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China launches its first mission to bring moon rocks back to Earth

MIT Technology Review

China launched its Chang'e 5 mission to the moon early Tuesday morning local time from the country's launch site on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. The country is seeking to bring soil and rock samples from the lunar surface back to Earth for the first time in its history, for scientific study. What's going to happen: Chang'e 5 should make it to the moon on November 27. The entire mission consists of four parts: an orbiter, a lander, an ascent stage, and a return capsule. The spacecraft are not equipped with any heating units to help the onboard electronics withstand the super-cold temperatures of the lunar night. That means the mission must collect its sample and start heading back to Earth within 14 days (the length of the lunar day).


China has launched its most advanced mission to the moon yet

New Scientist

China launched its Chang'e 5 spacecraft on 23 November, in the first mission designed to bring moon rocks back to Earth in more than four decades. The uncrewed Chang'e 5 probe will attempt to collect at least 2 kilograms of lunar dust and debris from the northern region of the Oceanus Procellarum, a previously unvisited area on the near side of the moon. If successful, the Chang'e 5 return mission will make China only the third country, after the US and the Soviet Union, to have retrieved samples from the moon. The last sample return mission was carried out in 1976 by the Soviet Union's Luna 24 robotic probe, which brought back around 170 grams to Earth. The Chang'e 5 launch happened early on Tuesday morning, Beijing time, from a Long March 5 rocket at a site in Wenchang on Hainan Island in the South China Sea.


New Chinese submersible reaches Earth's deepest ocean trench

The Japan Times

Beijing – China livestreamed footage of its new manned submersible parked at the bottom of the Mariana Trench on Friday, part of a historic mission into the deepest underwater valley on the planet. The "Fendouzhe," or "Striver," descended more than 10,000 meters (about 33,000 feet) into the submarine trench in the western Pacific Ocean with three researchers on board, state broadcaster CCTV said. Only a handful of people have ever visited the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a crescent-shaped depression in the Earth's crust that is deeper than Mount Everest is high and more than 2,550 km (1,600 miles) long. The first explorers visited the trench in 1960 on a brief expedition, after which there had been no missions until Hollywood director James Cameron made the first solo trip to the bottom in 2012. Cameron described a "desolate" and "alien" environment.


Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Planning: A Scalable Computational Framework

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The optimal charging infrastructure planning problem over a large geospatial area is challenging due to the increasing network sizes of the transportation system and the electric grid. The coupling between the electric vehicle travel behaviors and charging events is therefore complex. This paper focuses on the demonstration of a scalable computational framework for the electric vehicle charging infrastructure planning over the tightly integrated transportation and electric grid networks. On the transportation side, a charging profile generation strategy is proposed leveraging the EV energy consumption model, trip routing, and charger selection methods. On the grid side, a genetic algorithm is utilized within the optimal power flow program to solve the optimal charger placement problem with integer variables by adaptively evaluating candidate solutions in the current iteration and generating new solutions for the next iterations.


Chinese military eying AI to gain cyber, space dominance: Japan

#artificialintelligence

The Chinese military is aiming to utilize cutting-edge technologies like private sector-developed artificial intelligence to enhance its offensive capability in domains such as cyberspace and outer space, a Japanese Defense Ministry think tank warned Friday. Beijing aspires to match the United States' overall military capacity by transforming its People's Liberation Army into a world-class fighting force with the help of advanced technologies, the National Institute for Defense Studies said in its annual report on China's security strategy. The report said that until the Chinese catch up with the American military, "the PLA will build up its interference and strike capabilities to prevent the United States' military use of both the cyber and space domains." The China Security Report 2021 was released as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing has been intensifying, as has competition for technological hegemony. The United States has restricted exports of semiconductors to Huawei Technologies Co., the Chinese telecom giant that is aiming to expand its dominance of next-generation 5G technology.


Uber in talks to sell ATG self-driving unit to Aurora – TechCrunch

#artificialintelligence

Eighteen months ago, Uber's self-driving car unit, Uber Advanced Technologies Group, was valued at $7.25 billion following a $1 billion investment from Toyota, DENSO and SoftBank's Vision Fund. Now, it's up for sale and a competing autonomous vehicle technology startup is in talks with Uber to buy it, according to three sources familiar with the deal. Aurora Innovation, the startup founded by three veterans of the autonomous vehicle industry who led programs at Google, Tesla and Uber, is in negotiations to buy Uber ATG. Terms of the deal are still unknown, but sources say the two companies have been in talks since October and it is far along in the process. An Uber spokesperson declined to comment, citing that the company's general policy is not to comment on these sorts of inquiries.


Chinese military eying AI to gain cyber, space dominance: think tank

The Japan Times

The Chinese military is aiming to utilize cutting-edge technologies like private sector-developed artificial intelligence to enhance its offensive capability in domains such as cyberspace and outer space, a Japanese Defense Ministry think tank warned Friday. Beijing aspires to match the United States' overall military capacity by transforming its People's Liberation Army into a world-class fighting force with the help of advanced technologies, the National Institute for Defense Studies said in its annual report on China's security strategy. The report said that until the Chinese catch up with the American military, "the PLA will build up its interference and strike capabilities to prevent the United States' military use of both the cyber and space domains." The China Security Report 2021 was released as the rivalry between Washington and Beijing has been intensifying, as has competition for technological hegemony. The United States has restricted exports of semiconductors to Huawei Technologies Co., the Chinese telecom giant that is aiming to expand its dominance of next-generation 5G technology.


Classification of Polarimetric SAR Images Using Compact Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Classification of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images is an active research area with a major role in environmental applications. The traditional Machine Learning (ML) methods proposed in this domain generally focus on utilizing highly discriminative features to improve the classification performance, but this task is complicated by the well-known "curse of dimensionality" phenomena. Other approaches based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have certain limitations and drawbacks, such as high computational complexity, an unfeasibly large training set with ground-truth labels, and special hardware requirements. In this work, to address the limitations of traditional ML and deep CNN based methods, a novel and systematic classification framework is proposed for the classification of PolSAR images, based on a compact and adaptive implementation of CNNs using a sliding-window classification approach. The proposed approach has three advantages. First, there is no requirement for an extensive feature extraction process. Second, it is computationally efficient due to utilized compact configurations. In particular, the proposed compact and adaptive CNN model is designed to achieve the maximum classification accuracy with minimum training and computational complexity. This is of considerable importance considering the high costs involved in labelling in PolSAR classification. Finally, the proposed approach can perform classification using smaller window sizes than deep CNNs. Experimental evaluations have been performed over the most commonly-used four benchmark PolSAR images: AIRSAR L-Band and RADARSAT-2 C-Band data of San Francisco Bay and Flevoland areas. Accordingly, the best obtained overall accuracies range between 92.33 - 99.39% for these benchmark study sites.


Stealth (film) - Wikipedia

#artificialintelligence

Stealth is a 2005 American military science fiction action film directed by Rob Cohen and written by W. D. Richter, and starring Josh Lucas, Jessica Biel, Jamie Foxx, Sam Shepard, Joe Morton and Richard Roxburgh. The film follows three top fighter pilots as they join a project to develop an automated robotic stealth aircraft. Released on July 29, 2005 by Columbia Pictures, the film was a box office bomb, grossing $79 million worldwide against a budget of $135 million. It was one of the worst losses in cinematic history.[2][3] In the near future, the U.S. Navy develops the F/A-37 Talon, a single-seat fighter-bomber with advanced payload, range, speed, and stealth capabilities.


China Threatens U.S. Primacy in Artificial Intelligence

#artificialintelligence

It is a statement that has been broadcasted and heard around the world: China intends to be the global leader of artificial intelligence by 2030. The country is putting its money where its mouth is, officials and analysts say, and making investments in AI that could threaten the United States and erode Washington's advantages in the technology. "The Chinese Communist Party recognizes the transformational power of AI," Defense Secretary Mark Esper recently said during remarks at the Defense Department's AI Symposium and Exposition. Beijing views the technology as a critical component to its future military and industrial power, said the Pentagon's recently released "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China 2020" annual report to Congress. The country's "Next Generation AI Development Plan" details Beijing's strategy to employ commercial and military organizations to achieve major breakthroughs by 2025 and become the world leader by 2030, the report said.