Disruptive technology is the technology that affects the normal operation of a market or an industry. Digital disruption entails established companies and start-ups alike enlisting new technologies in the fight to dislodge incumbents, protect entrenched positions, or to re-invent entire industries and business activities. And to remain disruptive in the market, it is really important to keep innovating. This is crucial because, innovations occur now and then in every industry, however, to be truly disruptive, and innovation must entirely transform a product or solution that historically was so complicated only a few could access it. On a minimum level, digital transformation enables an organization to address the needs of its customers more simply and directly. But through disruptive innovation, companies can offer a far better way to users of doing things that current incumbents simply cannot compete with. Artificial intelligence (AI), E-Commerce, cloud, social networking, Internet of Things, 5G, blockchain and other emerging technologies are being leveraged to blur the lines between industries, creating new business models and converging sectors. A company that disrupts its market is in a great position to take advantage of new opportunities. Sometimes offering something different can change the whole market for the better. Most of the top disruptive companies get this label by offering highly innovative products and services and here are 100 such top disruptive companies listed below. The company provides innovative, managed cloud services to help its customers succeed. With best-in-class service and technology, 403Tech protects companies against cybercrimes while enabling greater efficiency and productivity. Some of its popular services include desktop support, server support, wired and wireless networking, virus removal, data recovery, and backup and hosted cloud services. Aegeus Technologies aims to design and develop robotic technologies and solutions.

We all have stuff that we've bought ourselves -- or asked others to buy for us -- that makes us happy, even if we suspect our friends may not understand why it's so great. It could be a $100-plus coffee cup that keeps your liquid at the exact right temperature. Or a video game that you've been playing for years. Or a hair styler that is way expensive but would make you look fabulous. We asked the staff of The Verge what some of their guilty pleasures are, and the braver among us volunteered some answers. I'm hesitant to call it a "guilty" pleasure because I have used this $550 (or more) GE Opal 2.0 ice machine every day for nearly a full year and not once have I felt guilt about spending such an obscene amount of cash on a kitchen gadget that does exactly one thing.

A new research collaboration between Carnegie Mellon and autonomous driving technology company Argo AI has developed an economical method for generating dynamic fly-through environments based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), using footage captured by drones. Mega-NeRF offers interactive fly-bys based on drone footage, with on-demand LOD. For more detail (at better resolution), check out the video embedded at the end of this article. The new approach, called Mega-NeRF, obtains a 40x speed-up compared to the average Neural Radiance Fields rendering standard, as well as offering something notably different from the standard tanks and temples that recur in new NeRF papers. The new paper is titled Mega-NeRF: Scalable Construction of Large-Scale NeRFs for Virtual Fly-Throughs, and comes from three researchers at Carnegie Mellon, one of whom also represents Argo AI.

In video reviews of the latest drone models to his 80,000 YouTube subscribers, Indiana college student Carson Miller doesn't seem like an unwitting tool of Chinese spies. Yet that's how the U.S. is increasingly viewing him and thousands of other Americans who purchase drones built by Shenzhen-based SZ DJI Technology Co., the world's top producer of unmanned aerial vehicles. Miller, who bought his first DJI model in 2016 for $500 and now owns six of them, shows why the company controls more than half of the U.S. drone market. "If tomorrow DJI were completely banned," the 21-year-old said, "I would be pretty frightened." Critics of DJI warn the dronemaker may be channeling reams of sensitive data to Chinese intelligence agencies on everything from critical infrastructure like bridges and dams to personal information such as heart rates and facial recognition.

Shortly before 3 a.m. on July 19, 2016, U.S. Special Operations forces bombed what they believed were three Islamic State (IS) group "staging areas" on the outskirts of Tokhar, a riverside hamlet in northern Syria. They reported 85 fighters killed. In fact, they hit houses far from the front line, where farmers, their families and other local people sought nighttime sanctuary from bombing and gunfire. More than 120 villagers were killed. In early 2017 in Iraq, an American war plane struck a dark-colored vehicle, believed to be a car bomb, stopped at an intersection in the Wadi Hajar neighborhood of West Mosul. Actually, the car had been bearing not a bomb but a man named Majid Mahmoud Ahmed, his wife and their two children, who were fleeing the fighting nearby. They and three other civilians were killed. In November 2015, after observing a man dragging an "unknown heavy object" into an IS "defensive fighting position," U.S. forces struck a building in Ramadi, Iraq. A military review found that the object was actually "a person of small stature" -- a child -- who died in the strike. None of these deadly failures resulted in a finding of wrongdoing. These cases are drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of the American air war in the Middle East since 2014. The trove of documents -- the military's own confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, obtained by The New York Times -- lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the U.S. government's image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs. The documents show, too, that despite the Pentagon's highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity. In only a handful of cases were the assessments made public. Not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action. Fewer than a dozen condolence payments were made, even though many survivors were left with disabilities requiring expensive medical care. Documented efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned are rare. The air campaign represents a fundamental transformation of warfare that took shape in the final years of the Obama administration, amid the deepening unpopularity of the forever wars that had claimed more than 6,000 American service members. The United States traded many of its boots on the ground for an arsenal of aircraft directed by controllers sitting at computers, often thousands of kilometers away. President Barack Obama called it "the most precise air campaign in history." This was the promise: America's "extraordinary technology" would allow the military to kill the right people while taking the greatest possible care not to harm the wrong ones. The IS caliphate ultimately crumbled under the weight of American bombing.

Two Katyusha rockets have struck Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses several Western embassies, the Iraqi military has said. One rocket was destroyed in the air by the C-RAM defence system and the other landed near a national monument and damaged two cars, the military said in a statement on Sunday. Security forces started an investigation to detect the launch site. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. A United States military official told the Reuters news agency that the C-RAM system brought down one of the rounds and none of them landed on the US embassy.

Country officials and campaigners have expressed disappointment after United Nations talks on autonomous weapons systems – known as "killer robots" – stopped short of launching negotiations into an international treaty to govern their use following opposition from manufacturing states. Unlike existing semi-autonomous weapons such as drones, fully-autonomous weapons have no human-operated "kill switch" and instead leave decisions over life and death to sensors, software and machine processes. The regulation of the industry has taken on new urgency since a UN panel report in March said the first autonomous drone attack may have occurred in Libya. This week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres encouraged the 125 parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) to come up with an "ambitious plan" on new rules. But on Friday, the Sixth Review Conference of the CCW failed to schedule further talks around the development and use of the Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems, or LAWS.

We present a novel framework for instance segmentation of 3D buildings from Multi-view Stereo (MVS) urban scenes. Unlike existing works focusing on semantic segmentation of an urban scene, the emphasis of this work lies in detecting and segmenting 3D building instances even if they are attached and embedded in a large and imprecise 3D surface model. Multi-view RGB images are first enhanced to RGBH images by adding a heightmap and are segmented to obtain all roof instances using a fine-tuned 2D instance segmentation neural network. Roof instance masks from different multi-view images are then clustered into global masks. Our mask clustering accounts for spatial occlusion and overlapping, which can eliminate segmentation ambiguities among multi-view images. Based on these global masks, 3D roof instances are segmented out by mask back-projections and extended to the entire building instances through a Markov random field (MRF) optimization. Quantitative evaluations and ablation studies have shown the effectiveness of all major steps of the method. A dataset for the evaluation of instance segmentation of 3D building models is provided as well. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first dataset for 3D urban buildings on the instance segmentation level.

Drones became the most loved gadget nowadays. Drones are getting huge demand in the market. Amazing aerial photography is the main reason drones are used by photographers, businesses for spectacular shots. Drones could be extremely helpful during rescue operations in the mountains and in the forests. Just imagine how many lives they can save with timely delivered medical supplies or simply a bottle of water!! Drones were used mostly by the military in the old days.

A top leader of the Pakistan Taliban escaped unhurt from a suspected drone strike on a safe house in eastern Afghanistan, the militant group said Friday. The strike on Thursday evening came a week after a ceasefire between the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and the government collapsed, with militants accusing Islamabad of killing its fighters. The TTP -- a separate movement but sharing common roots with Afghanistan's new leaders -- plunged Pakistan into a period of horrific violence after forming in 2007. Two TTP sources currently in Afghanistan told AFP that Maulvi Faqir Mohammad was the target of what they described as a drone strike on a compound in Chawgam village, in the eastern province of Kunar bordering Pakistan. "Maulvi Faqir Mohammad was not present at the time... two fighters of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan were wounded," one source said.