A fully autonomous ship called the "Mayflower" will make its voyage across the Atlantic Ocean next September, to mark the 400-year anniversary of the trip of the first Mayflower, which was very much not autonomous. It's a stark way to drive home just how much technology has advanced in the last four centuries, but also a key demonstration of autonomous seafaring technology, put together by marine research and exploration organization Promare and powered by IBM technology. The autonomous Mayflower will be decked out with solar panels, as well as diesel and wind turbines to provide it with its propulsion power, as it attempts the 3,220-mile journey from Plymouth in England, to Plymouth in Massachusetts in the U.S. The trip, if successful, will be among the first for full-size seafaring vessels navigating the Atlantic on their own, which Promare is hoping will open the doors to other research-focused applications of autonomous seagoing ships. To support that use case, it'll have research pods on board while it makes its trip. Three to be specific, developed by academics and researchers at the University of Plymouth, who will aim to run experiments in areas including maritime cybersecurity, sea mammal monitoring and even addressing the challenges of ocean-borne microplastics.

Every summer there is a mass exodus from New York City towards the white beach at Jones Beach State Park. Here, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, you can sunbathe, catch a concert or play a game of mini-golf. And get away from the bustle of the city. But you have to get there first. And there's something odd about the route you take. The flyovers over the Southern State Parkway that leads to Jones Beach are low.

Understanding local currents in the North Atlantic region of the ocean is a key part of modelling heat transfer and global climate patterns. Satellites provide a surface signature of the temperature of the ocean with a high horizontal resolution while in situ autonomous probes supply high vertical resolution, but horizontally sparse, knowledge of the ocean interior thermal structure. The objective of this paper is to develop a methodology to combine these complementary ocean observing systems measurements to obtain a three-dimensional time series of ocean temperatures with high horizontal and vertical resolution. Within an observation-driven framework, we investigate the extent to which mesoscale ocean dynamics in the North Atlantic region may be decomposed into a mixture of dynamical modes, characterized by different local regressions between Sea Surface Temperature (SST), Sea Level Anomalies (SLA) and Vertical Temperature fields. Ultimately we propose a Latent-class regression method to improve prediction of vertical ocean temperature.

In July 1958, the U.S. Office of Naval Research unveiled a remarkable invention. An IBM 704 – a 5-ton computer the size of a room – was fed a series of punch cards. After 50 trials, the computer taught itself to distinguish cards marked on the left from cards marked on the right. It was a demonstration of the "perceptron" – "the first machine which is capable of having an original idea," according to its creator, Frank Rosenblatt '50, Ph.D. '56. At the time, Rosenblatt – who later became an associate professor of neurobiology and behavior in Cornell's Division of Biological Sciences – was a research psychologist and project engineer at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in Buffalo, New York.

Robotics, as a discipline has been around for a long time. The increasing demand for automation, however, has seen interest in robots grow exponentially. Statista estimates that the market for Robo-advisors will be worth $225 billion in 2020. It is just one segment of the field of robotics. The increasing prominence of AI as a framework for more efficient robots has revolutionized the whole industry.

Kevin Warwick is Emeritus Professor at Reading and Coventry Universities. Prior to that he was Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University, England. His main research areas are artificial intelligence, biomedical systems, robotics and cyborgs. Due to his research as a self-experimenter he is frequently referred to as the world's first Cyborg. Kevin was born in Coventry, UK and left school to join British Telecom.

Farmers around the world are facing the urgent question of how to sustainably feed a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 -- and the answer, in part, might be found nestled among the cornstalks and soybeans on a farm a short distance from Washington, D.C. The fields are outfitted with a network of high-tech sensors that could revolutionize how food is grown across the globe by putting data in the hands of farmers and scientists in ways unimaginable a few years ago. The sensors are part of a groundbreaking new partnership between Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The 7,000-acre farm at the USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Maryland is using FarmBeats, a project that aims to harness data and artificial intelligence to help farmers cut costs, increase yields and sustainably grow crops that are more resilient to climate change. "We can't simply double our acreage to produce this food," says Dan Roberts, research leader at the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Research Laboratory, located at the Beltsville center.

--The increasing penetration level of energy generation from renewable sources is demanding for more accurate and reliable forecasting tools to support classic power grid operations (e.g., unit commitment, electricity market clearing or maintenance planning). For this purpose, many physical models have been employed, and more recently many statistical or machine learning algorithms, and data-driven methods in general, are becoming subject of intense research. While generally the power research community focuses on power forecasting at the level of single plants, in a short future horizon of time, in this time we are interested in aggregated macro-area power generation (i.e., in a territory of size greater than 100000 km Real data are used to validate the proposed forecasting methodology on a test set of several months. A. Motivations As the penetration level of Renewable Energy (RE) sources is growing worldwide to meet ever tightening sustainability goals [1], the intermittent and uncertain nature of RE is posing increasing challenges to efficiently manage a power grid, eventually endangering its own stability. In this context, the availability of accurate forecasts of power generation from RE may mitigate the impact of the increasing penetration level and improve the operation of power systems [2].

The C-130 Hercules is the most versatile aircraft in aviation history. From landing at the world's highest airstrip in the Himalayas to taking off and landing on an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the aircraft is celebrated for its unsurpassed versatility, performance and mission effectiveness. Today, 70 countries rely on the C-130 for search and rescue, peacekeeping, medical evacuations, scientific research, military operations, aerial refueling and humanitarian relief. More than 2,500 C-130s have been produced to date. The worldwide operational fleet includes legacy C-130 models as well as the current production variant – the C-130J Super Hercules.

At more than seven decades old, the United Nations has often been criticized for being too slow to respond to crises. But behind the scenes, a high-tech team is harnessing the power of big data and artificial intelligence to predict, monitor and respond to emergencies. CGTN's U.N. correspondent Liling Tan has an inside look at how U.N. Global Pulse is keeping the organization up to speed in the 21st century. Three blocks from the United Nations headquarters in New York, a veritable geek squad of data scientists, analysts and engineers are using big data and artificial intelligence for global good. Or, as U.N. Global Pulse's Director Robert Kirkpatrick puts it, "Our job is to help superheroes find out where people are in trouble, so they can rescue them."