Plus: Ukrainian drones defeated US forces in a military exercise. The police-tech giant Flock is changing officers' access to its nationwide network of license plate readers. The move comes amid a backlash over mass surveillance and reports of officers using the technology to stalk and harass current or former romantic partners. To combat that, the company will require them to enter a criminal case number before searching its database and expand automated auditing of suspicious searches. But because Flock won't verify those case numbers, officers could still find ways around the safeguards. Here's what Flock is changing--and where loopholes remain .

When Face Recognition Doesn't Know Your Face Is a Face An estimated 100 million people live with facial differences. As face recognition tech becomes widespread, some say they're getting blocked from accessing essential systems and services. Autumn Gardiner thought updating her driving license would be straightforward. After getting married last year, she headed to the local Department of Motor Vehicles office in Connecticut to get her name changed on her license. While she was there, Gardiner recalls, officials said she needed to update her photo.

It may have looked like clunky blocks of circuitry, soldered together by hand in a mass of wires and boxes, but what Cowan was witnessing was an early analogue form of a neural network – a precursor to the most advanced artificial intelligence of today, including the much discussed ChatGPT with its ability to generate written content in response to almost any command. ChatGPT's underlying technology is a neural network. As Cowan and Taylor stood and watched the machine work, they had no idea exactly how it was managing to perform this task. The answer to Taylor's mystery machine brain can be found somewhere in its "analogue neurons", in the associations made by its machine memory and, most importantly, in the fact that its automated functioning couldn't really be fully explained. It would take decades for these systems to find their purpose and for that power to be unlocked.

The threat of deepfake content has become a prevalent issue since 2017, where a user started a viral phenomenon by combining machine learning software and AI to create inappropriate content with the faces of famous celebrities. Utilising a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning to manipulate and produce falsified pieces of content, deepfakes are the 21st century's answer to Photoshop. As the technology continues to develop and spread, deepfakes have started becoming a concern of the public. The World Intellectual Property Organisation states that deepfakes can cause problems such as violation of human rights, right of privacy and personal data protection rights. With this technology being relatively new, the public has not yet acquainted itself to the dangers of this technology.

Actor-critic methods solve reinforcement learning problems by updating a parameterized policy known as an actor in a direction that increases an estimate of the expected return known as a critic. However, existing actor-critic methods only use values or gradients of the critic to update the policy parameter. In this paper, we propose a novel actor-critic method called the guide actor-critic (GAC). GAC firstly learns a guide actor that locally maximizes the critic and then it updates the policy parameter based on the guide actor by supervised learning. Our main theoretical contributions are two folds. First, we show that GAC updates the guide actor by performing second-order optimization in the action space where the curvature matrix is based on the Hessians of the critic. Second, we show that the deterministic policy gradient method is a special case of GAC when the Hessians are ignored. Through experiments, we show that our method is a promising reinforcement learning method for continuous controls.

Buying a drone for fun just got a little less complicated. A court ruling has declared that civilians c no longer need to register their non-commercial drones with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled in favor of drone user John Taylor, who filed an initial petition challenging the drone registration rule back in 2015, just days after the FAA's drone registry went live in December of that year. The rule required drone hobbyists to pay a $5 fee to register their drone with the FAA's website. However, the judge in Taylor's case cited the 2012 FAA Modernization and Reform Act, signed by President Obama, which states that the FAA "may not promulgate any rule or regulation regarding a model aircraft."

An appeals court on Friday struck down a Federal Aviation Administration rule that required owners of drones used for recreation to register their craft. The ruling was a victory for hobbyists and a setback for the FAA, which cited safety concerns as it tried to tighten regulation of the fast-growing army of drone operators. Some pilots of commercial airliners have reported close calls with drones flying near airports. About 760,000 hobbyists have registered more than 1.6 million drones since 2015, and sales have skyrocketed. The FAA estimates that hobbyists will buy 2.3 million drones this year and 13 million by the end of 2020.

Nearly 50 years ago, computer visionary Robert Taylor helped lay the foundations for what we know today as the internet. Taylor, who had Parkinson's disease, died Thursday at his home in Woodside, Calif., his son Kurt Taylor tells NPR. Like many of his peers who helped build the internet, Bob Taylor, as he was known, wasn't a computer scientist. The University of Texas at Austin graduate had a background in psychology and mathematics. Taylor was inspired by the idea of expanding human interaction using computer technology, Guy Raz noted in an interview profiling Taylor in 2009.

WOODSIDE, CALIFORNIA – Robert W. Taylor, who was instrumental in creating the internet and the modern personal computer, has died. Taylor, who had Parkinson's disease, died Thursday at his home in the San Francisco Peninsula community of Woodside, his son, Kurt Taylor, told the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. In 1961, Taylor was a project manager for NASA when he directed funding to Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, who helped develop the modern computer mouse. Taylor was working for the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1966 when he shepherded the creation of a single computer network to link ARPA-sponsored researchers at companies and institutions around the country. Taylor was frustrated that he had to use three separate terminals to communicate with the researchers through their computer systems.

Robert W. Taylor, who was instrumental in creating the internet and the modern personal computer, has died. Taylor, who had Parkinson's disease, died Thursday at his home in the San Francisco Peninsula community of Woodside, his son, Kurt Taylor, told the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. In 1961, Taylor was a project manager for NASA when he directed funding to Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, who helped develop the modern computer mouse. Taylor was working for the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency in 1966 when he shepherded the creation of a single computer network to link ARPA-sponsored researchers at companies and institutions around the country. Taylor was frustrated that he had to use three separate terminals to communicate with the researchers through their computer systems.