On the outskirts of Kyiv, troops are in training to be the tip of the spear in Ukraine's drive to modernise its tactical response on the front lines of the war with Russia, through a significant expansion of its drone fleet. Ukraine's military does not have an official drone unit but the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has made it possible for Kyiv to conduct reconnaissance along the 2,470-kilometre (1,535-mile) front line, spotting Russian forces and equipment and remotely directing artillery fire against targets. Drones save Ukrainian lives, but they are expensive and in short supply. "Nowadays, it's very important to have a drone in each battle unit because this is our eyes in the sky," said Lieutenant Anton Galyashinskiy, a Ukrainian army expert in visual data analytics. Galyashinskiy and nine of his fellow soldiers are learning to pilot drones from a moving vehicle.

Amazon has revealed the second city where it plans to start making drone deliveries later this year. The company says it will start contacting customers in College Station, Texas, to gauge their interest in receiving orders via Prime Air. Amazon says it was impressed by many elements of the city, including the research being conducted by Texas A&M University, such as work on drone technology. The US Census Bureau estimates the population of College Station was 120,000 as of last July, so while it isn't the biggest city around, it seems like a decent size for the initially rollout of Prime Air. "Amazon's new facility presents a tremendous opportunity for College Station to be at the forefront of the development of drone delivery technology," Karl Mooney, the mayor of College Station, said.

Technology is central to the country's sustainability agenda. Malaysia's commercial hub, Kuala Lumpur, has rolled out a smart city plan, which includes accelerating digital transformation by focusing on education and promoting cloud technologies and artificial intelligence (AI), among other areas. The Malaysian government has also emphasized technology investment in its Budget 2022, with up to MYR 100 million (US$ 23.7 million) in grants for areas such as smart automation and at least MYR 30 billion (US$ 7 billion) for government-linked companies investing in renewable energy, supply-chain modernization, and 5G infrastructure. In recent years, Kuala Lumpur has also seen an increasing number of "greening" opportunities. For instance, the city governance has employed a smart "City Brain", which uses Alibaba Cloud's computing systems to optimize services like traffic control and even calculate the best routes for emergency services.

In an undulating expanse of grassland at the city limits, a pick-up truck kicks up dust as it hurtles downhill, its passengers belting out the theme to 1980s hit comedy "Police Academy". It's a Ukrainian military Mitsubishi L200 on the outskirts of Kyiv and it is chasing after a quadcopter surveillance drone, not bank robbers. The troops inside are in training to be the tip of the spear in Ukraine's drive to modernise its tactical response on the frontlines of its war with Russia, in a massive expanse of its drone fleet. One of Europe's poorest countries even before Moscow's invasion on February 24, Ukraine does not have an official drone unit and is relying on the patriotism and hard cash of its civilians for equipment and training. "Nowadays it's very important to have a drone in each battle unit because this is our eyes in the sky," says Lieutenant Anton Galyashinskiy, 40, an army expert in visual data analytics who is taking part in the exercise.

Unprecedented heat waves, long droughts, intense floods, and biodiversity losses--the signs are all around us: humanity has locked itself in a long, drawn-out war against climate change. The vital signs of the planet are fluctuating, and only timely climate action involving governments, corporations and individuals can keep our ecosystems from incurring irreversible damage. Fortunately, the tools powered by artificial intelligence can play an instrumental role in preserving our planet and its biodiversity for posterity. Artificial intelligence technology has been a subject of interest in the international discourse regarding sustainable development for years. The Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) is a multi-stakeholder forum for world governments and experts leading the effort to devise strategies to bring AI solutions to aid climate action.

Marine commanders on the battlefield need access to better intelligence and AI tools for more rapid decision making, while higher-ranking commanders further from the tactical edge must accept that their picture may be less timely and complete and will focus more on pre-planning logistics, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger said Thursday. Speaking at a Hudson Institute event, Berger laid out his thoughts on how the Marine Corps must continue to transform to prepare for future potential fights against highly advanced adversaries like China and Russia. First, the Corps and the military must recognize that in highly contested environments with an advanced adversary, the Marine Corps will play a different role than it did during U.S. operations in the Middle East, and must be positioned forward before conflict starts, he said. "In a very simple sense, the way that I view it is: The most forward parts of the U.S. military in a contested environment, before shots are fired, are going to be special operations units, submarines, and Marines" Berger said. "If those three are forward persistently before, how do we stitch them together into some sort of framework where they can move information? Where they can--with some overlap, but not too much redundancy--cover the playing field?"

China is using artificial intelligence to'improve' its court system by recommending laws, drafting documents and alerting'perceived human errors' in rulings. Judges must now consult the AI on every case by law, Beijing's Supreme Court said in an update on the system published this week, and if they go against its recommendation they must submit a written explanation for why. The AI has also been connected to police databases and China's Orwellian social credit system, handing it the power to punish people - for example by automatically putting a thief's property up for sale online. Beijing has hailed the new technology for making'a significant contribution to the judicial advancement of human civilisation' - while critics say it risks creating a world in which man is ruled by machine. China has plugged artificial intelligence into its'smart court' system - allowing it to make rulings, draft laws, and charge people with crimes (pictured, a Chinese court during Covid) China has been developing a'smart court' system since at least 2016, when Chief Justice Qiang Zhou called for technology to be used to improve the'fairness, efficiency, and credibility' of the judicial system.

It's a rare cybersecurity product these days that doesn't claim to have some form of AI capability. But exactly what benefits does AI deliver? And is there a risk of an arms race as threat actors also turn to the technology? We spoke to Corey Nachreiner, CSO at WatchGuard Technologies, to find out more about the role of AI in cybersecurity. BN: What role does AI play in cybersecurity?

The Canadian government is helping to test a new airport security and screening system that will allow travellers to digitize and share travel documents and biometric information with authorities in advance. Launched at the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the "Known Traveller Digital Identity" system aims to exploit an array of emerging technologies including biometrics, blockchain and artificial intelligence to boost cross-border security, reduce the threat of cyber-terrorism and streamline international travel, according to the WEF. Transport Canada is one of several partners involved in the project, with the others including the likes of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice, INTERPOL, Google, Visa and Hilton Worldwide. The system aims to empower airport authorities to focus more of their time and energies on scrutinizing high-risk travellers, according to a WEF report on the initiative. Currently, when a traveller arrives at an international border, they have to quickly and accurately be screened for permission to enter the country, with border officials required to determine their residency or visa status and assess risk factors in a short period of time.

Prior literature on adversarial attack methods has mainly focused on attacking with and defending against a single threat model, e.g., perturbations bounded in Lp ball. However, multiple threat models can be combined into composite perturbations. One such approach, composite adversarial attack (CAA), not only expands the perturbable space of the image, but also may be overlooked by current modes of robustness evaluation. This paper demonstrates how CAA's attack order affects the resulting image, and provides real-time inferences of different models, which will facilitate users' configuration of the parameters of the attack level and their rapid evaluation of model prediction. A leaderboard to benchmark adversarial robustness against CAA is also introduced.