Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Drones can be a divisive subject, but they do have their uses (beyond causing mass panic). Professional unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) are already instrumental in conservation efforts and engineering projects, but even personal use drones do more than recording cool aerial shots of your vacation. In the case of a recent emergency in Florida, one man's drone helped save a teenager's life. Earlier this month, amateur shark fisherman Andrew Smith was convinced by a friend to come with them to Pensacola Beach after getting off from work.

The AAAI/SIGAI Doctoral Consortium provides an opportunity for a group of PhD students to discuss and explore their research interests and career objectives in an interdisciplinary workshop together with a panel of established researchers. This year, 30 students were selected for this programme, and we've been meeting them and talking about their research. In this interview, Raffaele Galliera, tells us about his work on deep reinforcement learning for communication networks. My name is Raffaele Galliera and I'm a PhD student in the Intelligent Systems and Robotics program at the University of West Florida, located in Pensacola. It's a joint program between the University of West Florida and the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), which is a nonprofit organization based in Pensacola.

The robotics group at the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Pensacola, Fla., has an enormous amount of experience with walking robots. They came in second at the DARPA Robotics Challenge with their Running Man Atlas, one of just three teams to score a perfect 8 out of 8, and they've continued to advance bipedal locomotion using both Atlas and NASA's Valkyrie. We write about their research all the time--just a few months ago, they taught Atlas to walk with straight legs, much like a human does. Humans set a very high standard for bipedal mobility. We're well designed for it in both hardware and software, and we can do some absolutely amazing things.

In this special guest feature, David McLaughlin, CEO and Founder of QuantaVerse, discusses how advancements in data science, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and big data, promise to stifle money laundering and change outcomes for victims around the globe. Financial institutions have begun working smarter through the use of AI and machine learning to help banks dramatically improve the efficiency and effectiveness of money laundering investigations. David McLaughlin is CEO and founder of QuantaVerse, an innovator of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions purpose-built for identifying financial crimes. David spent six years as a naval officer, starting in 1986 as an Ensign in the U.S. Navy and attending flight school in Pensacola, FL. He is a graduate from the highly regarded TOPGUN program, and completed a combat tour in the Persian Gulf where he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and two Air Medals for bravery in combat.

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.

In shows like HBO's "Westworld" and AMC's "Humans," Hollywood pits robots, with artificial intelligence, against humans. Half a century ago, a science fiction film about a space mission planted the first seeds of doubt about just how the human race could coexist with man-made sentient beings. "Consider the fictional robot HAL in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' " said Ken Ford, a computer scientist and founder and CEO of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, in Pensacola, which has won awards for its robotics innovations. HAL eventually turned on its master in that classic film, sending shivers down the spines of moviegoers everywhere. Some of that wariness about artificial intelligence still exists, but Ford said the fear is unwarranted, and in the case of fictional robots, misplaced.

The clever and simple two-legged robot, known as the Planar Elliptical Runner, was developed at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida, to explore how mechanical design can be used to enable sophisticated legged locomotion. A video produced by the researchers shows the robot being tested in a number of situations, including on a treadmill and running behind and alongside a car with a helping hand from an engineer.

In shows like HBO's "Westworld" and AMC's "Humans," Hollywood pits robots, with artificial intelligence, against humans. Half a century ago, a science fiction film about a space mission planted the first seeds of doubt about just how the human race could coexist with man-made sentient beings. "Consider the fictional robot HAL in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' " said Ken Ford, a computer scientist and founder and CEO of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, in Pensacola, which has won awards for its robotics innovations. HAL eventually turned on its master in that classic film, sending shivers down the spines of moviegoers everywhere. Some of that wariness about artificial intelligence still exists, but Ford said the fear is unwarranted, and in the case of fictional robots, misplaced.

Abstracts of the invited talks presented a the Twenty-Seventh International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society Conference (FLAIRS-27) held May 21-23, 2014, in Pensacola, Florida USA.

IUI-14 held in cooperation with AAAI. AAAI Spring Symposium Series will be AI Research Society Conference. Third International Conference on held March 24-26, 2014 at Stanford FLAIRS-14 will be held May 21-23, Pattern Recognition Applications University in Palo Alto, California USA 2014 in Pensacola Beach, Florida, USA and Methods. ICAPS-14 will be held Sixteenth International Conference 2014 will be held June 1-4, 2014 at the June 21-26, 2014 in Portsmouth, New on Enterprise Information Systems. IAAI-14 will be held July SOCS 2014 will be held August 15-17, 5th International Joint Conference 27-31, 2014, in Quebec City, Quebec, 2014 in Prague, Czech Republic on Computational Creativity.