This week, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration announced new safety regulations for unmanned aircraft weighing less than 55 pounds (25 kilograms) that are conducting non-hobbyist operations. In other words, the pilots and drones shooting your wedding video, trailing a snowboarder to catch the best trick as seen from above, or taking aerial footage of the horse ranch for sale in the next county now have dictates to follow. The general sUAS (small unmanned aircraft systems) rules that the FAA announced last year did a reasonable job of regulating small drones flown by hobbyists for fun. However, the rules did not make life any easier for anyone who wanted to fly a drone while making money; commercial operators were still required to register separately through a cumbersome and antiquated process involving paper. The FAA promised that sometime in the spring of this year, they'd announce a streamlined registration process for commercial sUAS.

Layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) is a recently proposed technique for explaining predictions of complex non-linear classifiers in terms of input variables. In this paper, we apply LRP for the first time to natural language processing (NLP). More precisely, we use it to explain the predictions of a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained on a topic categorization task. Our analysis highlights which words are relevant for a specific prediction of the CNN. We compare our technique to standard sensitivity analysis, both qualitatively and quantitatively, using a "word deleting" perturbation experiment, a PCA analysis, and various visualizations. All experiments validate the suitability of LRP for explaining the CNN predictions, which is also in line with results reported in recent image classification studies.

Amazon.com Inc.'s new U.S. intelligence community (IC) marketplace may make it easier for small software vendors to compete for classified business. According to Amazon Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, "Our goal is to give the Intelligence Community as broad a selection of software as possible, so we are working to help our AWS Marketplace sellers through the onboarding process so that the Intelligence Community can benefit from use of their software." To be eligible for the IC marketplace, software must already be available on Amazon's public marketplace, according to Amazon. And, according to Nextgov, "The IC Marketplace is essentially a classified version of AWS' public marketplace that allows customers to peruse -- and try before they buy or deploy -- nearly 3,000 software offerings created by 925 independent software vendors." Little information is publicly available about what's available on the IC marketplace, although it's a sure bet that companies are trying out their analytics and big data platforms.

On 14 June, news broke that someone had hacked into computers at the US Democratic National Committee, exposing opposition research on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, as well as a trove of chat logs and emails. Some blamed Russia – although as ever details are unclear. The same day, NATO announced that it was designating cyberspace as an "operational domain" for war alongside land, sea and air. Reports of one country attacking the computer systems of another – like this week's hack on the Democrats, last year's Chinese breach of the US Office of Personnel Management, or North Korea's attack on Sony in 2014 – have become common. The details of hacks may differ, but the story is a familiar one. Does NATO's announcement change anything?

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

The first spark of the idea that would go on to become Tech City, surfaced on the last night of a UK trade mission to India in July 2010. At a British Government-hosted reception in Delhi, Matt Webb, then CEO and cofounder of design consultancy BERG, struck up a conversation with Rohan Silva, then a senior special advisor to the prime minister. Their chat soon turned to London and the best way to get the small cluster of startups that were scattered around Old Street to take off, and ultimately become a viable ecosystem. "Matt said there [wasn't] a Silicon Valley-type ethos in Old Street, where you can all come together," Silva told Wired magazine at the time. "So he asked for our help." A few months later, the Prime Minister delivered a speech in which he declared that "something [was] stirring in east London", which could one day "be one of the world's great technology centres".

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Using cognitive science theories, Forbus and his collaborators have developed a model that could give computers the ability to reason more like humans and even make moral decisions. Called the structure-mapping engine (SME), the new model is capable of analogical problem solving, including capturing the way humans spontaneously use analogies between situations to solve moral dilemmas. "In terms of thinking like humans, analogies are where it's at," said Forbus, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. "Humans use relational statements fluidly to describe things, solve problems, indicate causality, and weigh moral dilemmas." The theory underlying the model is psychologist Dedre Gentner's structure-mapping theory of analogy and similarity, which has been used to explain and predict many psychology phenomena.