One of the top leaders of an al Qaeda-affiliated terror organization in Somalia was killed Thursday when the U.S. military launched an airstrike from a drone, the Pentagon says. The al-Shabab official, Hassan Ali Dhoore, was specifically targeted by U.S. forces for his alleged role in two separate attacks in the capital city of Mogadishu, according to a U.S. Defense Department statement Friday. The airstrike was sanctioned by and conducted in concert with the Somali government, and although additional details of the bombing were not immediately available, the Pentagon asserted that Dhoore's confirmed death deals "a significant blow to al-Shabab's operational planning and ability to conduct attacks against the government of the Federal Republic of Somalia, its citizens, U.S. partners in the region, and against Americans abroad." The news of Dhoore's demise comes about three weeks after another airstrike against the militant group, when up to 150 al-Shabab members were killed at a training camp in Somalia. Al-Shabab denied the U.S. account, but the Somali prime minister's office confirmed the airstrike.

According to statistics presented by the World Health Organization, 1.2 million lives are lost each year to car accidents. Further, 99% of these accidents are a result of human error. Perhaps a slight delay in hitting the brakes, or some casual speeding in an accident-prone zone, it is always some self-absorbed dimwit messing things up for society. According to Sebastian Thrun, leader of Google's self-driving car project, autonomous vehicles have the potential to reduce the death toll from road accidents by as much as a half. By eliminating all involvement with the apish race of greasy nincompoops that is humans, self-driving vehicles will allow for safer, more convenient road transport. Using a host of features such as GPS, cameras, LIDAR, radar, and the company's mapping technology, Google's autonomous vehicles map out an accurate projection of their surroundings allowing for smoother and safer navigation.

A U.S. drone strike in Somalia has killed a key leader of the al-Shabab militant group who was involved in two attacks in Mogadishu more than a year ago, killing Americans, several U.S. officials said Friday. Hassan Ali Dhoore and two others were killed in the strike Thursday about 20 miles south of Jilib in southern Somalia not far from the Kenya border, the officials said. They said Dhoore helped facilitate a deadly Christmas Day 2014 attack at the airport and a March 2015 attack at the Maka al-Mukarramah Hotel, both in Mogadishu. U.S. citizens were among those killed in the two attacks, the officials said. One senior official also said that Dhoore was believed to be involved in plotting more attacks that would have targeted U.S. citizens.

The war film is one of cinema's most enduring genres; nearly every major conflict of the past century has been depicted on screen--multiple times. Films that wrestle with the rapidly changing nature of war, though, are rarer. As drone warfare continues its slow march into public consciousness, Eye in the Sky is the best movie yet to tackle the legal and moral quagmire surrounding modern technological warfare. To do that, Eye in the Sky goes granular, telling the story of one particular mission on one particular day. In the movie, opening wide today, British colonel Katherine Powell (Helen Mirren) oversees a secret operation to capture a terrorist cell in Nairobi, Kenya.

The European Union is looking to connected vehicles and autonomous driving to reduce traffic fatalities, after a disappointing year for road safety. Last year, 26,000 died on European roads, up 1 percent on the previous year. "The latest figures are disappointing. For the second year in a row, we have not managed to reduce the number of victims on our roads," said European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc, presenting the EU's latest study of traffic accident statistics in Brussels on Thursday. Disappointing though the rise is, EU roads are still among the safest in the world, with traffic fatalities down 17 percent since 2010, after a reduction of 43 percent in the previous decade.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new buzzword to talk about on the street. Financial institutions need to embrace AI, as we have explained in our January report, or else they risk to lose competitiveness or be coded by the regulators more than they can do it themselves. I am in NYC next week to share Celent's view on AI for capital markets. Today we are at a crossroad where data scientists have the computing power, the alternative mind-sets to search and the willingness to look for narrow AI solutions, not the wide AI brain that we should get to in 2030 according to experts. This enables vendors to come up with amazing solutions from Research Scaling with Natural Language Generation to Market Surveillance/Insider Trading with Machine Learning Natural Language Processing or even Virtual Traders via Deep Learning of technical analysis graphics traders look at to take decisions.

Much of today's technology reporting is focused on the potential threats posed by developments. Dangers are seen in everything from robots to flying drones and two-wheeled "hoverboards". Physicist Stephen Hawking has even warned that full artificial intelligence "could spell the end of the human race". Such concerns are not new, according to Carl Benedikt Frey, co-director of the Oxford Martin programme on technology and employment at Oxford university. "Fears about technology, and certainly fears that technology will destroy our jobs, have been with us for as long as jobs have existed," he says.

Today's robots are far smarter and more capable than the clumsy and awkward robots of the 1980s and 1990s. And although we have a long way to go before autonomous robots reach the sophistication of TV science fiction, we do seem to be getting closer. Engineers, entrepreneurs and academics from the US and UK met this week to think out loud about the past, present and future of robotics during a conference hosted by the British Consulate General, a short walk from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. The robotics and artificial intelligence sectors will be a 2.6 trillion industry by 2020, according to the consulate, with robots playing an ever-larger role in healthcare, military and autonomous systems such as self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles and surface/underwater drones. I went to the conference to investigate a simple question: are the robots we're researching, designing and building today secure against hackers?

The Pentagon, the world's largest user of drones, has posted a new policy on signs outside the mammoth five-sided building: No Drone Zone. The signs, complete with a red slash through an image of a quadcopter drone, reflect America's growing concern about the proliferation of the small, inexpensive remote-controlled devices and the risk they pose to safety, security and privacy. Federal law prohibits flying a drone anywhere in and around Washington, an area known as the National Capital Region. Other communities and institutions across the country are wrestling with the potential threat from more than 400,000 private and commercial drones now registered to operate in the skies. The pilot of a commercial jetliner said his plane nearly collided with a drone while approaching Los Angeles International Airport on Friday afternoon, sparking a search by L.A. police and sheriff's officials for the owner of the unmanned aircraft.

How comfortable are you with hard decisions? If it affected you, how comfortable would you be with losing your agency and having someone else make the decision for you? What if that decision isn't made by a person but a machine? More than abstract questions, these are going to become as divisive a social issue as genetic manipulation. In many ways, they strike at the heart of what we believe makes us human. Let's play things forward a bit; sometime in the near future, a car's travelling from Chicago to New York.