Drone delivery is expected to take off big time in the next few years. Chinese online retailer JD.com has already launched drone delivery in four provinces in China, while DHL and Zipline are delivering medicines with drones in rural and hard-to-reach areas. Amazon, Google, and UPS are all working on getting drone delivery service off the ground. There are a lot of issues to think about when it comes to package delivery using drones--safety, privacy, and logistics being some of the main concerns. In a new study, researchers tackle two other important aspects: energy use and greenhouse gas emissions.

We have been working hard to understand the core stack of data services that make our cities work, or not work, depending on where you live. While we have labeled this research "smart cities", we are starting with the basics of open data required for city operations. This is the current data sets available via existing services, which may or may not exist in a machine readable format, via an API, depending on the city you live in. There is a huge amount of data already available at the municipal level, but here is where we have started as of January. Real Time Streaming 311 Incidents In Chicago 511 - Traffic, Travel & Transit Adding 511 Data To Our Existing Transit Data Research Getting Your 511 Traffic Incidents in the San Francisco Bay Area as a Real Time Streaming API 911 - Emergency Events Making 911 Data Real Time Streaming 911 Emergency Data For Baltimore, MD We've targeted these three areas because they make a difference in our lives at the local level, and have huge potential when it comes to making available via web APIs, and in real time using Server-Sent Events (SSE).

Yes, although the real work is happening not on the slopes of Davos, but on a hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. The location, in Presidio National Park, illustrates how the Forum and key member companies have shifted their focus in recent years to the promise and perils of emerging technologies. After all, San Francisco has become the global capital of a tech industry with companies that are as influential as countries. "The tech companies were having an increasing impact on pretty much every foreign policy issue that we were dealing with," says Zvika Krieger, who served as the U.S. State Department's envoy to Silicon Valley in the Obama administration's final year. In early 2017, the WEF recruited Krieger and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Murat Sönmez to establish its first major office outside Switzerland, bearing the ambitious name World Economic Forum Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The biggest underwater eruption of the last century took place 600 miles (1,000km) off the coast of New Zealand, scientists have found. The discovery was made after an airline passenger saw a strange substance spreading across the Pacific Ocean in 2012. At the time, scientists identified the material as pumice, a volcanic substance which floats. However, it has taken six years for researchers to understand the scale of the eruption with the help of remotely-operated deep search robots. The findings have been described as a'scientific goldmine' and could increase our understanding of how magma rises from the earth's crust to the surface More than 80 per cent of the volcanoes on Earth are located on the sea-floor.

Farmstead, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital "micro-grocer" that sources and delivers fresh food from farm to fridge in one hour, has launched a hub allowing for 30-minute grocery pickup in the San Francisco Bay Area. The new 30-minute Express Pickup service hubs, strategically located in San Francisco and San Mateo, are intended to put the San Francisco-based startup on par with the largest incumbent players in the rapidly expanding online grocery delivery market, many of which don't yet offer online ordering and pickup in the area. Groceries are ready for pickup within 30 minutes of placing an online order, and arriving customers simply tap an "I'm here" button on their phone to signal a Farmstead employee to place a custom-packed order in their car. The new service is Farmstead's latest step toward working to transform the way the grocery industry sources and distributes food from farms to customers. The startup, which first presented its plan to shake up the grocery industry in early October, uses AI technology to calculate and predict returning shoppers' habits and know exactly how much food to order from local sources daily, weekly, seasonally and annually, thus reducing food waste.

Dawit Haile fought against the odds when he decided to study computer science in Eritrea, East Africa, despite having no internet connectivity. His perseverance paid off, first landing a job with the Eritrean government department of education, and later as an engineer in Lithuania. Today, Dawit is a data scientist in the San Francisco Bay Area, and he credits this new job to the knowledge and experience he gained from fast.ai. On the side, he's building an algorithm to translate between English and his native language of Tigrinya. Dawit is just one of many impressive fast.ai

One of the biggest mysteries among people working on salmon recovery in Puget Sound and the Salish Sea is what happens to juvenile fish once they head for the ocean. Survival rates of Chinook, Coho and Steelhead have all declined since the 1980s, but resource managers don't know why. A new grant from Microsoft is using artificial intelligence to greatly improve the computer models used to tackle the question. A collaborative effort called the Salish Sea Marine Survival Project has been around for nearly a decade. It unites the work of 60 different scientific and non-profit entities, all trying to understand what is preventing salmon and steelhead from coming home.

Two years after World War II, billionaire Howard Hughes personally piloted his "Spruce Goose" troop transport aircraft on the first and only flight of the largest seaplane ever built. It lasted barely a minute. Now, more than 70 years later, a U.S. startup is testing a new seaplane concept--one that could evolve into huge cargo drones that fly 109 metric tons of freight across the Pacific, touch down autonomously over water, and unload at ports around the world. The startup Natilus was founded in 2014 with a dream of building large cargo drones to deliver international freight for about half the price of piloted aircraft, and much faster than ships. In December, Natilus planned to test the water-taxiing capabilities of a small prototype drone with a 9-meter wingspan in San Francisco Bay.

Tensions between poachers and conservationists in the Gulf of California escalated over the weekend after a fisherman shot down a drone being used to monitor illegal activities. The drone belonged to the U.S. conservation group Sea Shepherd, which has two ships in the northern part of the Sea of Cortez as part of an effort to save the critically endangered vaquita porpoise. The vaquita have been inadvertently caught in nets that poachers use to catch the endangered totoaba fish. Fishermen can make huge sums on the black market for dried totoaba swim bladders, which are sold in China for their supposed medicinal properties. The environmental group has been searching for nets and pulling them from the water.

Game developers were researching AI well before it became a tech industry trend, but they haven't had much incentive to share their work with the academic world. Ubisoft, however, is trying to find a happy middle ground. It recently established an AI research wing, La Forge, that aims to harmonize research for both gaming and science. The new unit has academics and Ubisoft employees working together on projects that will ideally advance gaming and lead to real-world breakthroughs that scientists can publish. As an example, Ubisoft points to its work on creating a small-scale version of the San Francisco Bay Area for Watch Dogs 2. The company developed AI-guided cars and pedestrians to navigate a realistic urban environment, and that's potentially ideal for self-driving car research -- scientists could use Watch Dogs' technology to test autonomous driving in tricky situations (such as crowds) without having to put real cars on the road.