American surveillance drones have been flying over the Tunisia-Libya border to tackle threats by the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi said late Tuesday. He said that the drones will use his country's military bases for Tunisia's benefit. In a local television interview, Essebsi said that the U.S. drones were unarmed and they were flying over the border on Tunisia's request. It remained unclear that whether the aircraft flew across Libyan territory. Last month U.S. government sources told Reuters that American drones have started flying missions into Libya from a Tunisian air base.

Bletchley Park will once again serve as a cryptographic hub in the UK. Plans are afoot to create a new "National College of Cyber Security" in G-Block, a building which is currently in a state of disrepair. It's scheduled to open in 2018 and will serve as a specialised six-form college, teaching teenagers the fundamentals of encryption and computer science. As the Guardian reports, the center will take up to 500 students at any one time and offer free tuition, funding its efforts through venture capital, corporate sponsorship and possibly state funding instead. It's envisioned as a boarding school, however a day tuition option will also be available.

Queensland is preparing for driverless and connected vehicles, with plans under way for what the state government called the largest on-road testing trial in Australia. State Main Roads and Road Safety Minister Mark Bailey announced that Ipswich, southeast of Brisbane, would host trials over the next four years on vehicles and infrastructure that can talk to one another, as well as tests on highly automated vehicles. The trials form part of the Cooperative and Automated Vehicle Initiative (CAVI), and will see the state government recruit around 500 Ipswich motorists to have their vehicles retrofitted with cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) technology. "These C-ITS devices work by providing safety warnings to the driver about a range of conditions -- for example, a pedestrian crossing at a signalised intersection, a red light runner, or a queue ahead that isn't visible to a driver," Bailey explained. "Our interest in testing these vehicles is to help understand the implications for our infrastructure and drivers, and the improvements to automated vehicle performance when the vehicle can talk to other vehicles and infrastructure."

Townsville MP Scott Stewart reportedly wants the Queensland Police Force to look into the use of drone technology in an effort to curb what has been called a crime crisis in the state's north. According to local media, the MP believes drones are considerably cheaper than helicopters and can be launched within seconds -- travelling in excess of 100 kilometres per hour, with a range of around 7 kilometres -- from a police vehicle. "What I've been trying to do is look at as many different solutions as possible, and cutting-edge drone technology is so much cheaper than a police helicopter," Stewart is quoted as saying. "We need to use the technology now and in the future to fight crime, not costly and old technology like helicopters." Stewart has reportedly put forward his proposal to newly appointed Police Minister Mark Ryan, who is expected to raise the left-field idea with senior police on Thursday.

For years London's Design Museum got by in a former banana warehouse near Tower Bridge. Now it has moved to a cool, minimalist home in Kensington. The new building is much bigger. It will offer, says the director, far more to intrigue all visitors - and not just the hardcore design fans. In 1962 the Queen opened the Commonwealth Institute on the leafy fringes of Holland Park in London.

Bletchley Park, the site of secret code-deciphering projects during World War Two, could become the centre for a new generation of codemakers and codebreakers. There are plans for a training college to teach cybersecurity skills to 16-19 year olds at the Buckinghamshire site. Former Home Secretary Lord Reid said it had become vital to build up the "talent pool" for cyber-defence. The college in a wartime building at Bletchley is intended to open in 2018. The project, developed by a not-for-profit group from the cybersecurity industry, is planning a National College of Cyber Security, which would open in autumn 2018.

Its first operatives famously cracked coded messages encrypted by the Nazis, hastening the end of the second world war. Now Bletchley Park is planning a new school for the next generation of codebreakers in order to plug a huge skills gap in what is fast emerging as the biggest security threat to 21st-century Britain. The College of National Security, a first for the UK, is scheduled to open in 2018 in a specially adapted premises on the Bletchley Park site. The sixth-form boarding school will be free to the 500-odd applicants, with a mix of venture capital, corporate sponsorship and very possibly state funding underwriting the multimillion-pound costs. The school will teach cyber skills to some of the UK's most gifted 16- to 19-year-olds.

The ongoing evolution in advanced analytics and other emerging technologies is transforming the operational processes in government and public service agencies throughout the world. With the help of these technologies, such organisations are trying to address citizen demands, helping to overcome persistent challenges such as regulatory compliance, outdated legacy IT infrastructures and organisational cultures, according to a new study report from Accenture. In its latest report titled, Emerging Technologies in Public Service, Accenture surveyed nearly 800 public service technology professionals across nine countries to identify emerging technologies being implemented or piloted. The technologies include advanced analytics/predictive modelling, the IoT, intelligent process automation, video analytics, biometrics/identity analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing/generation. The survey found that while more than two-thirds, (70%) of public sector agencies are evaluating the potential of emerging technologies, only a small percentage (25%) is moving beyond the pilot phase to full implementation.

Automaton models are often seen as interpretable models. Interpretability itself is not well defined: it remains unclear what interpretability means without first explicitly specifying objectives or desired attributes. In this paper, we identify the key properties used to interpret automata and propose a modification of a state-merging approach to learn variants of finite state automata. We apply the approach to problems beyond typical grammar inference tasks. Additionally, we cover several use-cases for prediction, classification, and clustering on sequential data in both supervised and unsupervised scenarios to show how the identified key properties are applicable in a wide range of contexts.

Europe's Schiaparelli Mars lander crashed last month after a sensor failure caused it to cast away its parachute and turn off braking thrusters more than two miles (3.7 km) above the surface of the planet, as if it had already landed, a new report has revealed. The error stemmed from a momentary glitch in a device that measured how fast the spacecraft was spinning, the report by the European Space Agency said. The spacecraft activated its ground systems, even though it was still about 2.3 miles off the surface, the ESA said. The new image of Schiaparelli and its hardware components was taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, or MRO, on 1 November. A number of the bright white spots around the dark region interpreted as the impact site are now confirmed as real objects – they are not likely to be imaging'noise' – and therefore are most likely fragments of Schiaparelli.