I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it's a little strange how I've ended up now--someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler's equation. It's hard to believe I've flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering. One day, one of my students asked me how I did it--how I changed my brain. I wanted to answer Hell--with lots of difficulty! In fact, I didn't start studying remedial math until I left the Army at age 26. If there were a textbook example of the potential for adult neural plasticity, I'd be Exhibit A. Learning math and then science as an adult gave me passage into the empowering world of engineering.

Large volume of networked streaming event data are becoming increasingly available in a wide variety of applications, such as social network analysis, Internet traffic monitoring and healthcare analytics. Streaming event data are discrete observation occurred in continuous time, and the precise time interval between two events carries a great deal of information about the dynamics of the underlying systems. How to promptly detect changes in these dynamic systems using these streaming event data? In this paper, we propose a novel change-point detection framework for multi-dimensional event data over networks. We cast the problem into sequential hypothesis test, and derive the likelihood ratios for point processes, which are computed efficiently via an EM-like algorithm that is parameter-free and can be computed in a distributed fashion. We derive a highly accurate theoretical characterization of the false-alarm-rate, and show that it can achieve weak signal detection by aggregating local statistics over time and networks. Finally, we demonstrate the good performance of our algorithm on numerical examples and real-world datasets from twitter and Memetracker.

It looks like a Star Trek Bird of Prey, and acts like a drone that terrorists cannot escape: A new military aircraft that's powered by the sun and can conduct missions without landing for 45 days. Airbus Defence and Space calls the new drone the High Altitude Pseudo Satellite (HAPS), but it's been dubbed the Zephyr. It has satellite-type capabilities like extreme surveillance-- but is on demand with the flexibility and versatility of an unmanned aircraft. Unlike a satellite, the Zephyr can be landed, modified with alternative tech, and quickly re-launched to provide different capabilities as required. The Zephyr could fly without landing to provide the military with non-stop high- resolution imagery for a remarkable month and a half, and it could give teams accuracy down to 6-inch resolution. Flying at about 12.5 miles high at a fixed location, Zephyr can see over 250 miles to the horizon and provide imagery in excess of 386 square miles.

The Federal Communications Commission still has some work to do on its set-top box proposal. The commission is expected to vote Sept. 29 on the measure, which would require pay-TV providers to make free apps available that would work on other devices and video game consoles. But some concerns about the proposed rules were aired Thursday at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing. A provision that requires the FCC to oversee the creation of a standard license that third-party device makers and app developers could get to deliver new ways for pay-TV customers to watch programming. Even on the commission itself there's questions about whether that is within the FCC's purview.

The Marine Corps is looking for jobs that Marines currently do which robots could do better. "Being a tiny scout and slipping through doorways" is one of them. Yesterday marked 15 years to the day since the United States formally entered into a War on Terror, and after 15 long years of war, it's not hard to imagine that there must be a better way. For the United States Marine Corps, which is focused narrowly on the work of fighting America's wars, that innovation can't come soon enough. General Robert B. Neller, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, is launching an innovation challenge today, specifically asking Marines to figure out what aspect of their jobs could be better done by robots.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has unveiled a campaign to utilise emerging technologies, including drones and artificial intelligence, to increase productivity at construction sites by 20% by 2025. According to Japanese newspaper The Japan Times, Abe announced the plan at the inaugural meeting of a think tank tasked with formulating new growth strategy policies. The panel of government officials and industry experts is expected to announce details of the construction productivity strategy before the end of 2017. The government intends to ramp up the use of drones and AI to increase the efficiency of surveys on centrally funded infrastructure projects, such as tunnels, bridges and dams. Faced with an ageing population, Japan is already leading the world in advancing the use of autonomous vehicles, with construction drones set to be used to automate groundworks for the 2020 Olympic games.

Retail sales fell in August, during what is traditionally back-to-school shopping season, as shoppers continued to rein in their spending. It was the first drop since March. U.S. retail sales fell 0.3% last month compared with July, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. July sales, however, were revised up slightly to 0.1% growth from an estimate of no growth. A drop in auto sales was expected to drag down overall August retail sales.

Economist Milton Friedman was in favor of replacing the Federal Reserve with a computer. Maybe he was on to something. To the contrary, as a monetarist he wanted the Fed to increase the stock of money at a constant, 3%-5% rate a year, a task he thought a computer quite capable of performing. The Fed's lagged response to the 2008 financial crisis and an anemic recovery since then have given a new sense of urgency to the quest for a monetary rule or rules. For economists, the main benefit of a rule is to make monetary policy transparent and predictable. Everyone knows where the ship is headed and can plan accordingly.

The role of technology-fueled algorithms in shaping our society, and how to use them responsibly, is one of the topics I'll be exploring at the Next:Economy Summit in San Francisco, October 10-11. Some years ago, John Mattison, the chief medical information officer of Kaiser Permanente, the large integrated health provider, said to me, "The great question of the 21st century is going to be'Whose black box do you trust?'" Mattison was talking about the growing importance of algorithms in medicine, but his point, more broadly, was that we increasingly place our trust in systems whose methods for making decisions we do not understand. A lot of attention has been paid to the role of algorithms in shaping the experience of consumers. Much less attention has been paid to the role of algorithms in shaping the incentives for business decision-making. For example, there has been hand-wringing for years about how algorithms shape the news we see from Google or Facebook.

It's an adage that one should not speak ill of the dead. But when conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly died last week, I was among the many liberal writers who didn't hesitate to call her a hatemonger. Schlafly, who built her 40-year career on stoking intolerance, was a vocal supporter of segregation and discrimination in housing, voting, and the workplace. She pushed to make anti-gay activism a core feature of the conservative movement. Even as the national consensus evolved toward greater rights for many Americans who had once been marginalized, Schlafly remained staunchly opposed to progress.