The US has developed a drone interceptor that fires what appears to be a form of Silly String into their rotors, bringing them down with minimal risk of accidental damage. The interceptor was created by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It is launched from a vehicle and guided by radar that can automatically identify and track small drones. Once the interceptor has a target drone in sight, it releases string-like streamers – their exact composition is unknown – to disable it. The system can also launch multiple interceptors to deal with several incoming drones simultaneously, and the interceptors are reusable. DARPA says it wants to provide drone defences for convoys and other mobile units in heavily populated areas, where normal military weapons would create too much risk of civilian casualties.

The last 15 years have been tough times for many Americans, but there are now encouraging signs of a turnaround. Productivity growth, a key driver for higher living standards, averaged only 1.3% since 2006, less than half the rate of the previous decade. But on June 3, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that US labor productivity increased by 5.4% in the first quarter of 2021. What's better, there's reason to believe that this is not just a blip, but rather a harbinger of better times ahead: a productivity surge that will match or surpass the boom times of the 1990s. Our optimism is grounded in our research which indicates that most OECD countries are just passing the lowest point in a productivity J-curve. Driven by advances in digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, productivity growth is now headed up.

Bitcoin has had a rollercoaster ride over the last months. Once Tesla's darling, with its value climbing, when the EV maker dropped BTC pricing, the cryptocurrency plummeted in value, (it's down 37 percent over the last month, at the time of writing). But hey, don't tell El Salvador. President Nayib Bukele has followed through on his campaign promise to make the turbulent Bitcoin legal tender, alongside the US dollar. It means that, in about 90 days, the cryptocurrency can be used as payment for goods or services unless a business doesn't have the facilities to accept it.

Fox News correspondent Claudia Cowan joins'Your World' with the details from San Francisco This is a rush transcript from "Your World with Neil Cavuto" June 8, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. NEIL CAVUTO, FOX NEWS ANCHOR: How about some good news to kick off things, like herd immunity happening in a lot of parts of this country, including in San Francisco, where close to eight out of 10 residents older than 12 years old have already had at least one vaccination shot? It reads similarly in other cities, like Philadelphia, 67.4 percent have been vaccinated, in Denver, close to 70 percent, in San Diego, north of 65 percent, and, in New York City, more than 52 percent. And this is "Your World." And FOX on top of vaccinations that are surprisingly robust across a country that is rapidly leading the world in finally putting a spike in this horrific, horrific disease. Now, the implications of all of this are being weighed in the medical community, as well as the political community, as to how much longer term this means we get to, well, herd immunity, if we even need to get to that, technically, at the rate we're going. Let's go to Claudia Cowan following all of this in San Francisco -- Claudia. The City by the Bay is on the cusp of herd immunity, which means that the coronavirus is having trouble finding new hosts. The city is reporting that nearly 80 percent of teens and adults have been vaccinated with at least one dose against COVID-19, while 68 percent are fully vaccinated. The number of new cases is the lowest since the city shut down in March of 2020. And no one has died of COVID in over a month. San Francisco pushed people to get the shot while infections hospitalizations and death rates were low. Officials believe that made a world of difference. While there is some debate over what exactly constitutes herd immunity, one expert says the numbers here are among the best in the country. MONICA GANDHI, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO: And there are places, like in the Bay Area, that are up to 76, 77 percent. So, we are doing great in terms of high vaccination rates, high immunity, low cases, low hospitalizations, low deaths, low test positivity rate.

Digital transformation has unleashed a high volume of cyber threats, making cybersecurity and compliance a top priority for CXOs, and making it critical for businesses to ensure their cyber-regulatory compliance roadmap is in place. In alignment with Birlasoft's strategy to ensure customers realize utmost value from their digital transformation initiatives, the co-developed platform will help regulated enterprises gain a deeper understanding of their cyber regulatory compliance risks and provide them with actionable reports to mitigate risks and ensure compliance. In addition, as organizations across other regulated industries accelerate their digital transformation, cybersecurity becomes fundamental for future business resiliency. Shilpa Bhandari, SVP and Global Head - BFSI, Birlasoft said, "Enterprises are moving towards a digital-first approach at an accelerated pace and are increasingly concerned about their cybersecurity resiliency. Regulativ.ai is transforming the cybersecurity reporting function across regulated industries. We have created a lightning-fast, scalable, and cost-efficient governance platform using leading-edge AI technologies. Our innovative multi-cloud platform will significantly streamline cybersecurity self-assessment processes."

U.S. President Joe Biden's blueprint for the U.S. semiconductor industry marks an ambitious effort to set industrial policy for a critical sector of the economy, but the strategy will need more money and global support to take back chip supremacy and pre-empt a rival effort from China. The White House on Tuesday outlined a sweeping plan to secure the conduits for critical products from medicines to chips, responding in part to the growing economic and political sway of its Asian rival. Semiconductors -- the basic yet incredibly sophisticated components in almost every modern device -- took center stage in a 250-page White House report, which highlighted Beijing's "ultimate goal of cyber sovereignty and establishing first-mover advantage." The U.S. Senate expressed bipartisan support by passing a bill offering $52 billion to bolster domestic chip manufacturing the same day. That's aimed at reassuring industry leaders like Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. as they consider expanding investments in production capacity in the country.

Army researchers have developed a pioneering framework that provides a baseline for the development of collaborative multi-agent systems. The framework is detailed in the survey paper "Survey of recent multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms utilizing centralized training," which is featured in the SPIE Digital Library. Researchers said the work will support research in reinforcement learning approaches for developing collaborative multi-agent systems such as teams of robots that could work side-by-side with future soldiers. "We propose that the underlying information sharing mechanism plays a critical role in centralized learning for multi-agent systems, but there is limited study of this phenomena within the research community," said Army researcher and computer scientist Dr. Piyush K. Sharma of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory. "We conducted this survey of the state-of-the-art in reinforcement learning algorithms and their information sharing paradigms as a basis for asking fundamental questions on centralized learning for multi-agent systems that would improve their ability to work together."

Team Description: Kitware's Data and Analytics team helps internal and external customers deliver their next data and AI workflows with our expertise in emerging web and software infrastructure technologies. About the Projects: Kitware collaborates on a multitude of basic and applied research and development aimed to improve critical issues in today's world in order to advance health care, improve national security, combat human trafficking, and understand climate change. Our collaborators include the top universities from around the world, national research labs, medical device manufacturers, car manufacturers, financial institutes, government organizations, and many others. The projects range from extending our open source libraries and applications, such as Girder and VTK, to developing proprietary domain-specific vertical applications for a wide array of platforms including web and mobile devices. The Data and Analytics team focuses on building Python and JavaScript-based web systems that provide solutions for data management, analysis, and visualization.

Why artificial intelligence dangerous to humanity than we think? Some people think AI is a sort of science fiction. In fact, some are out there crazy due to the exposure of the public eye to Sci-Fi horror movies. This involves killer robots and hyper-intelligent machines. But, when we think of where we have come from in the last few generations.

Identifying academic plagiarism is a pressing problem, among others, for research institutions, publishers, and funding organizations. Detection approaches proposed so far analyze lexical, syntactical, and semantic text similarity. These approaches find copied, moderately reworded, and literally translated text. However, reliably detecting disguised plagiarism, such as strong paraphrases, sense-for-sense translations, and the reuse of non-textual content and ideas, is an open research problem. The thesis addresses this problem by proposing plagiarism detection approaches that implement a different concept: analyzing non-textual content in academic documents, specifically citations, images, and mathematical content. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed detection approaches, the thesis presents five evaluations that use real cases of academic plagiarism and exploratory searches for unknown cases. The evaluation results show that non-textual content elements contain a high degree of semantic information, are language-independent, and largely immutable to the alterations that authors typically perform to conceal plagiarism. Analyzing non-textual content complements text-based detection approaches and increases the detection effectiveness, particularly for disguised forms of academic plagiarism. To demonstrate the benefit of combining non-textual and text-based detection methods, the thesis describes the first plagiarism detection system that integrates the analysis of citation-based, image-based, math-based, and text-based document similarity. The system's user interface employs visualizations that significantly reduce the effort and time users must invest in examining content similarity.