SHANGHAI--A Chinese man whose son was killed while driving a Tesla Motors Inc. TSLA -0.82 % vehicle applied to a local Beijing court to investigate whether the car's Autopilot driving system was engaged. In January, 23-year-old Gao Yaning died in a crash in the northeastern province of Hebei while driving a Tesla Model S. Six months later his father, Gao Jubin, filed a lawsuit accusing Tesla of exaggerating Autopilot's capabilities. At a court hearing Tuesday, he asked for an independent investigation of the cause of the crash. "The family insists the investigation should be done by a third party, rather than Tesla," said Cui Qiuna, a lawyer for the Gao family. The court will study the family's request.

For California state officials, the new federal guidelines on testing and deployment of driverless cars come as a bit of a relief. Until this week, the absence of U.S. government guidance had left the state Department of Motor Vehicles -- generally in charge…

Asteroid mining is coming soon to a planet near you: this planet, and in 2021, to be specific. But NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission has lots of work to do before that point. Today the space-faring organization issued an official "request for proposal" from four partners on how they would go about creating the robotic spacecraft that would perform the actual asteroid redirection in question. This mission is a bit different from OSIRIS-REx, which recently got underway. The idea there is to go to an asteroid, grab a piece and return it to Earth -- difficult enough, but it wouldn't be the first collection of "live" asteroid matter -- that was already achieved by the Japanese probe Hayabusa a few years ago (an astonishing achievement, by the way).

Wells Fargo CEO testifies, GoPro announces new drone, fast-food chain antibiotics report, and LAUSD considers starting school later. Wells Fargo CEO testifies, GoPro announces new drone, fast-food chain antibiotics report, and LAUSD considers starting school later. Warning, this video contains graphic content: Tulsa police released several police car and helicopter videos Sunday after Terence Crutcher, an unarmed 40-year-old black man, was fatally shot by a white police officer on Friday. Warning, this video contains graphic content: Tulsa police released several police car and helicopter videos Sunday after Terence Crutcher, an unarmed 40-year-old black man, was fatally shot by a white police officer on Friday.

For California state officials, the new federal guidelines on testing and deployment of driverless cars come as a bit of a relief. Until this week, the absence of U.S. government guidance had left the state Department of Motor Vehicles -- generally in charge of registering vehicles and issuing drivers' licenses -- to take the lead role in drafting regulations to ensure the safety of self-driving vehicles. Though the federal guidelines issued Tuesday are short on specifics, the Department of Transportation will take responsibility for regulating the driving hardware and software, and it has devised a model state policy that probably will take the pressure off individual state agencies. That policy, issued jointly by the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, could result in changes to current California draft regulations on autonomous vehicles. "You can imagine how the California DMV would be struggling, with no technological background or engineers at their disposal, trying to figure out whether a particular autonomous vehicle is or is not safe enough to be deployed," said Robert Peterson, a law professor at Santa Clara University.

One of the longstanding problems in spectral graph clustering (SGC) is the so-called model order selection problem: automated selection of the correct number of clusters. This is equivalent to the problem of finding the number of connected components or communities in an undirected graph. In this paper, we propose AMOS, an automated model order selection algorithm for SGC. Based on a recent analysis of clustering reliability for SGC under the random interconnection model, AMOS works by incrementally increasing the number of clusters, estimating the quality of identified clusters, and providing a series of clustering reliability tests. Consequently, AMOS outputs clusters of minimal model order with statistical clustering reliability guarantees. Comparing to three other automated graph clustering methods on real-world datasets, AMOS shows superior performance in terms of multiple external and internal clustering metrics.

Bibliographic analysis considers the author's research areas, the citation network and the paper content among other things. In this paper, we combine these three in a topic model that produces a bibliographic model of authors, topics and documents, using a nonparametric extension of a combination of the Poisson mixed-topic link model and the author-topic model. This gives rise to the Citation Network Topic Model (CNTM). We propose a novel and efficient inference algorithm for the CNTM to explore subsets of research publications from CiteSeerX. The publication datasets are organised into three corpora, totalling to about 168k publications with about 62k authors. The queried datasets are made available online. In three publicly available corpora in addition to the queried datasets, our proposed model demonstrates an improved performance in both model fitting and document clustering, compared to several baselines. Moreover, our model allows extraction of additional useful knowledge from the corpora, such as the visualisation of the author-topics network. Additionally, we propose a simple method to incorporate supervision into topic modelling to achieve further improvement on the clustering task.

U.S. stocks inched higher Tuesday in another cautious day of trading as investors kept an eye on central banks in the U.S. and Japan. Healthcare and household goods companies led the way, while energy companies slipped. Major market indexes were higher all day but returned most of those gains at the close of trading. They rose just enough to cancel out Monday's small losses. Drug companies helped healthcare stocks make modest gains, while Exxon Mobil fell on reports that it's being investigated by securities regulators.

A group of self driving Uber vehicles position themselves to take journalists on rides during a media preview at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh, (Photo: Gene J. Puskar, AP) SAN FRANCISCO - Self-driving car advocates and observers are reacting with cautious approval Tuesday to the government's 112-page directive on the transformational technology. "The devil is in the details, so we will want to take a good hard look before we comment," says David Strickland, general counsel for the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, which advocates for Ford, Google, Uber, Lyft and Volvo. Strickland is also a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. "We see this document as evolutionary," he told reporters on a conference call. "But we appreciate their effort, and the iterative process."

Companies from the Motor City to Silicon Valley welcomed the Obama administration's new self-driving car policy this week, but there is still a long road ahead full of obstacles before robots entirely replace humans as motorists. For auto makers and technology firms, the guidelines detailed Tuesday represent an early victory that steer clear of regulations with legal force and pressure states to avoid developing conflicting rules that could frustrate rollout efforts. But the government's unwillingness for now to aggressively draft firm, prescriptive rules shows how unprepared some regulators, urban planners and insurers are for an autonomous overhaul. Questions remain about whether the federal government will ultimately need to unwind decades of safety regulations to accommodate for vehicles that don't have steering wheels, brake pedals and other features designed for human interaction. Assuming manufacturers can overcome all the technical challenges of building an autonomous car, the burgeoning field would change the fabric of everyday life in a way that hasn't occurred since automobiles replaced horse carriages.