Kerala's experiments with cutting technology to simplify citizen services have always been much appreciated across the country, irrespective of the natural calamities it has seen in the past or the current global pandemic of the coronavirus that has taken the world into its grip. When the entire country is going through a tough time and complete government machinery is pressed into serviceto contain the dreaded coronavirus or Covid-19, Kerala Police is extensively using ICT to track people violating the 21 day lockdown and taking help of ultra modern gadgets to keep citizens inside their homes. From using drones to geofence-based home quarantine solution app to tele medicine platform, the Kerala government is not leaving any stone unturned to use technology optimally. Kerala Police has already hogged the limelight by making innovative videos on social media like the four'corona virus awareness videos' made by the Kerala police. All are innovative in-house creations of Kerala Police, where all the actors, directors and producers are police officers.

Governor Andrew Cuomo has repeatedly scolded New Yorkers for not practicing social distancing amid the coronavirus pandemic and now an anonymous citizen has offered their services to enforce the policy. A drone was spotted flying over the East River Park in Manhattan that chastised pedestrians for walking in groups along a path. Dubbed'the Anti-COVID-19 Volunteer Drone Task Force', the unmanned aerial vehicle told groups to stay at least six-feet apart in order to'reduce the death toll and save lives.' However, it is illegal to fly drones in certain parts of the city and the Federal Aviation Administration told DailyMail.com it is'looking into the drone flight to determine if it was compliant with Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR).' WATCH: A drone was seen flying over a Manhattan park on Saturday, urging pedestrians to "maintain social distancing." A drone was spotted flying over the East River Park in Manhattan that chastised pedestrians for walking in groups along a path.

Experts around the globe claim that artificial intelligence is an inseparable part of the future business, public sector and especially, national security. But this fact does not imply that AI should be, or could be, implemented quickly and successfully. According to Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst, and Founder at Futurum Research, there are several factors that are hampering the penetration of this technology in numerous industries and fields due to the difficulties they pose to organizations interested in taking this digital leap i.e lack of future vision, fear of job loss, etc. Similarly, anyone who has ever watched any Iron Man movie knows that its principal character, Tony Stark, relies heavily on Jarvis, an advanced Artificial Intelligence system designed to manage almost "everything" in his life, especially in the fight against crime. We might be considering this a far-fetched reality but it could actually be closer than we think when it comes to national security.

In this paper, we study novel variants of the well-known two-echelon vehicle routing problem in which a truck works on the first echelon to transport parcels and a fleet of drones to intermediate depots while in the second echelon, the drones are used to deliver parcels from intermediate depots to customers. The objective is to minimize the completion time instead of the transportation cost as in classical 2-echelon vehicle routing problems. Depending on the context, a drone can be launched from the truck at an intermediate depot once (single trip drone) or several times (multiple trip drone). Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) models are first proposed to formulate mathematically the problems and solve to optimality small-size instances. To handle larger instances, a metaheuristic based on the idea of Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) is introduced. Experimental results obtained on instances of different contexts are reported and analyzed.

Data-driven experiences are rich, immersive and immediate. Think pizza delivery by drone, video cameras that can record traffic accidents at an intersection, freight trucks that can identify a potential system failure. These kinds of fast-acting activities need lots of data -- quickly. So they can't sustain latency as data travels to and from the cloud. That to-and-fro takes too long.

China is deploying robots and drones to remotely disinfect hospitals, deliver food and enforce quarantine restrictions as part of the effort to fight coronavirus. Chinese state media has reported that drones and robots are being used by the government to cut the risk of person-to-person transmission of the disease. There are 780 million people that are on some form of residential lockdown in China. Wuhan, the city where the viral outbreak began, has been sealed off from the outside world for weeks. The global death toll from coronavirus topped 2,100 people this week, with over 74,000 infected.

Fox News finds the coronavirus outbreak has left San Francisco streets and tourist sites including Chinatown and Fisherman's Wharf largely deserted. Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox. New drone footage and other video shot by Fox News shows once-busy streets and tourist areas in Los Angeles and San Francisco eerily deserted as the coronavirus has kept people indoors. Fisherman's Wharf, one of San Francisco's busiest tourist areas, once brimming with souvenir shops and seafood stalls and situated near Ghirardelli Square, was shuttered after the city's mayor called for a shelter-in-place, restricting people from leaving their homes except for trips to the grocery store or for medical supplies. The Golden Gate Bridge, which usually has seen over 100,000 cars and other vehicles a day and Alamo Square -- which overlooks the famous "Painted Ladies" -- were surprisingly barren.

Perception-Action loops are at the core of most our daily life activities. Subconsciously, our brains use sensory inputs to trigger specific motor actions in real time and this becomes a continuous activity that in all sorts of activities from playing sports to watching TV. In the context of artificial intelligence(AI), perception-action loops are the cornerstone of autonomous systems such as self-driving vehicles. While disciplines such as imitation learning or reinforcement learning have certainly made progress in this area, the current generation of autonomous systems are still nowhere near human skill in making those decisions directly from visual data. Recently, AI researchers from Microsoft published a paper proposing a transfer learning method to learn perception-action policies from in a simulated environment and apply the knowledge to fly an autonomous drone.

Experts are set to unleash a'pandemic drone' to help limit the spread of coronavirus. The drone is fitted with sensors and computer vision, allowing it to monitor and detect people with infectious respiratory conditions. The system could also identify people sneezing and coughing in crowds, offices, airports, cruise ships, aged care homes and other places where groups of people may work or congregate. Its creators hope to deploy the drone in six months and in various hotspots where'the most amount of detection is currently required.' Experts are set to unleash a'pandemic drone' to help limit the spread of coronavirus.

The Army Research Laboratory is exploring new applications of AI designed to better enable forward operating robot "tanks" to acquire targets, discern and organize war-crucial information, surveil combat zones and even fire weapons when directed by a human. "For the first time the Army will deploy manned tanks that are capable of controlling robotic vehicles able to adapt to the environment and act semi-independently. Manned vehicles will control a number of combat vehicles, not small ones but large ones. In the future we are going to be incorporating robotic systems that are larger, more like the size of a tanks," Dr. Brandon Perelman, Scientist and Engineer, Army Research Laboratory, Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Futures Command, told Warrior in an interview, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. The concept is aligned with ongoing research into new generations of AI being engineered to not only gather and organize information for human decision makers but also advance networking between humans and machines.