Hyundai have revealed plans to develop autonomous, 'self-flying', electric taxis -- with seating for up to five passengers -- that will hit the skies by the year 2028. To deliver this, the Seoul-based manufacturer announced yesterday that it had transformed its Urban Air Mobility Division into a new company, Supernal. Supernal, which will be US-based, has said it will also be working to integrate the planned craft into existing transit networks and create necessary infrastructure. Such might include so-called vertiports -- transport hubs for flying taxis. Hyundai first revealed its concept for a flying taxi, the S-A1 Personal Air Vehicle, at last year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

"Surprise: Top US soldier clears US soldiers of murder" That should have been the headline attached to any story written about the "findings" of a recent "probe" into the massacre of an Afghan family, including seven children, obliterated by a US "Hellfire" missile in late August. Of course, not one editor – as far as I can gather – opted to tell that simple, blunt truth. Instead, most trotted out the usual pallet of euphemisms in effect to absolve US soldiers of the murders of an Afghan humanitarian worker, Zemari Ahmadi, three of his children, Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 13, as well as his cousin, Ahmad, 30, and three of Ahmadi's nephews, Arwin, seven, Benyamin, six, and Hayat, two and two three-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya. So, editors wrote lots of headlines like this one to summarise the predictable "conclusions" of a report authored by US Air Force Lieutenant General Sami Said: "Watchdog Finds No Misconduct in Mistaken Afghan Airstrike." The Pentagon could not have penned a more agreeable precis of Lieutenant General Said's "investigation" into the summary execution of Ahmadi and his family.

The jury at Kyle Rittenhouse's murder trial Tuesday watched drone video that showed Rittenhouse wheeling around and shooting Joseph Rosenbaum at close range during a night of turbulent protests on the streets of Kenosha. The video, zoomed in and slowed down by a forensic imaging specialist, was played as the prosecution's case appeared to be winding down after a week of testimony in which some of its own witnesses often bolstered Rittenhouse's claim of self-defense. The footage showed Rosenbaum following Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse suddenly spins around and fires his rifle at him. Rosenbaum falls, and Rittenhouse runs around a car. Dr. Doug Kelley, a forensic pathologist with the Milwaukee County medical examiner's office, said Rosenbaum was shot by someone who was within 4 feet of him.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems have become increasingly popular in many areas. Nevertheless, AI technologies are still in their developing stages, and many issues need to be addressed. Among those, the reliability of AI systems needs to be demonstrated so that the AI systems can be used with confidence by the general public. In this paper, we provide statistical perspectives on the reliability of AI systems. Different from other considerations, the reliability of AI systems focuses on the time dimension. That is, the system can perform its designed functionality for the intended period. We introduce a so-called SMART statistical framework for AI reliability research, which includes five components: Structure of the system, Metrics of reliability, Analysis of failure causes, Reliability assessment, and Test planning. We review traditional methods in reliability data analysis and software reliability, and discuss how those existing methods can be transformed for reliability modeling and assessment of AI systems. We also describe recent developments in modeling and analysis of AI reliability and outline statistical research challenges in this area, including out-of-distribution detection, the effect of the training set, adversarial attacks, model accuracy, and uncertainty quantification, and discuss how those topics can be related to AI reliability, with illustrative examples. Finally, we discuss data collection and test planning for AI reliability assessment and how to improve system designs for higher AI reliability. The paper closes with some concluding remarks.

While sharks are deadly marine predators, they also seem to attract fish looking for a'spa day' by rubbing against their rough skin. Drone footage recorded by marine biologists at the University of Miami captured frequent incidents of the surprising ritual. Researchers pored over underwater video, photos, drone footage, and even witness reports to find 47 different instances of fish rubbing up against a shark's body at more than a dozen locations around the world. The length of these regimens varied from eight seconds to more than five minutes, and included dozens of incidents of leerfish, also known as garrick, rubbing up against a great white shark, the ultimate oceanic apex predator, in Plettenberg Bay, South Africa. The number of fish chafing against a particular shark varied, too, from one lone swimmer to over 100 at once.

We present a novel approach to maximize the communication-aware coverage for robots operating over large-scale geographical regions of interest (ROIs). Our approach complements the underlying network topology in neighborhood selection and control, rendering it highly robust in dynamic environments. We formulate the coverage as a multi-stage, cooperative graphical game and employ Variational Inference (VI) to reach the equilibrium. We experimentally validate our approach in an mobile ad-hoc wireless network scenario using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and User Equipment (UE) robots. We show that it can cater to ROIs defined by stationary and moving User Equipment (UE) robots under realistic network conditions.

Drones are apparently turning into assassination tools. According to CBS News and Reuters, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi says he survived a drone-based assassination attempt today (November 7th) at his home in Baghdad's highly secure Green Zone. The country's Interior Ministry said the attack involved three drones, including at least one bomb-laden vehicle. Six bodyguards were injured during the incident, and an official speaking talking to Reuters claimed security forces obtained the remnants of a small drone at the scene. While the Iraqi government publicly said it was "premature" to identify culprits, CBS sources suspected the perpetrators belonged to pro-Iranian militias that have used similar tactics against Erbil International Airport and the US Embassy.

On Friday, the radical transparency group DDoSecrets released hundreds of hours of police helicopter surveillance footage. It's unclear who originally obtained the data, or what that person's motivations were, but the trove shows how extensive law enforcement's eye-in-the-sky has become, and how high-fidelity its cameras are. Privacy advocates also say the incident underscores that authorities don't do nearly enough to protect sensitive data, and have retention policies that are far too lax. In other aerial news: For the first time, intelligence officials say, a consumer drone likely attempted to disrupt the US power grid. The July 2020 incident took place at a power substation in Pennsylvania; a DJI Mavic 2 quadcopter outfitted with nylon ropes and copper wire seemed determined to cause a short circuit, but crash-landed on a nearby roof before it reached its apparent target.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi escaped unhurt from an "assassination attempt" in which an explosives-packed drone hit his Baghdad residence early Sunday, a new escalation in the country's post-election turmoil. Washington condemned the "apparent act of terrorism" while Iraqi President Barham Saleh called the attack, which was not immediately claimed by any group, an attempted "coup against the constitutional system". Kadhemi, aged 54 and in power since May 2020, appealed for "calm and restraint" before chairing a meeting at his office in the high-security Baghdad Green Zone, where the overnight attack took place. Three drones were launched from near a Tigris River bridge but two were intercepted, according to security sources, who said two bodyguards were wounded. Gunfire rang out and smoke rose from the Green Zone after the strike, which the premier's office labelled a "failed assassination attempt".

Iraq's Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi said he was unhurt and appealed for "calm and restraint" after a drone attack on his residence early Sunday heightened political tensions in the war-scarred country. The attack in Baghdad's Green Zone was the first to target the residence of Kadhemi, who has been in power since May 2020. It came as Iraq's political parties negotiate alliances over who will run the next government after elections last month. That vote saw the Conquest (Fatah) Alliance, the political arm of the pro-Iran Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary network, suffer a substantial decline in its parliamentary seats, leading the group to denounce the outcome as "fraud". The big winner, with more than 70 seats according to the initial count, was the movement of Moqtada Sadr, a Shiite Muslim preacher who campaigned as a nationalist and critic of Iran.