management company. Skyward develops software for drone operators to manage flight tracking and logging, maintenance scheduling, and contract management. The drone startup will join Verizon's Internet of Things portfolio. Kenya's government has implemented regulations for commercial drone use. The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority will begin allowing businesses to import and use drones for a range of operations.

Building on developments in machine learning and prior work in the science of judicial prediction, we construct a model designed to predict the behavior of the Supreme Court of the United States in a generalized, out-of-sample context. To do so, we develop a time evolving random forest classifier which leverages some unique feature engineering to predict more than 240,000 justice votes and 28,000 cases outcomes over nearly two centuries (1816-2015). Using only data available prior to decision, our model outperforms null (baseline) models at both the justice and case level under both parametric and non-parametric tests. Over nearly two centuries, we achieve 70.2% accuracy at the case outcome level and 71.9% at the justice vote level. More recently, over the past century, we outperform an in-sample optimized null model by nearly 5%.

Machine learning is often used to build predictive models by extracting patterns from large datasets. These models are used in predictive data analytics applications including price prediction, risk assessment, predicting customer beha... read more

Cognitive computing is an outgrowth of artificial intelligence (AI), which originally set out to make computers more useful and more capable of independent reasoning. But where did AI come from? The field has a long history rooted in military science and statistics, with contributions from philosophy, psychology, math and cognitive science. Most historians trace the birth of AI to a Dartmouth research project in 1956 that explored topics like problem solving and symbolic methods. In the 1960s, the US Department of Defense took interest in this type of work and increased the focus on training computers to mimic human reasoning.