John Healey, the British defense secretary, tours a new military drone production facility in Swindon, U.K., on Sept. 15. Healey is reportedly set to authorize new powers to shoot down drones amid a rise in incursions. British troops will be given new powers to shoot down drones threatening U.K. military bases, the Telegraph reported on Sunday, citing an upcoming announcement on Monday from John Healey, the British defense secretary. Healey is expected to unveil his vision on how to protect Britain's most critical military bases in response to a growing threat posed by Russia, the newspaper said. Although the new powers will initially apply only for military sites, the British government was not ruling out working to extend those powers to other important sites like airports, the Telegraph said, citing a source.

Uncertainty on human behaviors poses a significant challenge to autonomous driving in crowded urban environments. The partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) offer a principled framework for planning under uncertainty, often leveraging Monte Carlo sampling to achieve online performance for complex tasks. However, sampling also raises safety concerns by potentially missing critical events. To address this, we propose a new algorithm, LEarning Attention over Driving bEhavioRs (LEADER), that learns to attend to critical human behaviors during planning. LEADER learns a neural network generator to provide attention over human behaviors in real-time situations. It integrates the attention into a belief-space planner, using importance sampling to bias reasoning towards critical events. To train the algorithm, we let the attention generator and the planner form a min-max game. By solving the min-max game, LEADER learns to perform risk-aware planning without human labeling.

This paper presents an architecture for generating music for video games based on the Transformer deep learning model. Our motivation is to be able to customize the generation according to the taste of the player, who can select a corpus of training examples, corresponding to his preferred musical style. The system generates various musical layers, following the standard layering strategy currently used by composers designing video game music. To adapt the music generated to the game play and to the player(s) situation, we are using an arousal-valence model of emotions, in order to control the selection of musical layers. We discuss current limitations and prospects for the future, such as collaborative and interactive control of the musical components.

The presumed data owners' right to explanations brought about by the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe has shed light on the social challenges of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In this paper, we present a case study with Deep Learning (DL) experts from a research and development laboratory focused on the delivery of industrial-strength AI technologies. Our aim was to investigate the social meaning (i.e. meaning to others) that DL experts assign to what they do, given a richly contextualized and familiar domain of application. Using qualitative research techniques to collect and analyze empirical data, our study has shown that participating DL experts did not spontaneously engage into considerations about the social meaning of machine learning models that they build. Moreover, when explicitly stimulated to do so, these experts expressed expectations that, with real-world DL application, there will be available mediators to bridge the gap between technical meanings that drive DL work, and social meanings that AI technology users assign to it. We concluded that current research incentives and values guiding the participants' scientific interests and conduct are at odds with those required to face some of the scientific challenges involved in advancing XAI, and thus responding to the alleged data owners' right to explanations or similar societal demands emerging from current debates. As a concrete contribution to mitigate what seems to be a more general problem, we propose three preliminary XAI Mediation Challenges with the potential to bring together technical and social meanings of DL applications, as well as to foster much needed interdisciplinary collaboration among AI and the Social Sciences researchers.