CHIBA – The government and companies started a trial of a drone home delivery service in Chiba Prefecture on Monday, with drones loaded with packages flying between condominiums, commercial facilities and adjacent parks. The joint project involving the central government, the city of Chiba, research institutions and companies including e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc. is the first drone delivery trial in an urban area. The city of Chiba has been designated as a special deregulation zone to conduct the trial. In the next stage of the trial, drones will pick up packages from a warehouse located beside Tokyo Bay and deliver them to Chiba's Mihama Ward, about 10 km away. The city aims to start the drone home delivery service by 2020, when Tokyo will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and plans to ask real estate developers scheduled to construct high-rise condominiums in Mihama to set up landing areas for the craft on each unit's balcony.

Engineers, safety advocates and automakers have a safety message for federal regulators eager to get self-driving cars on the road: slow down. Self-driving cars may pave the way for the future, but industry officials cautioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during a meeting on Friday, saying the vehicles aren't up to the demands of real-world driving yet. The federal agency had previously announced it would begin writing guidelines for deploying the automated vehicles in January with the promise that they would be ready by July. Instead of issuing more strictly defined regulations, which can take up to eight years, the agency is writing guidelines instead, arguing that they needed to catch up with cars on the road that already have self-driving features included. FILE - In this May 13, 2014 file photo, a Google self-driving car goes on a test drive near the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Self-driving cars are more likely to be a threat than a boon to public safety because of unresolved technical issues, engineers and safety advocates told the government Friday, countering a push by innovators for expedited government approval.

Over the past several decades, the United States has been an aggressive first mover in a war-fighting regime centered on guided munitions and integrated battle networks. These innovations have allowed U.S. forces to operate relatively uncontested in space, in the air, and on and under the sea, and to dominate conventional force-on-force land combat. For a variety of reasons – the geopolitics of rising powers, the global diffusion of technology and counter-reactions by its adversaries chief among them – the preeminence enjoyed by the United States in this regime is starting to erode. It's an amazing document for which this first sentence barely does justice for what is revealed throughout. So, once again we are given a DARPA press release of sorts that covers a program supposedly in development.

Public debates are a common platform for presenting and juxtaposing diverging views on important issues. In this work we propose a methodology for tracking how ideas flow between participants throughout a debate. We use this approach in a case study of Oxford-style debates---a competitive format where the winner is determined by audience votes---and show how the outcome of a debate depends on aspects of conversational flow. In particular, we find that winners tend to make better use of a debate's interactive component than losers, by actively pursuing their opponents' points rather than promoting their own ideas over the course of the conversation.

We study the relationship between the sentiment levels of Twitter users and the evolving network structure that the users created by @-mentioning each other. We use a large dataset of tweets to which we apply three sentiment scoring algorithms, including the open source SentiStrength program. Specifically we make three contributions. Firstly we find that people who have potentially the largest communication reach (according to a dynamic centrality measure) use sentiment differently than the average user: for example they use positive sentiment more often and negative sentiment less often. Secondly we find that when we follow structurally stable Twitter communities over a period of months, their sentiment levels are also stable, and sudden changes in community sentiment from one day to the next can in most cases be traced to external events affecting the community. Thirdly, based on our findings, we create and calibrate a simple agent-based model that is capable of reproducing measures of emotive response comparable to those obtained from our empirical dataset.

CAPE, CANAVERAL – SpaceX has made good on a high-priority delivery: the world's first inflatable room for astronauts. A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, two days after launching from Cape Canaveral. Station astronauts used a robot arm to capture the Dragon, orbiting 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. The Dragon holds 7,000 pounds (3,175 kg) of freight, including the soft-sided compartment built by Bigelow Aerospace. The pioneering pod -- packed tightly for launch -- should swell to the size of a small bedroom once filled with air next month.

Since the first computer-managed elements entered service in a General Motors auto manufacturing plant in 1961, almost every service and manufacturing industry in the world has benefited from increased automation provided -- to a greater or lesser degree -- by robotics. And, as industries become more deeply interconnected as a result of the demands of globalization and ubiquitous connectivity, so the very nature of robots will also evolve. However, increased proliferation of robots will bring as many new or accentuated risks as benefits, heightening the need for control over our creations. Today, there are many different types of robots in commercial and private use, with form factors varying considerably from the static to the fully mobile, from the microscopic to the truly huge and from the single function-specific design to the multi-function, modular types popularised by science fiction. Risks and threats posed by robots will also vary considerably.

Although Google is selling Boston Dynamics to distance itself from "terrifying" humanoid robots, there's still plenty of robot projects underway. SCHAFT, a Tokyo-based robotics company run by Google's parent company Alphabet, presented the bipedal robot at the New Economic Summit in Japan. SCHAFT is best know as the winner of the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge that put it on the map. There aren't too many details on the robot yet, except that it can carry up to 132 pounds and can tackle uneven terrain. But it's nice to be in the snow once in a while too.

SpaceX has arrived at the International Space Station (ISS), delevering the world's first inflatable tent for astronauts. The US aerospace company's unmanned Dragon cargo ship, carrying lettuce seeds, lab mice and an inflatable pop-up room, arrived on Sunday at the space station where six spacecraft are now docked. British astronaut Tim Peake reached out with the station's robotic arm and grappled the Dragon, carrying its nearly 3,175kg of gear, at 7:23am (11:23 GMT). "It looks like we've caught a Dragon," said Peake. Four Russian spaceships - two Progress cargo carriers and two Soyuz capsules which ferry astronauts - are docked at the space station, along with Orbital ATK's Cygnus cargo ship and SpaceX's Dragon. Not since 2011, during the final flight of the space shuttle Discovery, have there been six vehicles parked at the ISS at the same time, NASA said.

Digital transformation has become a popular term in IT circles, fast becoming a priority for organisations across the private and public sectors. The government's shift to digital services and departments has been a longstanding goal over the last three years and continues to be a long-term objective, as success across online services has created more efficiency for both workers and UK citizens. It's surprising therefore that this year's Budget, as delivered by George Osborne, was a little light on the technology front and neglected the next chapter in the government's digital story. IT and technology sectors are considered to be the foundation points for economic growth and needs to continue to be a priority for organisations to get more done. Productivity plays a crucial role in sustaining this growth, but continues to be an area where the UK falls short.