Along with the springing up of the semantics-empowered communication (SemCom) research, it is now witnessing an unprecedentedly growing interest towards a wide range of aspects (e.g., theories, applications, metrics and implementations) in both academia and industry. In this work, we primarily aim to provide a comprehensive survey on both the background and research taxonomy, as well as a detailed technical tutorial. Specifically, we start by reviewing the literature and answering the "what" and "why" questions in semantic transmissions. Afterwards, we present the ecosystems of SemCom, including history, theories, metrics, datasets and toolkits, on top of which the taxonomy for research directions is presented. Furthermore, we propose to categorize the critical enabling techniques by explicit and implicit reasoning-based methods, and elaborate on how they evolve and contribute to modern content & channel semantics-empowered communications. Besides reviewing and summarizing the latest efforts in SemCom, we discuss the relations with other communication levels (e.g., conventional communications) from a holistic and unified viewpoint. Subsequently, in order to facilitate future developments and industrial applications, we also highlight advanced practical techniques for boosting semantic accuracy, robustness, and large-scale scalability, just to mention a few. Finally, we discuss the technical challenges that shed light on future research opportunities.

The IDF says it forces "destroyed an underground tunnel shaft containing ready-to-use explosive devices. It also said that "additional weapons were found, as well as ammunition and military equipment." JERUSALEM - Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on Wednesday launched a raid on the city of Jenin and its refugee camp - two strongholds of Palestinian terrorist activity - in the West Bank. The IDF operation in the West Bank, known by Israelis by its biblical name Judea and Samaria, raises questions about the opening of a third front in Israel's response to Hamas' multipronged attack against the Jewish state on Oct. 7, resulting in the massacre of 1,400 people in southern Israel. The IDF said in a statement that its counterterrorism forces "exchanged fire with armed terrorists, over ten terrorists were killed, and over 20 wanted suspects were apprehended, among them Nur and Minur Salma, Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists." The U.S. has designated the Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad a foreign terrorist organization. The fighting comes at a time when the Biden administration is cautioning Israeli actions in the West Bank, especially when it comes to violence from a small group of extremist settlers who have been involved in armed confrontations with Palestinian villagers in the area. NETANYAHU TELLS BRET BAIER CEASE-FIRE'MEANS SURRENDER,' INSISTS SQUAD MEMBER IS CALLING FOR'GENOCIDE' Palestinian terrorists take up position during a confrontation with the Israeli army in Jenin on July 3, 2023. The Israeli army said it had launched drone strikes in Jenin as part of an "extensive counterterrorism effort." U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Monday in Tokyo at the G-7 meeting that "I briefed by (sic) colleagues about my conversations with Israeli leaders on pauses, and on concrete steps to minimize harm to Palestinian civilians in Gaza and to stop extremist violence in the West Bank." The Associated Press reported that President Biden said in late October the attacks by "extremist settlers" amounted to "pouring gasoline" on the already burning fires in the Middle East since the Hamas attack. The administration refers to Jewish residents who live in the disputed West Bank territory as settlers. Following Thursday's raid, the IDF added that "Two M-16 rifles, a'Carlo' gun, three handguns, ammunition, and military equipment were seized." The Palestinian-manufactured "Carlo" gun has its origins in the 2016 terrorism wave against Israelis. The weapon is a watered-down version of the Carl Gustav submachine gun - hence its name, the "Carlo" gun. "The initiative is always ours to prevent a third front.

United States troops in Iraq have been targeted in new attacks using drones and explosives, according to military and security sources. Three attacks took place on Thursday, the sources said, adding to the more than 40 assaults that US and allied troops based across the Middle East have come under since the Israel-Hamas war started on October 7. As well as two drone assaults at bases, a US-led coalition convoy was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED) blast in the vicinity of Mosul Dam. The security sources said the patrol was accompanied by Iraqi counterterrorism forces and that a vehicle in the patrol was damaged. Three US troops sustained minor injuries but had returned to duty, the official added.

This paper presents multi-agent reinforcement learning frameworks for the low-level control of a quadrotor UAV. While single-agent reinforcement learning has been successfully applied to quadrotors, training a single monolithic network is often data-intensive and time-consuming. To address this, we decompose the quadrotor dynamics into the translational dynamics and the yawing dynamics, and assign a reinforcement learning agent to each part for efficient training and performance improvements. The proposed multi-agent framework for quadrotor low-level control that leverages the underlying structures of the quadrotor dynamics is a unique contribution. Further, we introduce regularization terms to mitigate steady-state errors and to avoid aggressive control inputs. Through benchmark studies with sim-to-sim transfer, it is illustrated that the proposed multi-agent reinforcement learning substantially improves the convergence rate of the training and the stability of the controlled dynamics.

For the second time in nearly two weeks, the United States carried out airstrikes against a facility used by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and its proxies in eastern Syria early Thursday, ratcheting up retaliation for a steady stream of rocket and drone attacks against American forces in Iraq and Syria. The strikes by two Air Force F-15E jets against a weapons warehouse in Deir al Zour Province, Syria, came after U.S. airstrikes on Oct. 27 against similar targets in eastern Syria failed to deter Iran or its proxies in Syria and Iraq, which the Biden administration has blamed for the attacks. Not only have the attacks continued -- there have been at least 22 more since the American retaliatory strikes last month -- but Pentagon officials said they have become more dangerous. Iran-backed militias have packed even larger loads of explosives -- more than 80 pounds -- onto drones launched at American bases, U.S. officials said. "This precision self-defense strike is a response to a series of attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria by I.R.G.C.-Quds Force affiliates," Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in a statement.

A U.S. military surveillance drone was shot down off the coast of Yemen on Wednesday by Iran-backed Houthi rebels, the Pentagon said. Pentagon officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, confirmed that the drone, an MQ-9 Reaper, had been shot down. But they would not say if the aircraft was armed, where it was flying from or other details. The downing of a Reaper drone, the mainstay of the American military's aerial surveillance fleet, was the latest escalation of violence between the United States and Iran-backed groups in Yemen, Iraq and Syria. The episodes have underscored the risks that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas could spiral into a wider war.

Internet of Things (IoT) involves sensors for monitoring and wireless networks for efficient communication. However, resource-constrained IoT devices and limitations in existing wireless technologies hinder its full potential. Integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) into IoT networks can address some challenges by expanding its' coverage, providing security, and bringing computing closer to IoT devices. Nevertheless, effective data collection in UAV-assisted IoT networks is hampered by factors, including dynamic UAV behavior, environmental variables, connectivity instability, and security considerations. In this survey, we first explore UAV-based IoT networks, focusing on communication and networking aspects. Next, we cover various UAV-based data collection methods their advantages and disadvantages, followed by a discussion on performance metrics for data collection. As this article primarily emphasizes reliable and efficient data collection in UAV-assisted IoT networks, we briefly discuss existing research on data accuracy and consistency, network connectivity, and data security and privacy to provide insights into reliable data collection. Additionally, we discuss efficient data collection strategies in UAV-based IoT networks, covering trajectory and path planning, collision avoidance, sensor network clustering, data aggregation, UAV swarm formations, and artificial intelligence for optimization. We also present two use cases of UAVs as a service for enhancing data collection reliability and efficiency. Finally, we discuss future challenges in data collection for UAV-assisted IoT networks.

Maintaining freshness of data collection in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks has attracted increasing attention. By taking into account age-of-information (AoI), we investigate the trajectory planning problem of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is used to aid a cluster-based IoT network. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total AoI of the collected data by the UAV from the ground IoT network. Since the total AoI of the IoT network depends on the flight time of the UAV and the data collection time at hovering points, we jointly optimize the selection of hovering points and the visiting order to these points. We exploit the state-of-the-art transformer and the weighted A*, which is a path search algorithm, to design a machine learning algorithm to solve the formulated problem. The whole UAV-IoT system is fed into the encoder network of the proposed algorithm, and the algorithm's decoder network outputs the visiting order to ground clusters. Then, the weighted A* is used to find the hovering point for each cluster in the ground IoT network. Simulation results show that the trained model by the proposed algorithm has a good generalization ability to generate solutions for IoT networks with different numbers of ground clusters, without the need to retrain the model. Furthermore, results show that our proposed algorithm can find better UAV trajectories with the minimum total AoI when compared to other algorithms.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. A series of drone strikes around the town of Kidal in northern Mali have killed at least 14 people in the rebel stronghold, the town's mayor said Tuesday. Kidal Mayor Arbakane Ag Abzayack told The Associated Press that the town's deputy mayor and a local councillor were among the victims. Residents say victims of the first drone strike Tuesday included children who had gathered in front of the former U.N. peacekeeping camp that was vacated a week ago.

With the world greatly relying on maritime transport and marine resources, a global At the epicenter of the necessary inspection processes is fleet of approximately 54, 000 large (> 1, 000 gross tons [1]) the General Visual Inspection (GVI). In simple terms, conventional maritime structures are mainly inspected manually by human GVI is the process of "naked eye"-based inspection surveyors, while the broader global fleet involves more than and detection of damages or anomalies that may pose a 100, 000 ships [2]. Among others, the surveyors must inspect risk to the structural integrity and safety of the BWT and the Ballast Water Tanks (BWTs) which represent dangerous, thus the vessel as a whole. As GVI is often the basis upon confined, enclosed environments often with difficult access which further inspections and maintenance are scheduled, via narrow hatches and manholes, low-lighting, slippery automating this process with robots and enabling the ability surfaces, as well as possible oxygen deficiency or presence of for it to take place virtually in any place of the world with toxic gases. The European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA) little to no human intervention, has the potential to optimize reports that a significant number of accidents aboard ships the inspection and maintenance cycles. This in turn will between 2014-2021 were due to the fall of persons (e.g., greatly reduce the associated costs, while keeping humans within the challenging enclosed ballast tank and cargo hold out of harms way [5].