The U.S. Air Force announced Friday that it's offering experienced drone pilots a bonus worth up to $175,000 illustrating the military's focus on the evolution of unmanned warfare. The Air Force Times reported that the payout would be $35,000 per year for qualified pilots who agree to a five year commitment. The report of the military's offer came just before the Pentagon controversially sought to recover some hefty reenlistment bonuses. Military officials revealed nearly 10,000 California Army National Guard soldiers were paid too much to go fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an audit first reported by The Los Angeles Times. The paper reported widespread overpayments by California Guard officials under pressure to meet enlistment targets at the height of the wars 10 years ago.

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. When it comes to new technologies and products, we tend to think of "digital" as synonymous with advanced, modern, and high-def, while "analog" is considered retrograde, outmoded, and low-resolution. But if you think analog is dead, you'd be wrong. Analog processing not only remains at the heart of many vital systems we depend on today, it is now going to make its way into a new breed of compute and intelligent systems that will power some of the most exciting technologies of the future: artificial intelligence and robotics.

Tech-savvy farmers have been some of the earliest commercial adopters of drone technology, purchasing 45,000 drones last year alone. But if they were using the drones to check on the condition of their fields, spraying their crops, or keeping tabs on livestock, most of them were technically breaking the law. New U.S. federal rules that went into effect this summer, however, should make it easier for farmers to get a drone's-eye view of their fields. The new rules allow commercial drone operators to get certified via a written test, so long as they fly drones that meet certain weight and altitude guidelines. Before this, operators had to pay for a pilot's license and get a special exemption to use a drone, a slow and cumbersome process.

I should have known it'd be you, Teddy Roosevelt. I was keeping to myself, peaceably prepping rockets for Mars, and then your armada showed up. After all the gifts I sent! When you're swatting Yankee field cannons and battering rams with rockets and fighter jets, what's to complain about? I remember when we obsessed over absurdities like this in the Civilization games.

AliveCor, the leader in FDA-cleared mobile electrocardiogram (ECG) technology for mobile devices, announced a collaboration with Mayo Clinic to utilize AliveCor's unique measurement technology to unlock previously hidden health indicators in ECG readings. These indicators have the potential to not only improve heart health but also overall health care for a variety of conditions. AliveCor provides the first consumer-ready, clinically validated and FDA-cleared ECG to give patients a more complete view of their heart health, improve proactive monitoring and create a new standard of cardiac care. By using AliveCor's deep machine learning capabilities applied to 10 million of its user ECG recordings, Mayo Clinic and AliveCor will work together to uncover hidden physiological signals to improve heart and overall human health. "Mayo Clinic has pioneered new approaches that may uncover significant measures of physiology that have been hidden in individuals' ECGs," said Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor.

Self-driving convoys were born from a simple military calculus: the fewer people driving vehicles in convoys, the fewer people will die when those convoys get attacked. In 2004, as the Iraq war entered its second year, DARPA offered 1 million to the team of robotics engineers who could make a machine cross 150 miles of the Mojave desert. No team succeeded in the first year, and the furthest only covered 7 miles of desert, but five teams completed the course in 2005. Since then, driverless vehicles have taken the civilian world by storm, with autopilot a key Tesla feature and companies like Uber and Alphabet investing in their own autonomous people-carrying machines. So what happened to the military driverless convoys?

In his prescient work on investigating the potential use of information technology in the legal domain, Lawlor surmised that computers would one day become able to analyse and predict the outcomes of judicial decisions (Lawlor, 1963). According to Lawlor, reliable prediction of the activity of judges would depend on a scientific understanding of the ways that the law and the facts impact on the relevant decision-makers, i.e., the judges. More than fifty years later, the advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) provide us with the tools to automatically analyse legal materials, so as to build successful predictive models of judicial outcomes. In this paper, our particular focus is on the automatic analysis of cases of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR or Court). The ECtHR is an international court that rules on individual or, much more rarely, State applications alleging violations by some State Party of the civil and political rights set out in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR or Convention).

The company says it teamed with self-driving truck maker, Otto, and the state of Colorado for the feat. The trailer, loaded with Budweiser beer, began the self-driving trip at a weigh station in Fort Collins, Colorado, and ran along Interstate 25 through Denver before wrapping up in Colorado Springs.

On the morning of September 1, just before a routine pre-flight ignition test, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket exploded. In an instant, the 277 foot-tall space vehicle and its 200 million satellite cargo disappeared into a ball of flames. SpaceX has been fairly mum with details on what went wrong last month on Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. But, considering it is SpaceX's second launch failure in 15 months, the explosion is a more tangible measure of the company's future than its highly-publicized (and hypothetical) plan to settle Mars. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the problem may have been operational--rather than a manufacturing or design flaw of the rocket itself.

The study said robots could replace humans in data input roles. "That is a current burden in shared-service arrangements, such as those in local government, where legacy systems may not be interoperable," it said. "Robotic process automation now provides a software alternative."