TEHRAN - Iran's Revolutionary Guard said Thursday it shot down a U.S. drone amid heightened tensions between Tehran and Washington over its collapsing nuclear deal. The U.S. military declined to immediately comment. The reported shootdown of the RQ-4 Global Hawk comes after the U.S. military previously alleged Iran fired a missile at another drone last week that responded to the attack on two oil tankers near the Gulf of Oman. The U.S. blames Iran for the attack on the ships, which Tehran denies. The attacks come against the backdrop of heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran following President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers a year ago. The White House separately said it was aware of reports of a missile strike on Saudi Arabia amid a campaign targeting the kingdom by Yemen's Iranian-allied Houthi rebels.

One of the biggest problems in media today is so-called "fake news," which is so highly pernicious in part because it superficially resembles the real thing. AI tools promise to help identify it, but in order for it to do so, researchers have found that the best way is for that AI to learn to create fake news itself -- a double-edged sword, though perhaps not as dangerous as it sounds. Grover is a new system created by the University of Washington and Allen Institute for AI (AI2) computer scientists that is extremely adept at writing convincing fake news on myriad topics and as many styles -- and as a direct consequence is also no slouch at spotting it. The paper describing the model is available here. The idea of a fake news generator isn't new -- in fact, OpenAI made a splash recently by announcing that its own text-generating AI was too dangerous to release publicly. But Grover's creators believe we'll only get better at fighting generated fake news by putting the tools to create it out there to be studied.

WASHINGTON - Blacksburg was already well prepared when the U.S. government announced in April that the Virginia town would be home to the country's first commercial drone delivery service. Virginia Tech University, based in Blacksburg, has for years hosted a major drone development program, which has carried out experimental deliveries of ice cream, fast food and more. "I moved (to Blacksburg) last August, and when I was telling people I was moving, they said, 'I know somebody there had their Chipotle (Mexican restaurant chain) delivered by drone!' " said Megan Duncan, a communications professor at Virginia Tech. So, when Wing became the first drone company to be approved as an air carrier by the federal government, allowing the Google parent company Alphabet Inc. to start drone deliveries in and around Blacksburg, many of the locals were excited, Duncan said. "I think there's superinteresting possibilities for remote areas that are underserved, particularly with people who need prescriptions and can't make a 45-minute drive," she said by phone.

Detectives have launched an investigation after three drones disrupted flights at an airport during a nearby music festival. Leicestershire police said a pilot of one of the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) had been interviewed by officers after it was reported to police at 9.30am on Saturday near the Download festival at Donington Park. Two further drones were reported inside the restricted airspace at East Midlands airport at midnight and on Sunday at 1.30pm. Flights were delayed at the airport as a result of the drones. Police said they had carried out inquiries in conjunction with the Civil Aviation Authority and East Midlands airport.

The Diet enacted a revised aviation law Thursday that increases punishments for pilots found to have flown under the influence of alcohol or drugs following a series of drinking-related incidents involving Japanese airlines. Under the legislation, which will take effect in stages within one year of its official announcement, the penalty for drinking and flying has been raised from a maximum one-year jail term or ¥300,000 fine to a sentence of up to three years or a ¥500,000 fine. Japanese airlines have already tightened drinking rules, introducing mandatory Breathalyzer tests and relieving pilots of their duties if even a very low level of alcohol is detected. Those flying private planes, however, are not subject to the same checks. The legislation also seeks to improve aviation safety ahead of the intended mid-2020 delivery of the Mitsubishi Regional Jet, Japan's first homegrown commercial passenger jet.

WASHINGTON - Uber is testing restaurant food deliveries by drone. The company's Uber Eats unit began the tests in San Diego with McDonald's and plans to expand to other restaurants later this year. Uber says the service should decrease food delivery times. It works this way: Workers at a restaurant load the meal into a drone and it takes off, tracked and guided by a new aerospace management system. The drone then meets an Uber Eats driver at a drop-off location, and the driver will hand-deliver the meal to the customer.

The enterprise drone market is ascending rapidly. Goldman Sachs estimated that businesses will spend $13 billion on drones between now and 2020. Promising commercial applications for drones range from emergency response and firefighting to surveying farmland and grocery delivery. However, as is the case with any new and innovative technology, there have been some speed bumps along the way that must be delicately navigated before broad adoption sets in. One of the most common speed bumps for businesses is the challenge of analyzing the vast volumes of data collected by drones.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - Yemen's Houthi rebels said on Tuesday they launched at least two drones targeting a southwest Saudi city that's home to an air base. The Houthis' Al-Masirah satellite news channel reported the rebels launched Qasef-2K drones to strike the city of Khamis Mushait. The state-run Saudi Press Agency reported Tuesday, quoting military spokesman Col. Turki al-Maliki, that soldiers "intercepted" two drones launched by the Houthis. The Iranian-allied Houthis increasingly have targeted the kingdom with bomb-carrying drones. Khamis Mushait, some 815 km (510 miles) southwest of the capital, Riyadh, is near the kingdom's border with Yemen.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are envisioned to complement the 5G communication infrastructure in future smart cities. Hot spots easily appear in road intersections, where effective communication among vehicles is challenging. UAVs may serve as relays with the advantages of low price, easy deployment, line-of-sight links, and flexible mobility. In this paper, we study a UAV-assisted vehicular network where the UAV jointly adjusts its transmission power and bandwidth allocation under 3D flight to maximize the total throughput. First, we formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem by modeling the mobility of vehicles and the state transitions caused by the UAV's 3D flight. Secondly, we solve the target problem using a deep reinforcement learning method, namely, the deep deterministic policy gradient, and propose three solutions with different control objectives. Thirdly, in a simplified model with small state and action spaces, we verify the optimality of proposed algorithms. Comparing with two baseline schemes, we demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms in a realistic model.

This paper considers a resilient state estimation framework for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that integrates a Kalman filter-like state estimator and an attack detector. When an attack is detected, the state estimator uses only IMU signals as the GPS signals do not contain legitimate information. This limited sensor availability induces a sensor drift problem questioning the reliability of the sensor estimates. We propose a new resilience measure, escape time, as the safe time within which the estimation errors remain in a tolerable region with high probability. This paper analyzes the stability of the proposed resilient estimation framework and quantifies a lower bound for the escape time. Moreover, simulations of the UAV model demonstrate the performance of the proposed framework and provide analytical results.