Patents are given to inventions, which are usually the product of a human mind. But what about inventions that come from not-so-human sources, like artificial intelligence (AI)? Should these patents be awarded to their computer inventors? Well, at least one expert patent attorney thinks so. Ryan Abbott is a professor of law and health sciences at the University of Surrey's School of Law, and he is a patent attorney at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). He is also an adjunct assistant professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA--quite the list of credentials, to be sure.

GoPro Inc.'s first drone is off to a troubled start. The action-camera maker on Tuesday said it is recalling its new Karma drone after a few units lost power during flight. GoPro said no injuries or property damage have been reported. GoPro said it will issue refunds for the 2,500 drones it has sold since its launch two weeks ago, and that it isn't offering replacements. The company didn't say what caused the power loss. GoPro said it is working "in close coordination" with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration on its recall.

When crowdsourced labor company CrowdFlower recently raised funding from Microsoft, co-founder Lukas Biewald told me his team was focused on technology that allows businesses to supplement algorithms and artificial intelligence with human judgment from crowdsourced labor pools. Now CrowdFlower bringing on more experts to shape the development of that technology. Specifically it's formed a three-person scientific advisory board, made up of Barney Pell (founder/co-founder of startups including Powerset, LocoMobi and Moon Express, who also led an artificial intelligence team at NASA), Anthony Goldbloom (founder and CEO of Kaggle) and Pete Warden (a staff research engineer at Google, where he's the technical lead on the TensorFlow Mobile machine learning project). "With all these different customers and all these different applications, we wanted them to be confident that they're going to get a high-quality algorithm," said Biewald. He's also a friend of mine from college --although we really only talk about CrowdFlower now, which is kinda sad when you think about it.) "One way to make sure all the product decisions we make really reflect the cutting edge was to get some of the world leaders come in and look at our product."

While America was looking the other way because #ElectionNight, GoPro revealed its new Karma drones have one little issue: They sometimes stop flying. The company announced Tuesday it was recalling around 2,500 Karma drones. According to a statement emailed to Mashable, a number of the drones lost power during operation. Customers can return the item to its place of purchase for a full refund. "Safety is our top priority, GoPro founder and CEO Nicholas Woodman said. "We are working in close coordination with both the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and Federal Aviation Administration.

We develop correlated random measures, random measures where the atom weights can exhibit a flexible pattern of dependence, and use them to develop powerful hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric models. Hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric models are usually built from completely random measures, a Poisson-process based construction in which the atom weights are independent. Completely random measures imply strong independence assumptions in the corresponding hierarchical model, and these assumptions are often misplaced in real-world settings. Correlated random measures address this limitation. They model correlation within the measure by using a Gaussian process in concert with the Poisson process. With correlated random measures, for example, we can develop a latent feature model for which we can infer both the properties of the latent features and their dependency pattern. We develop several other examples as well. We study a correlated random measure model of pairwise count data. We derive an efficient variational inference algorithm and show improved predictive performance on large data sets of documents, web clicks, and electronic health records.

If you were dreaming of having your next grande no-whip soy latte delivered by drone, you can forget about it. Project Wing's wings were clipped by Google parent Alphabet as it tightens budgets across the board, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, quoting people familiar with the decision. Bloomberg said the decision to end the proposed venture with Starbucks followed the departure of project leader Dave Vos, who has not been replaced. Hiring also was frozen, and some people were urged to seek employment elsewhere in the company, Bloomberg reported. The Alphabet decision comes as other companies are ramping up drone programs despite a lack of Federal Aviation Administration approval for deliveries outside test zones.

Machine learning is a buzzword that has picked up steam across several industries, and especially in the cybersecurity space we see more and more companies adding machine learning capabilities as a differentiator into their marketing materials. However, machine learning has been around for decades, and many security companies have been using it under the hood for a while. So what is changing, how much is hype and what shows promise? To better understand the value of machine learning, it's important to take a step back at how most security tools work. The traditional workhorses of cybersecurity have been signatures and heuristics.

The Washington Post plans to cover every House, Senate and gubernatorial race in the country on Election Day with the aid of what it describes as artificial intelligence. The plan is to use a data-crunching program called Heliograf, which was built in-house, to bolster efforts by the Post's team of 60 political reporters to provide detailed coverage of nearly 500 contests across the U.S. Reporters will focus their attention on covering high-profile contests and races expected to be close or pivotal, while the program fills in the gaps. "This will give readers Washington Post-quality coverage at all levels but will also be used to alert reporters to things that they may not see, or draw their attention to a particular race that they didn't expect to be a close one," said Jeremy Gilbert, the Post's director of strategic initiatives. The Post first experimented with Heliograf to cover events at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro this summer and will look to expand its use on Election Day. Using templates and pre-written previews, the program will automatically update stories as results come in, said Sam Han, the Post's director of data science.

When it comes to maintaining the mental health and wellness of American citizens, the 2016 presidential election cycle has been less than ideal. In a recent article in Politico, therapists and their clients described how the last several months of political turmoil have thrown them for a loop. One psychologist even commissioned a poll of 1,000 voter-age respondents to probe the emotional impact of the election. The results: Nearly 30 percent of respondents reported emotional distress due to Hillary Clinton's campaign, while over 40 percent reported emotional distress due to Donald Trump's campaign. Perhaps most tellingly, a whopping 90 percent of those who reported emotional distress felt that the toll of this election was worse than any other election in the past, offering perspective into the general American psyche right about now.

Language Technologies must be considered an area of particular relevance both at the academic and industrial levels. In recent years, several programs have been designed to promote research and development, entrepreneurship and innovation that have highlighted the key role of these technologies for progress and society. At the European level, we have witnessed a strong funding action in the field from the 7th Framework Programme to the H2020 that have resulted in the creation of what has been called the European Multilingual Digital Single Market. In Spain, for example, the government presented a Plan to Promote Language Technologies with an estimated investment of over 70 million euros. In 2015, a group of professors and researchers at the University of Seville faced the challenge to convene a workshop where experts from different countries could meet to analyze emerging trends in this field so that they could also envision the pace for the future.