Researchers are working on an interdisciplinary research project funded by NASA that aims to design and develop a safety management system for electric autonomous aircraft. Assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, researches control, optimization, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in air transportation and aviation. His lab builds flight deck and ground-based automation and decision support tools to improve and ensure safety for emerging aircraft types and flight operations. While a lot of the innovation in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning applications has been focused on revolutionizing the internet and digital connectivity, group of researchers are focused on expanding those benefits into transforming air transportation for physical connectivity and future mobility. Researchers are investigating on a new three-year, $2.5 million NASA System-Wide Safety grant project.

Because terrain, characteristics of the rocks and soil, weather and climate all contribute to landslide activity, accurately identifying the areas most at risk at any given time can be an uphill battle. Early warning systems are generally regional – based on region-specific data provided by ground-based sensors, field observations, and rainfall totals. But what if we could identify at-risk areas anywhere in the world at any time using the combined power of space-based observations and models? The NASA global Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness (LHASA) model, developed by a team of scientists led by Universities Space Research Association's Thomas Stanley, addresses this issue. The findings were published in Frontiers in Earth Science.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The U.S. Navy is looking to develop drones that work in both the sea and air. Several unclassified documents uploaded under the military branch's budget materials for 2022 mention the Navy's ongoing research for the dual-purpose technology, according to The Drive. Moreover, the news outlet reported that researchers and engineers for the Navy are working on "biocentric" projects that take inspiration from aquatic and airborne animals. In a 546-page budget estimate submitted for the fiscal year of 2022, the Navy states it aims to advance research into amphibious tactical support units and assault vehicles.

In this paper we deal with a practical problem that arises in military situations. The problem is to plan a path for one (or more) agents to reach a target without being detected by enemy sensors. Agents are not passive, rather they can (within limits) initiate actions which aid evasion, namely knockout (completely disable sensors) and confusion (reduce sensor detection probabilities). Agent actions are path dependent and time limited. Here by path dependent we mean that an agent needs to be sufficiently close to a sensor to knock it out. By time limited we mean that a limit is imposed on how long a sensor is knocked out or confused before it reverts back to its original operating state. The approach adopted breaks the continuous space in which agents move into a discrete space. This enables the problem to be represented (formulated) mathematically as a zero-one integer program with linear constraints. The advantage of representing the problem in this manner is that powerful commercial software optimisation packages exist to solve the problem to proven global optimality. Computational results are presented for a number of randomly generated test problems.

Facial recognition is facing a showdown in Congress. U.S. Sens. Edward Markey and Elizabeth Warren are joined by U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley in reintroducing legislation to tamp down on the government's use of biometric technology, which includes facial recognition. Executive Director of ACLU Massachusetts Kate Ruane said people shouldn't worry "that government agencies are keeping tabs on their every movement." The bill would, under almost any circumstance, make it illegal for any federal agent or official to "acquire, possess, access or use" any biometric surveillance system. This includes facial recognition, voice recognition, gait recognition and "other immutable characteristic(s)," according to the bill.

Following the announcement of the first Networks Advanced Naval Technology Exercise (NetANTX) Prize Challenge, Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR) launched a second prize challenge in support of Project Overmatch, this one seeking artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Project Overmatch is a high priority Department of the Navy initiative to deliver a more lethal, better-connected fleet of the future by connecting manned and unmanned platforms, weapons and sensors together in a robust Naval Operational Architecture that integrates with Joint All-Domain Command and Control for enhanced Distributed Maritime Operations. Critical to Project Overmatch is the development of networks, infrastructure, data architecture, tools and analytics that support the operational and developmental environment that will enable sustained maritime dominance for years to come. To deliver this modernized network, the AINetANTX challenge aims to identify and leverage the latest in AI-enabled technologies to allow warfighters to make critical decisions quickly in operationally relevant maritime environments. The challenge is offering $100,000 in total cash prizes for the best solution presented, with the first place entry winning $75,000, and second place winning $25,000.

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence's 2021 Spring Symposium Series was held virtually from March 22-24, 2021. There were ten symposia in the program: Applied AI in Healthcare: Safety, Community, and the Environment, Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Education, Artificial Intelligence for Synthetic Biology, Challenges and Opportunities for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning, Combining Machine Learning and Knowledge Engineering, Combining Machine Learning with Physical Sciences, Implementing AI Ethics, Leveraging Systems Engineering to Realize Synergistic AI/Machine-Learning Capabilities, Machine Learning for Mobile Robot Navigation in the Wild, and Survival Prediction: Algorithms, Challenges and Applications. This report contains summaries of all the symposia. The two-day international virtual symposium included invited speakers, presenters of research papers, and breakout discussions from attendees around the world. Registrants were from different countries/cities including the US, Canada, Melbourne, Paris, Berlin, Lisbon, Beijing, Central America, Amsterdam, and Switzerland. We had active discussions about solving health-related, real-world issues in various emerging, ongoing, and underrepresented areas using innovative technologies including Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. We primarily focused on AI-assisted and robot-assisted healthcare, with specific focus on areas of improving safety, the community, and the environment through the latest technological advances in our respective fields. The day was kicked off by Raj Puri, Physician and Director of Strategic Health Initiatives & Innovation at Stanford University spoke about a novel, automated sentinel surveillance system his team built mitigating COVID and its integration into their public-facing dashboard of clinical data and metrics. Selected paper presentations during both days were wide ranging including talks from Oliver Bendel, a Professor from Switzerland and his Swiss colleague, Alina Gasser discussing co-robots in care and support, providing the latest information on technologies relating to human-robot interaction and communication. Yizheng Zhao, Associate Professor at Nanjing University and her colleagues from China discussed views of ontologies with applications to logical difference computation in the healthcare sector. Pooria Ghadiri from McGill University, Montreal, Canada discussed his research relating to AI enhancements in health-care delivery for adolescents with mental health problems in the primary care setting.

Four Democratic lawmakers want to ban the federal government from using facial recognition technology. Led by Massachusetts Senator Edward J. Markey and Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, the group plans to introduce The Facial Recognition and Biometric Technology Moratorium Act to Congress. If passed, the bill would prohibit federal authorities from using the technology alongside several other biometric tools like voice recognition. Perhaps even more significantly, state and local entities, including law enforcement agencies, would need to pass their own moratoriums to secure funding from the federal government. In laying out the need for policy intervention, the group cites a report from The National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Former CDC Director Robert Redfield sits down for an exclusive interview with Fox News' Dr. Marc Siegel to discuss his belief that COVID-19 'evolved' from a Wuhan lab. EXCLUSIVE: Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, explained the reasoning behind his opinion that a lab leak was the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic's origins, in a wide-ranging interview with Fox News. The former CDC director discussed the ongoing debate over the COVID-19 pandemic's origins during a lengthy interview this past weekend with Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at the NYU Langone Medical Center and a Fox News contributor. While Dr. Anthony Fauci and other leading members of the science community have long argued that human contact with an infected animal started the pandemic, calls to investigate the lab leak theory have intensified in recent days. Redfield argued COVID-19's efficient human-to-human spread contradicted the behavior of other deadly coronaviruses with similar profiles, such as SARS and MERS, which first reached humans through animal contact but spread at a much slower pace.

Ransomware will inevitably plague self-driving cars. Ransomware is being continually mentioned in the daily news and appears to be a seemingly unstoppable fiendish craze. Perhaps the recent attack of ransomware on the Colonial Pipeline received the most rapt attention since it led to concerns over gasoline shortages and caused quite a stir amongst the general public. When ransomware is used against a particular bank or hospital or school, this normally doesn't have quite the same widespread disruption as did the fuel pipeline incident. The thing is, we are probably going to see a lot more ransomware being fielded and doing so against all manner of businesses and governmental entities. Some would assert that we are only so far at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ransomware hacks. Part of the reason why you can expect more use of ransomware is that it is relatively easy for an evildoer or crook to deploy the computer hacking scourge. Whereas the perpetrator used to need to have some keen computer nerdish skills, that's pretty much not the case anymore. Sadly, the ease of attempting to infect computer systems with ransomware has become nearly easy-peasy and has opened the floodgates to just about any determined villain to try (ransomware programs can be cheaply purchased online via the so-called dark web). There are now plentiful Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) capabilities available that will do most of the heavy lifting for those that prefer a hands-off chauffeured form of ransomware cyberattacks.