The Taliban on Wednesday warned the U.S. against flying drones over its "sacred airspace" or there could be "negative consequences." "We recently saw [the] United States violating all international rights, laws and … commitments made to the [Taliban] in Doha, Qatar, as Afghanistan's sacred airspace is being invaded by U.S. drones," a spokesperson said on Twitter. "We call on all countries, especially [the] United States, to treat Afghanistan in light of international rights, laws and commitments … in order to prevent any negative consequences." The Pentagon did not reply to the Taliban warnings and instead directed Fox News to comments made by press secretary John Kirby, who said the U.S. retains "all necessary authorities to execute over-the-horizon counterterrorism operations." "We remain confident in these capabilities moving forward," he told reporters Friday.

The aim behind a new international project is to develop advanced AI programs that will allow machines to learn gradually over a lifetime and share that input with each other. Scientists are optimistic that the technology will enable machines to reuse data, adapt rapidly to new conditions and work in partnership by sharing data. The project comes under the initiative known as Shared-Experience Lifelong Learning (ShELL), a program financially supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- a U.S. government agency known for some major technological developments in recent history such as the Internet, Siri, the miniaturization of GPS and the computer mouse. It began this month and is being headed by Dr. Andrea Soltoggio of Loughborough's Computer Science department, in partnership with Dr. Soheil Kolouri at Vanderbilt University and Dr. Cong Liu at the University of Texas at Dallas, both in the United States. The idea behind this project is to gain a deep understanding of how and what an AI system learns when dealing with a new task, so that we can exploit task similarities and share information to create fast, reliable, and collaborating learning agents.

Fumbling to find flashlights during blackouts may soon be a distant memory, as quantum computing and artificial intelligence could learn to decipher an electric grid's problematic quirks and solve system hiccups so fast, humans may not notice. Rather than energy grid faults turning into giant problems – such as voltage variations or widespread blackouts – blazing fast computation blended with artificial intelligence could rapidly diagnose trouble and find solutions in tiny splits of seconds, according to Cornell research forthcoming in Applied Energy (Dec. 1, 2021). "Energy power system failures are an old problem and we are still using classic computational methods to resolve them," said Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering in the College of Engineering. "Today's power systems can benefit from AI and the computational power of quantum computing, so power systems can be stable and reliable." You, along with doctoral student Akshay Ajagekar, are co-authors of "Quantum Computing-based Hybrid Deep Learning for Fault Diagnosis in Electrical Power Systems."

First protein folding, now weather forecasting: London-based AI firm DeepMind is continuing its run applying deep learning to hard science problems. Working with the Met Office, the UK's national weather service, DeepMind has developed a deep-learning tool called DGMR that can accurately predict the likelihood of rain in the next 90 minutes--one of weather forecasting's toughest challenges. In a blind comparison with existing tools, several dozen experts judged DGMR's forecasts to be the best across a range of factors--including its predictions of the location, extent, movement, and intensity of the rain--89% of the time. The results were published in a Nature paper today. DeepMind's new tool is no AlphaFold, which cracked open a key problem in biology that scientists had been struggling with for decades.

NASA is set to pause most of its robotic Mars missions for safety reasons ahead of a two-week blackout caused by the Red Planet's position in space. The rovers Perseverance and Curiosity, as well as helicopter Ingenuity and the lander InSight, will all lose connection with Earth from October 2 when Mars moves behind the sun from our planet's perspective. This position in its orbit, called solar conjunction, happens every two years and can disrupt interplanetary communications and lead to'unexpected behaviour from our deep space explorers', NASA said in a statement. Solar conjunction, when Mars moves behind the sun from Earth's perspective (pictured), happens every two years and can disrupt interplanetary communications NASA is planning to stop sending commands to most of its Mars missions during a communications blackout between October 2 and 16. Instead, the various robots will be given'homework' to carry out on their own. The main missions affected include the Perseverance rover, which arrived on the Red Planet in February, and the Ingenuity helicopter it brought with it on its seven-month journey.

Amazon's annual barrage of new Echo hardware didn't disappoint, ranging from role-playing games to nutrition tracking, drones and videocall devices for kids. I think the new 15-inch Echo Show, a smart screen to mount on your wall, was the most intriguing reveal. Amazon has redesigned its home screen to make the most of all that extra display space, and you can customize it so part of the screen scrolls through ambient content, like headlines and weather updates. Aimed at families, the Echo Show 15 also has a new visual ID feature that can recognize your face and show you personalized information, like calendar appointments, reminders and notes. Amazon and Google dominate the smart displays space, and I might be the rare exception of having not a single Alexa-powered device in my home.

Tuesday, top U.S. military officials publicly acknowledged they advised President Joe Biden to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan despite the president's claim otherwise. This amid multiple sources confirming extremist organizations such al-Qaeda and ISIS-K are still present in Afghanistan and remain a rising threat to U.S. national security. While Tuesday's Senate hearing was a productive start to this investigation, I am looking forward to asking General Mark Milley, Secretary Lloyd Austin, and General Kenneth McKenzie questions in Wednesday's House Armed Services Committee Hearing. Leading up to the Biden Administration's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the president touted an "over-the-horizon" capability that would allow the U.S. to identify and eliminate threats from afar. The Biden administration has claimed the U.S. did not need a counterterrorism force in Afghanistan because the U.S. possessed significant intelligence and military capability to attack and eliminate terrorist threats reaching into Afghanistan from other U.S. military locations. However, Biden's withdrawal left a gap in intelligence gathering capabilities that has caused targeting decisions to be made with incomplete information, with increased risk and assumptions, and outside the norms of standard protocols.

BRIDGEi2i Analytics Solutions announced its inclusion in Gartner's Market Guide for Artificial Intelligence Service Providers, 2021. The Gartner report compiles a list of service providers that represent the breadth of offerings in the AI market. Organizations of varied size, complexity, type and location are listed here. This list is based on client interactions and publicly available information. BRIDGEi2i CEO and Co-Founder - Prithvijit Roy remarked, "At BRIDGEi2i, we are excited to leverage AI to build the digital enterprise. Our pre-built, ready-to-deploy algorithmic engines, the AI Accelerators, enable enterprises to transform their businesses and achieve powerful outcomes using AI. Being featured in the Gartner's Market Guide for Artificial Intelligence Service Providers, 2021, takes us one step further on the journey of making AI real for enterprises. I'm grateful to all our employees and clients who are partnered with us in reimagining businesses using AI, and also for the Gartner analyst team's support."

While use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is high amongst IT decision makers, more than half are unsure what the technology actually means, new research has revealed. Webroot has released its annual artificial intelligence and machine learning report, which reveals how IT professionals perceive and use these advancing technologies in business. According to the research, while 93% of IT decision makers in Australia and New Zealand use artificial intelligence and machine learning, more than half (51%) admit they are unsure what the technology means. Although understanding around these tools is increasing (64% of global respondents were unsure what artificial intelligence and machine learning meant in 2020), this is happening at a significantly slower pace than the adoption rate. Webroot says this lack of understanding may be why Australia was the country where enterprises were most likely to cite struggling to keep up with the latest technology as the reason they were unable to prevent a cyberattack in the last year.

In this paper, we introduce a novel non-linear activation function that spontaneously induces class-compactness and regularization in the embedding space of neural networks. The function is dubbed DOME for Difference Of Mirrored Exponential terms. The basic form of the function can replace the sigmoid or the hyperbolic tangent functions as an output activation function for binary classification problems. The function can also be extended to the case of multi-class classification, and used as an alternative to the standard softmax function. It can also be further generalized to take more flexible shapes suitable for intermediate layers of a network. In this version of the paper, we only introduce the concept. In a subsequent version, experimental evaluation will be added.