Quadrupedal robots are one of the most interesting developments in robotics in recent years. They're small, nimble, and able to traverse environments that frustrate wheeled machines. So, of course, it was only a matter of time until someone put a gun on one. The image above shows a quadrupedal robot -- a Vision 60 unit built by US firm Ghost Robotics -- that's been equipped with a custom gun by small-arms specialists Sword International. It seems the gun itself (dubbed the SPUR or "special purpose unmanned rifle") is designed to be fitted onto a variety of robotic platforms.

If there is life beyond Earth, it's going to be found on an exoplanet--planets orbiting stars other than our own sun. The number of exoplanets is thought to number in the trillions [1], but despite an abundance of data from exoplanet-finding missions like Kepler, K2, and TESS, just a few thousand potential exoplanets have been confirmed. The biggest problem is a glut of information; About 30 GB is being collected every day from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission [2], which launched in 2018. This gives astronomers an overwhelming amount of data to analyze. The sheer number of candidate stars, which stretches into the millions, confounds the problem and results in too many candidate exoplanets to manage without the assistance of ML.

The Air Force Research Laboratory, in partnership with United Kingdom's Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), have demonstrated for the first time the ability for the U.S. and the U.K. to jointly develop, select, train and deploy state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms in support of the armed forces of each of the two nations. This research is designed to support adjacent, collaborating U.S. and U.K. brigades with enduring wide-area situational awareness, which aims to improve decision-making, increase operational tempo, reduce risk to life and reduce manpower burden. The in-person, virtual demonstration was hosted jointly at AFRL's Information Directorate in Rome and Dstl at its site near Salisbury, U.K., Oct. 18. The demonstration highlighted integrated AI technologies across the two nations, showcasing the ability to share data and algorithms through a common development and deployment platform to enable the rapid selection, testing and deployment of AI capabilities. The event was made possible by a U.K. and U.S. partnership agreement concerning autonomy and AI collaboration established in December 2020.

Vyopta, the leader in digital collaboration and experience optimization, today announced it has achieved U.S. Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Authority to Operate (ATO). Vyopta earned this authorization in partnership with the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), its sponsoring agency. Vyopta is the only multi-vendor collaboration solution available in the FedRAMP Marketplace. FedRAMP is one of the most extensive security authorizations cloud services providers can achieve. It provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization and continuous monitoring for cloud services to ensure all federal data is secure in cloud environments.

The South Korean government shared roughly 170 million face images of citizens and resident foreign nationals with the private sector without their consent to be used in training and testing biometric algorithms, according to a recent Ministry of Justice document. The move is part of an "AI identification and tracking system development project" based on a memorandum of understanding between the Korean Ministry of Justice (MOJ) and the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT). Scheduled for completion in 2022, the project has seen the MOJ transferring information obtained during the immigration screening process to the MSIT, including face biometrics, nationality, gender, and age. The MSIT subsequently transferred that information to private businesses for the purpose of artificial intelligence technology research, according to the allegations. The South Korean government mentioned the creation of the project in a press release when it first launched in 2019 but did not disclose information about its structure, scope, or data collection methods.

A world-renowned historian and philosopher is warning that humanity needs to begin regulating artificial intelligence and data collection globally or risk being "hacked." In an upcoming interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," bestselling author Yuval Harari said the nations and large corporations that control the biggest share of data on consumers will control the world in the future, noting that the raw data is worth much more than money. "The world is increasingly kind of cut up into spheres of data collection, of data harvesting. In the Cold War, you had the Iron Curtain. Now we have the Silicon Curtain, that the world is increasingly divided between the USA and China," Harari told Anderson Cooper.

Over the past several decades, climate change has led to major disasters in Eastern Africa countries including Tanzania. From floods, chronic droughts, landslides, strong winds and earthquakes to their secondary impacts of diseases and epidemics, these are some of the recent disasters plaguing Tanzania. These disasters lead to death and displacement of people, loss of properties and livelihoods, disruption of social networks and services such as water, food, and healthcare thereby leaving communities more vulnerable and susceptible to the next extreme event. Lack of disaster preparedness and awareness makes the situation worse as communities remain helpless in the event of disasters hence face its full impact. Combining citizen science and modern technological innovation provides an opportunity to build the resilience of communities and reduce risks.

The U.S. Air Force revealed recently that it had used artificial intelligence to aid targeting decisions for the first time. It turns out that this was not simply a test: AI is embedded in the Air Force's targeting operation, raising serious questions. Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall told the Air Force Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Maryland on Sept. 20, that the Air Force had "deployed AI algorithms for the first time to a live operational kill chain." He did not give details of the strike, whether it was by a drone or piloted aircraft, and if there were civilian casualties. The "kill chain" is the entire province in which data gathered by various sensors is analyzed, targets selected and strikes planned and ordered and the results evaluated. AI takes some of the burden off human analysts, who spend thousands of hours searching through video footage trying to find, locate and positively identify targets.

We address the issue of safety in reinforcement learning. We pose the problem in a discounted infinite-horizon constrained Markov decision process framework. Existing results have shown that gradient-based methods are able to achieve an $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ global convergence rate both for the optimality gap and the constraint violation. We exhibit a natural policy gradient-based algorithm that has a faster convergence rate $\mathcal{O}(\log(T)/T)$ for both the optimality gap and the constraint violation. When Slater's condition is satisfied and known a priori, zero constraint violation can be further guaranteed for a sufficiently large $T$ while maintaining the same convergence rate.

Are We on the Verge of Chatting With Whales? Christoph Droesser Hakai Magazine "An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them. The next step would be an interactive chatbot that tries to engage in a dialogue with free-living whales." Brain Implants Could Be the Next Computer Mouse Antonio Regalado MIT Technology Review "While other brain-interface researchers grabbed the limelight with more spectacular demonstrations, Shenoy's group has stayed focused on creating a practical interface that paralyzed patients can use for everyday computer interactions. Boston Dynamics Wants You to Know Its Spot Robot Has Moves Like Jagger I. Bonifacic Engadget "Is this what TikTok will look like when the robots take over?