This article was first published on the IEC e-tech website. Rapid advances in technology are revolutionizing the roles of aerial, terrestrial and maritime robotic systems in disaster relief, search and rescue (SAR) and salvage operations. Robots and drones can be deployed quickly in areas deemed too unsafe for humans and are used to guide rescuers, collect data, deliver essential supplies or provide communication services. The first reported use of SAR robots was to explore the wreckage beneath the collapsed twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York after the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Drones and robots have been used to survey damage after disasters such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident in Japan in 2011 and the earthquakes in Haiti (2010) and Nepal (2015).

An interdisciplinary workshop on self-organization and swarm intelligence in cyber physical systems was held at Lakeside Labs this week. Experts presented their work and discussed open issues in this exciting field. "Our crazyswarm is the largest indoor drone swarm that I'm aware of," Nora Ayanian states. The assistant professor from the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles was recently described by MIT Technology Review to be one of "35 innovators under 35." She came to Klagenfurt to expound her latest results on multirobot coordination.

Microsoft Corp. is setting up a new research lab focused on artificial intelligence with the goal of creating more general-purpose learning systems. The new lab, called Microsoft Research AI, will be based at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and involve more than 100 scientists from across various sub-fields of artificial intelligence research, including perception, learning, reasoning and natural language processing. The goal, said Eric Horvitz, the director of Microsoft Research Labs, is to combine these disciplines to work toward more general artificial intelligence, meaning a single system that can tackle a wide-range of tasks and problems. Such a system, for instance, might be able to both plan the best route to drive through a city and also figure out how to minimize your income tax bill, while also understanding difficult human concepts like sarcasm or gestures. This differs from so-called narrow AIs, which are just designed to perform a single task well -- for instance, recognize faces in digital photographs.

As automation becomes cheaper and robotics innovation accelerates, how we work and who we work with will change. In this excerpt from their new book, "Machine Platform Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future,"(W.W. Norton & Company) MIT Sloan's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson identify five areas driving automation and consider where humans fit in the new world of work. San Francisco-based fast causal restaurant Eatsa -- where customers order, pay for, and receive meals without encountering any employees -- wants to do more than virtualize the task of ordering meals; it also wants to automate how they're prepared. Food preparation in its kitchens is highly optimized and standardized, and the main reason the company uses human cooks instead of robots is that the objects being processed -- avocados, tomatoes, eggplants, and so on -- are both irregularly shaped and not completely rigid. These traits present no real problems for humans, who have always lived in a world full of softish blobs. Most of the robots created so far, however, are much better at handling things that are completely rigid and do not vary from one to the next. This is because robots' senses of vision and touch have historically been quite primitive -- far inferior to ours -- and proper handling of a tomato generally entails seeing and feeling it with a lot of precision. It's also because it's been surprisingly hard to program robots to handle squishiness -- here again, we know more than we can tell -- so robot brains have lagged far behind ours, just as their senses have.

Hot off Google unveiling its own initiative for improving artificial intelligence's impact on humanity, fellow AI research giant Microsoft has announced a program dedicated to improving the planet through machine learning. AI for Earth, revealed during Microsoft's AI event today in London, will assist organizations using AI for environmental protection, innovation and research -- particularly those addressing issues in water conservation, agriculture, biodiversity and climate change. According to Microsoft, AI for Earth will operate on three major "pillars" -- granting access to Microsoft's resources for research groups, providing educational resources to teach said groups how to utilize AI optimally and special lighthouse projects that innovate AI's ability to study the environment. To that effect, Microsoft also announced today it will invest $2 million into AI for Earth, which will manifest as research grants enabling access to its cloud and AI tools, as well as technical training on its various platforms. Though a newly announced initiative, Microsoft has already demonstrated concepts for what AI for Earth could accomplish, including past work where it's used machine learning and cloud computing to monitor watershed in the Chesapeake Bay, track soil moisture levels, and power Project Premonition -- a multi-step program that aims to analyze and prevent mosquito-borne disease outbreaks.

Microsoft just announced a new initiative called AI for Earth. Headed by Microsoft Research's computational ecologist Lucas Joppa, the program will help researchers and organizations use AI to solve the major environmental issues we face today. Leaders of projects focusing on water, agriculture, biodiversity and climate change can apply for access to Microsoft's cloud and AI computing resources and it's putting down $2 million towards the initiative this year. In a statement, Microsoft President Brad Smith said, "Our goal is to empower others in new and more impactful ways to help create a more sustainable future. This program expands our commitments to democratizing AI and advancing sustainability around the globe."

Robots in Service of the Environment has designed an underwater robot to combat a growing problem in the Atlantic Ocean: the invasive lionfish.

Since joining UCLA's faculty in 1988, urology researcher Arie Belldegrun has developed a specialty: starting companies with the university's help. Belldegrun's track record includes selling his first company, the Santa Monica cancer therapy biotech Agensys Inc., for more than $500 million. In 2009, Belldegrun's Cougar Biotechnology was sold to Johnson & Johnson, for $1 billion. He's still running the cancer cell therapy firm, Kite Pharma, which recently ranked seventh in the MIT Technology Review's 2017 list of the 50 smartest companies. Belldegrun, 67, thinks most universities would have forced him to choose between being a full-time professor or an entrepreneur.

Scientists are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help predict which embryos will result in IVF success. In a new study, AI was found to be more accurate than embryologists at pinpointing which embryos had the potential to result in the birth of a healthy baby. Experts from Sao Paulo State University in Brazil have teamed up with Boston Place Clinic in London to develop the technology in collaboration with Dr Cristina Hickman, scientific adviser to the British Fertility Society. They believe the inexpensive technique has the potential to transform care for patients and help women achieve pregnancy sooner. During the process, AI was "trained" in what a good embryo looks like from a series of images.

Yuan Wang, co-founder of American Marine Research Company, details the progress his company is making in developing automated drones to identify and catch lionfish. An engineer at American Marine Research Company works on a drone on Thursday, June 29, 2017. The company is designing robots to autonomously detect and collect lionfish. PENSACOLA, Fla. -- There's a potential game changer brewing in the struggle to eradicate lionfish from the Gulf of Mexico. A quartet of engineers is developing drones to autonomously detect and collect lionfish at depths beyond the scope of human divers.