Blue-tongue lizards and sulfur-crested cockatoos are among the native animals frequently smuggled overseas. While the number of live animals seized by the Australian Government has tripled since 2017, the full scale of the problem eludes us as authorities don't often know where and how wildlife is trafficked. Now, we can add a new technology to Australia's arsenal against this cruel and inhumane industry. Our research, published in Frontiers in Conservation Science today, shows the potential for new technology to detect illegal wildlife in luggage or mail. This technology uses artificial intelligence to recognize the shapes of animals when scanned at international frontlines such as airports and mail centers.

In modern geo-politics the role of Indian Navy is going to be more challenging and its active participation could decide the place of India in global power play. The seminar "Swavlamban" chaired by the PM Modi on SPRINT Challenges on July 18th 2022, is showcasing the seriousness of New Delhi towards the strengthening the Indian Navy through the modern indigenous technologies. The presence of Chinses third generation research and survey ship "Yuan Wang 5" in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, is sufficient to explain that the Indo-Pacific is going to be future coliseum of geo-politics. It is provoking India to adopt modern cutting-edge naval technologies to protect the country's interest and control the foreign powers. Technology is always an important agent, which decides or redefines the war parameters with some distinctive outputs.

Tehran, Iran – Iran says it will "respond appropriately" to Ukraine's revoking of its ambassador's accreditation over alleged drone sales to Russia while not directly denying it sold the aircraft. In a short statement on Saturday, Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanani said Ukraine's decision to downgrade diplomatic relations with Iran was "regrettable" and based on "unconfirmed reports" by foreign media. Kanani did not mention drones or explicitly deny that Tehran has supplied them to Moscow, but said Iran has exercised a "clear policy of active neutrality" when dealing with the war in Ukraine as it has stressed hostilities need to be resolved through dialogue. "The numerous meetings and calls of our country's foreign minister with Russian and Ukrainian counterparts in recent months have been in line with helping to resolve the crisis," he said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address on Friday the downgrade in diplomatic relations with Iran is because Ukrainian forces shot down a total of eight Iranian-made drones recently sold to Russia and used in the conflict.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivers remarks to the United Nations. Kyiv has stripped its diplomatic ties with Iran over its "evil" collaboration with Russia after at least eight Tehran-supplied drones have been shot down by Ukrainian forces. In an overnight address Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksyy said that the Iranian ambassador to Ukraine, Manouchehr Moradi, had been stripped of his accreditation and the number of Iranian staff permitted to stay at the Iranian embassy in Kyiv "significantly" reduced. The notice to remove the ambassador from his post was apparently handed to the acting ambassador as Moradi was not in Ukraine at the time of the decision, reported Reuters. "Today the Russian army used Iranian drones for its strikes. The world will know about every instance of collaboration with evil, and it will have corresponding consequences," Zelenskyy said.

On 18 July 2022, the United Kingdom (UK) government set out its new proposals for regulating the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies while promoting innovation, boosting public trust, and protecting data. The proposals reflect a less centralised and more risk-based approach than in the EU's draft AI Act. The proposals coincide with the introduction to Parliament of the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, which includes measures to use AI responsibly while reducing compliance burdens on businesses to boost the economy. One of the key challenges of regulating the use of AI is undoubtedly the pace of technology advancement in this area. The UK government's current proposal is to set out the core characteristics of AI, whilst allowing regulators to set out more detailed definitions according to their specific sectors. The government is of the opinion that it should regulate the use of AI, not the technology itself.

IT Concepts (ITC) is an 8(a) SDVOSB founded on the concepts of customer-centric, driven to deliver, teamwork, integrity, and innovation. Founded in 2003, ITC was established with a simple yet important promise to "deliver solutions that work". As we continue to grow in the support of our government customers, we are looking for driven and innovative individuals to join our team. IT Concepts is looking for an experienced Data Analyst to support our engagement with a Government customer. The United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA), Office of Budget & Program Analysis (OBPA) is seeking support to improve operations and better support Departmental budget activities and policy implementation and assessing its organizational structure, workforce allocations and business.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the accreditation of the Iranian ambassador will be revoked and Iranian diplomatic staff in Kyiv reduced as a result of Russian forces using Iranian drones to attack Ukraine. Ukrainian forces had shot down a total of eight Iranian-made drones in the conflict so far, Zelenskyy said in a late-night video address on Friday. "Today the Russian army used Iranian drones for its attacks on Dnipropetrovsk region and Odesa. I instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to strongly react to this fact," Zelenskyy said in his address. "Six of these Iranian drones were downed by our air defences of the East and South commands. One more was brought to ground by air defences of the Navy…. And just now I am being told about the downing by air defences of the South command of another strike Iranian drone," he said.

Pharmacokinetic natural product-drug interactions (NPDIs) occur when botanical natural products are co-consumed with pharmaceutical drugs. Understanding mechanisms of NPDIs is key to preventing adverse events. We constructed a knowledge graph framework, NP-KG, as a step toward computational discovery of pharmacokinetic NPDIs. NP-KG is a heterogeneous KG with biomedical ontologies, linked data, and full texts of the scientific literature, constructed with the Phenotype Knowledge Translator framework and the semantic relation extraction systems, SemRep and Integrated Network and Dynamic Reasoning Assembler. NP-KG was evaluated with case studies of pharmacokinetic green tea- and kratom-drug interactions through path searches and meta-path discovery to determine congruent and contradictory information compared to ground truth data. The fully integrated NP-KG consisted of 745,512 nodes and 7,249,576 edges. Evaluation of NP-KG resulted in congruent (38.98% for green tea, 50% for kratom), contradictory (15.25% for green tea, 21.43% for kratom), and both congruent and contradictory (15.25% for green tea, 21.43% for kratom) information. Potential pharmacokinetic mechanisms for several purported NPDIs, including the green tea-raloxifene, green tea-nadolol, kratom-midazolam, kratom-quetiapine, and kratom-venlafaxine interactions were congruent with the published literature. NP-KG is the first KG to integrate biomedical ontologies with full texts of the scientific literature focused on natural products. We demonstrate the application of NP-KG to identify pharmacokinetic interactions involving enzymes, transporters, and pharmaceutical drugs. We envision that NP-KG will facilitate improved human-machine collaboration to guide researchers in future studies of pharmacokinetic NPDIs. The NP-KG framework is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6814507 and https://github.com/sanyabt/np-kg.

Robust Reinforcement Learning (RL) focuses on improving performances under model errors or adversarial attacks, which facilitates the real-life deployment of RL agents. Robust Adversarial Reinforcement Learning (RARL) is one of the most popular frameworks for robust RL. However, most of the existing literature models RARL as a zero-sum simultaneous game with Nash equilibrium as the solution concept, which could overlook the sequential nature of RL deployments, produce overly conservative agents, and induce training instability. In this paper, we introduce a novel hierarchical formulation of robust RL - a general-sum Stackelberg game model called RRL-Stack - to formalize the sequential nature and provide extra flexibility for robust training. We develop the Stackelberg Policy Gradient algorithm to solve RRL-Stack, leveraging the Stackelberg learning dynamics by considering the adversary's response. Our method generates challenging yet solvable adversarial environments which benefit RL agents' robust learning. Our algorithm demonstrates better training stability and robustness against different testing conditions in the single-agent robotics control and multi-agent highway merging tasks.

Since Facebook was renamed Meta, a lot of attention, debate, and exploration have intensified about what the Metaverse is, how it works, and the possible ways to exploit it. It is anticipated that Metaverse will be a continuum of rapidly emerging technologies, usecases, capabilities, and experiences that will make it up for the next evolution of the Internet. Several researchers have already surveyed the literature on artificial intelligence (AI) and wireless communications in realizing the Metaverse. However, due to the rapid emergence and continuous evolution of technologies, there is a need for a comprehensive and in-depth survey of the role of AI, 6G, and the nexus of both in realizing the immersive experiences of Metaverse. Therefore, in this survey, we first introduce the background and ongoing progress in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR) and spatial computing, followed by the technical aspects of AI and 6G. Then, we survey the role of AI in the Metaverse by reviewing the state-of-the-art in deep learning, computer vision, and Edge AI to extract the requirements of 6G in Metaverse. Next, we investigate the promising services of B5G/6G towards Metaverse, followed by identifying the role of AI in 6G networks and 6G networks for AI in support of Metaverse applications, and the need for sustainability in Metaverse. Finally, we enlist the existing and potential applications, usecases, and projects to highlight the importance of progress in the Metaverse. Moreover, in order to provide potential research directions to researchers, we underline the challenges, research gaps, and lessons learned identified from the literature review of the aforementioned technologies.