Hyderabad: The general insurance industry that has been deploying several tech tools to improve service delivery, is now betting big usage of drone technologies to speed up the process of risk assessment, monitoring, damage assessment and record keeping, among others to bring in efficiencies. Sanjay Datta, chief (underwriting and claims), ICICI Lombard General Insurance, pointed out that as insurance regulator IRDAI moots changes in norms for surveyors to ensure speedy settlement, the usage of emerging technologies such as drones can reduce claim settlement time. Datta explained that drone technologies can be used in instances where insurance companies' personnel either find a location very difficult or risky to access. Besides, if there is a higher cost involved in sending staff to a location, especially in cases where choppers need to be pressed into services (like in the case of natural disasters), drones can be a better option. "The biggest advantage is that drones are able to capture images in a standardised manner that human beings cannot. One can analyse and act accordingly based on the images," he said.

U.S. defense spending on AI shows no signs of slowing -- if anything, it's accelerating. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) expects to spend $2 billion over the next five years on military AI projects. The Pentagon's controversial Project Maven, which taps machine learning to detect and classify objects of interest in drone footage, recently received a 580 percent funding increase in this year's $717 billion National Defense Authorization Act. And this week, the U.S. Army announced it would invest $72 million in AI research to "increase [the] readiness" of soldiers off and on the battlefield. "Tackling difficult science and technology challenges is rarely done alone and there is no greater challenge or opportunity facing the Army than Artificial Intelligence," said Dr. Philip Perconti, director of the Army's corporate laboratory, in a statement today.

Motivated by the increasing appeal of robots in information-gathering missions, we study multi-agent path planning problems in which the agents must remain interconnected. We model an area by a topological graph specifying the movement and the connectivity constraints of the agents. We study the theoretical complexity of the reachability and the coverage problems of a fleet of connected agents on various classes of topological graphs. We establish the complexity of these problems on known classes, and introduce a new class called sight-moveable graphs which admit efficient algorithms.

UberEats, ride-hailing company Uber's four-year-old food delivery arm, is a veritable juggernaut. It covers more than 50 percent of the U.S. population, facilitating deliveries for roughly 100,000 restaurants. And globally, it operates in 300 cities and 300 more locations around the globe. Chen Peng, head of data science at UberEats, spoke to a few of UberEats' unique advantages onstage at VentureBeat Summit 2018. "Analytics has played a critical role in driving the growth of the business," he said.

When I joined the artificial intelligence company Clarifai in early 2017, you could practically taste the promise in the air. My colleagues were brilliant, dedicated, and committed to making the world a better place. We founded Clarifai 4 Good where we helped students and charities, and we donated our software to researchers around the world whose projects had a socially beneficial goal. We were determined to be the one AI company that took our social responsibility seriously. I never could have predicted that two years later, I would have to quit this job on moral grounds.

Check out our CES 2019 coverage! Sit tight, because the future of gaming, and everything else, is about to change forever. If you look up in the corner of your phone, you're probably used to seeing a little indicator that says 4G LTE or, 3G, or... god forbid, 2G – and you've come to recognize that it probably has something to do with your phone's connection to your mobile network. It's pretty easy to follow, the G stands for generation, and each subsequent generation refers to a specific minimum speed, connectivity, and reliability necessary to classify the network as that particular generation. But all that is in the soon to be past, because up on the horizon is 5G.

President Trump's executive order this week removing a requirement that the government disclose estimates of civilians killed by U.S. airstrikes outside of war zones won't change very much--in practice. But that doesn't mean it's nothing to worry about. Trump's order rescinds a requirement created in one issued by Barack Obama in 2016 that the director of national intelligence to disclose civilian casualty estimates from all strikes by U.S. government agencies. The White House says the requirement was superfluous since the Pentagon has its own congressionally mandated reporting requirements. But as Luke Hartig, who helped draft Obama's order, explains for Just Security, that law doesn't cover strikes carried out by the CIA.

Lambeth's employer, Ben Crossley, confirmed that his fourth-generation farm is indeed using drones to control sheep. One favored model: the DJI Mavic Enterprise, which is already outfitted to play sounds -- such as barking -- over a speaker. The Washington Post noted that farmers are already using drones around the world for a variety of farming tasks, *including* surveying crops. The Washington Post noted that farmers are already using drones around the world for a variety of farming tasks, including surveying crops. Having the devices deal directly with animals is less common -- but it could be a vision of the future of agriculture.

Tensions between the warring parties have heightened in recent weeks over a stalled United Nations-led peace deal in the port of Hodeidah. The U.N. is trying to arrange a withdrawal of both sides from Hodeidah, the main entry point for most of Yemen's imports.

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order that revoked an Obama-era policy requiring United States intelligence officials to report civilian deaths in drone attacks outside active war zones. Former President Barack Obama, put the policy in place in 2016 as part of an effort to be more transparent about drone attacks after he had dramatically increased their use against armed groups in mostly Muslim countries. Trump's rescinding of the policy was done with little fanfare on Wednesday. The White House released the text of his executive order. "This action eliminates superfluous reporting requirements, requirements that do not improve government transparency, but rather distract our intelligence professionals from their primary mission," an administration official said.