Whether it is the Irish backstop or English Channel, the issue of how the UK and Europe are controlling their borders has been thrust into the public consciousness. And as with many of the globe's conundrums, countries and private companies are turning to ever more futuristic, and often controversial, technologies in order to protect their borders. There are, of course, immediate issues for Britain's borders with quandaries such as the potential hard border in Northern Ireland following Brexit, with the nebulous'technology' promised by some politicians either still being developed or put under question. One such future proposal is a satellite system that registered mobile phones as they pass the border, while sensors buried in the ground or radars on flying drones could detect possible unlawful breaches of the boundaries. But that would still leave the question of invasive, even if largely invisible, checks that run against the Good Friday Agreement.

Last year, after breaking the Guinness World Record for the Key West to Cuba run, we wondered what was next for the #77 Lucas Oil SilverHook ocean racing powerboat? We found the answer in the 50th anniversary of the Trinidad & Tobago Great Race, one of the most grueling races in the world. The 115-mile endurance course starts in Trinidad's Port of Spain, where you head north and then east near the island before popping into the Atlantic Ocean for a 50-mile sprint to the finish in Store Bay, Tobago. Because of the logistical difficulties of racing on foreign shores, we were the first American entry in 29 years. We knew we would face stiff competition from Jumbie, Cat Killer, Mr. Solo and other local rivals that know the course well.

This article explores the concepts of ocean wave multivariate multistep forecasting, reconstruction and feature selection. We introduce recurrent neural network frameworks, integrated with Bayesian hyperparameter optimization and Elastic Net methods. We consider both short- and long-term forecasts and reconstruction, for significant wave height and output power of the ocean waves. Sequence-to-sequence neural networks are being developed for the first time to reconstruct the missing characteristics of ocean waves based on information from nearby wave sensors. Our results indicate that the Adam and AMSGrad optimization algorithms are the most robust ones to optimize the sequence-to-sequence network. For the case of significant wave height reconstruction, we compare the proposed methods with alternatives on a well-studied dataset. We show the superiority of the proposed methods considering several error metrics. We design a new case study based on measurement stations along the east coast of the United States and investigate the feature selection concept. Comparisons substantiate the benefit of utilizing Elastic Net. Moreover, case study results indicate that when the number of features is considerable, having deeper structures improves the performance.

Continuous queries over data streams may suffer from blocking operations and/or unbound wait, which may delay answers until some relevant input arrives through the data stream. These delays may turn answers, when they arrive, obsolete to users who sometimes have to make decisions with no help whatsoever. Therefore, it can be useful to provide hypothetical answers - "given the current information, it is possible that X will become true at time t" - instead of no information at all. In this paper we present a semantics for queries and corresponding answers that covers such hypothetical answers, together with an online algorithm for updating the set of facts that are consistent with the currently available information.

Bioacoustic sensors, sometimes known as autonomous recording units (ARUs), can record sounds of wildlife over long periods of time in scalable and minimally invasive ways. Deriving per-species abundance estimates from these sensors requires detection, classification, and quantification of animal vocalizations as individual acoustic events. Yet, variability in ambient noise, both over time and across sensors, hinders the reliability of current automated systems for sound event detection (SED), such as convolutional neural networks (CNN) in the time-frequency domain. In this article, we develop, benchmark, and combine several machine listening techniques to improve the generalizability of SED models across heterogeneous acoustic environments. As a case study, we consider the problem of detecting avian flight calls from a ten-hour recording of nocturnal bird migration, recorded by a network of six ARUs in the presence of heterogeneous background noise. Starting from a CNN yielding state-of-the-art accuracy on this task, we introduce two noise adaptation techniques, respectively integrating short-term (60-millisecond) and long-term (30-minute) context. First, we apply per-channel energy normalization (PCEN) in the time-frequency domain, which applies short-term automatic gain control to every subband in the mel-frequency spectrogram. Secondly, we replace the last dense layer in the network by a context-adaptive neural network (CA-NN) layer, i.e. an affine layer whose weights are dynamically adapted at prediction time by an auxiliary network taking long-term summary statistics of spectrotemporal features as input. We show that both techniques are helpful and complementary. [...] We release a pre-trained version of our best performing system under the name of BirdVoxDetect, a ready-to-use detector of avian flight calls in field recordings.

A boat carrying a cargo of British oysters across the English Channel has become the world's first ever shipment completed using remote control. Mersea Island molluscs were on-board the 40-foot (12 m) long Sea-Kit vessel heading to Orstend in Belgium and there was not a single human being on-board. It successfully completed the delivery of the 11 pounds (5kg) of shellfish and then made a return journey with some Belgian beer on-board. Myriad technological gadgets and innovations fed data back to a control room in Maldon, Essex where two workers completed the 22-hour trip. The British vessel is equipped with cameras, radar, microphones, thermal imaging and a back-up autonomous system to keep it and other sea-goers safe.

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA - A SpaceX shipment arrived at the International Space Station on Monday with a "cosmic catch" by a pair of Canadians. The Dragon capsule delivered 5,500 pounds (2,500 kg) of equipment and experiments. Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques used the station's big robot arm -- also made in Canada -- to capture the Dragon approximately 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the North Atlantic Ocean. An external cable that normally comes off during launch dangled from the capsule, but it did not interfere with the grappling. "Welcome on board, Dragon," Saint-Jacques radioed. He congratulated ground teams for their help, in both English and French.

Total SA plans to start a digital factory in the coming weeks to tap artificial intelligence in a bid to save hundreds of millions of dollars on exploration and production projects, according to an executive. The use of artificial intelligence to screen geological data will help identify new prospects, and shorten the time to acquire licenses, drill and make discoveries, Arnaud Breuillac, head of E&P, said at a conference organized by IFP Energies Nouvelles in Paris on Friday. It will also help optimize the use of equipment and reduce maintenance costs, he said. The digital factory will employ between 200 and 300 engineers and build on successful North Sea pilot projects, Chief Executive Officer Patrick Pouyanne said at the same event. It will also be a way to attract "young talent" to the industry.

SpaceX says it lost the Falcon Heavy's center core after'rough sea conditions' caused it to topple over as it was being transported back to the Florida coast. Elon Musk's rocket company managed to make history on Thursday when it landed three boosters back on Earth for the first time, following the Falcon Heavy megarocket's successful second launch into space. But as ocean swells continued to rise, wave heights caused the center core to fall off of the company's drone ship, dubbed'Of Course I Still Love You,' which is stationed in the Atlantic Ocean, according to the Verge. SpaceX says it lost the Falcon Heavy's center core (pictured) after'rough sea conditions' caused it to topple over as it was being transported back to the Florida coast'Over the weekend, due to rough sea conditions, SpaceX's recovery team was unable to secure the center booster for its return trip to Port Canaveral,' SpaceX said in a statement. 'As conditions worsened with eight to ten foot swells, the booster began to shift and ultimately was unable to remain upright.

Russia has been manipulating global satellite positioning (GPS) locations on a vast scale in order to protect Vladimir Putin from drones, according to a report. The Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a Washington-based research organisation, undertook a year-long investigation ending in November 2018 into the manipulation of GPS and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS). Their report, which drew upon publicly available satellite data, found that the tactic was used in Russia, the Ukraine and Syria, with some incidents of spoofing, correlating closely with the movements of Putin. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.