A moment later, a missile fired from a drone slams into the vehicle, exploding in an orange flash, blowing the man off his feet and leaving the tank a smoldering wreck. The scene is one of dozens of aerial videos that were posted online in Azerbaijan last year showing off a new weapon. Over six weeks, it helped the nation regain territory in the Nagorno-Karabakh region that had been held by Russian-backed Armenian forces for more than two decades. The videos show attacks on tanks, trucks, command posts, mortar positions and radar installations. Smaller militaries around the world are deploying inexpensive missile-equipped drones against armored enemies, a new battlefield tactic that proved successful last year in regional conflicts, shifting the strategic balance around Turkey and Russia.

When a person dies in a car crash in the US, data on the incident is typically reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Federal law requires that civilian airplane pilots notify the National Transportation Safety Board of in-flight fires and some other incidents. The grim registries are intended to give authorities and manufacturers better insights on ways to improve safety. They helped inspire a crowdsourced repository of artificial intelligence incidents aimed at improving safety in much less regulated areas, such as autonomous vehicles and robotics. The AI Incident Database launched late in 2020 and now contains 100 incidents, including #68, the security robot that flopped into a fountain, and #16, in which Google's photo organizing service tagged Black people as "gorillas."

DataDome, a cybersecurity company, announced that it has raised $35 million from Elephant, and its historical investor ISAI. The firm is known for its Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that uses artificial intelligence to protect the data of companies suffering from fraud committed by malicious robots. This investment will allow DataDome to strengthen its teams. Founded in 2015 by Fabien Grenier and Benjamin Fabre, DataDome is a cybersecurity company whose main mission is to help companies protect their data and digital activities. A fast-growing demand: bot fraud attacks are constantly on the rise as they are up 47% over the last six months.

NASA is returning to Venus, our closest yet perhaps most overlooked neighbor, after decades of exploring other worlds. Bill Nelson, NASA's new administrator, on Wednesday announced two new robotic missions to the solar system's hottest planet. (June 2)

MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt. Yoel Fink, who is a professor of material sciences and electrical engineering, a Research Laboratory of Electronics principal investigator, and the senior author on the study, says digital fibers expand the possibilities for fabrics to uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection. Or, you might someday store your wedding music in the gown you wore on the big day -- more on that later. Fink and his colleagues describe the features of the digital fiber in Nature Communications. Until now, electronic fibers have been analog -- carrying a continuous electrical signal -- rather than digital, where discrete bits of information can be encoded and processed in 0s and 1s.

MIT researchers have created the first fiber with digital capabilities, able to sense, store, analyze, and infer activity after being sewn into a shirt. Yoel Fink, who is a professor of material sciences and electrical engineering, a Research Laboratory of Electronics principal investigator, and the senior author on the study, says digital fibers expand the possibilities for fabrics to uncover the context of hidden patterns in the human body that could be used for physical performance monitoring, medical inference, and early disease detection. Or, you might someday store your wedding music in the gown you wore on the big day -- more on that later. Fink and his colleagues describe the features of the digital fiber today in Nature Communications. Until now, electronic fibers have been analog -- carrying a continuous electrical signal -- rather than digital, where discrete bits of information can be encoded and processed in 0s and 1s.

Sign up for the New Economy Daily newsletter, follow us @economics and subscribe to our podcast. The French government will use algorithms and artificial intelligence to identify small firms at risk of collapse in the wake of the Covid pandemic, and provide as much as 3 billion euros ($3.7 billion) to protect them. Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire presented the new measures on Tuesday as part of a plan that also includes an extension of crisis lending facilities to the end of 2021 and simplified procedures for restructuring debts of small firms. The new tools come amid warnings that a jump in insolvencies as governments pare back crisis aid could hamstring the economic recovery. The OECD said Monday that shoring up balance sheets of small firms is a crucial part of targeted fiscal support in the transition out of the crisis.

Yesterday the European Investment Bank (EIB) published a report which concluded that companies and governments in Europe are substantially underinvesting in artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain. This is especially in comparison with other leading regions. It declared that "the European Union struggles to translate its scientific excellence into business application and economic success". The report on AI and blockchain found that Europe's venture capital ecosystem focuses predominantly on providing early-stage finance for AI/blockchain-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) but underperforms in the subsequent expansion and growth stages. The study estimates a total investment gap in AI and blockchain technologies in the European Union of approximately €5-10 billion ($6-12 bn) per year.

JUNE 2, 2021 – From the battlefield to the back office, artificial intelligence has the potential to transform how the Defense Department does business in areas like increasing the speed of decision making, making sense of complex data sets and improving efficiency in back-office operations. Ensuring that AI is developed, procured and used responsibly and ethically is a top priority for the department's top leader. "As the Department of Defense embraces artificial intelligence, it is imperative that we adopt responsible behavior, processes and outcomes in a manner that reflects the department's commitment to its core set of ethical principles," Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks wrote in a department-wide memorandum released last week. As part of that commitment to responsible artificial intelligence, or RAI, the memorandum sets forth foundational tenets for implementation across the department including a governance structure and processes to provide oversight and accountability; warfighter trust to ensure fidelity in the AI capability and its use, a systems engineering and risk management approach to implementation in the AI product and acquisition lifecycle; a robust ecosystem to ensure collaboration across government, academia, industry, and allies and build an AI-ready workforce. The memorandum also spelled out how the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center will serve as the lead to coordinate the implementation and oversight of the department's RAI efforts.

Atos and Thales have announced the creation of Athea, a joint-venture that will develop a sovereign Big Data and Artificial Intelligence platform for public and private sector players in the defence, intelligence and internal state security communities. Athea will draw on the experience gained by both companies from the demonstration phase of the ARTEMIS programme, the Big Data platform of the French Ministry of Armed Forces. The contract to optimise and prepare the full-scale roll-out of the ARTEMIS platform was also awarded jointly to the two leaders by the French Defence Procurement Agency on April 30, 2021. The new joint venture will initially serve the French market before addressing European requirements at a later date. With the exponential rise in the number of sources of information and increased pressure to respond more quickly to potential issues, state agencies need to manage ever-greater volumes of heterogeneous data and accelerate the development of new AI applications where security and sovereignty are key.