The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has given nine companies permission to fly in controlled airspace, such as airports, as part of its Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) initiative. One of those nine companies is DJI, along with Aeronyde, Airbus, AiRXOS, Altitude Angel, Converge, KittyHawk, UASidekick and Unifly. It doesn't mean operators can fly those brands' drones over airports anytime they want, though -- it only means that professional drone pilots can now get authorization to enter controlled airspace in near-real time instead of waiting for months. A pilot that's going to use a drone to conduct an inspection, capture photos and videos or herd birds away from airports, for instance, can now send their applications to fly in controlled airspace to LAANC. The program then processes their applications in near-real time, designating the locations within that airspace they can use, along with the altitudes they can fly in.

After an interesting year for Google Cloud's artificial intelligence group, Andrew Moore, dean of computer science at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, will become head of the division at the end of the year, with current leader Fei Fei Li returning to Stanford in a move that Google said was all part of the original plan. Moore, a former Google employee, will rejoin the company at the end of the current semester at Carnegie Mellon, Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene announced in a blog post. "We are incredibly fortunate to have Andrew's leadership at this point in our development as we define how we will expand bringing AI and ML technologies and solutions to developers and organizations all over the world," she wrote. Google's artificial intelligence research team is considered among the best in the world, but it endured some high-profile setbacks this year after employees demanded that the cloud group stop working with the Department of Defense on Project Maven, which used image-recognition techniques to target drone strikes. In August, Greene announced that Google would not renew its contract with the Pentagon for those services, a move that also likely took the company out of the running for the $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract under consideration by the military.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that the university's researchers are helping lead the study with more than 50 scientists and students from the University of Colorado, Texas Tech University and the University of Oklahoma. The research beginning in May is funded through a three-year, $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. Although flying a drone might sound like the biggest risk in operating one, dealing with the batteries is potentially more explosive. At the 100 hospital emergency rooms that report electronics-related injury cases to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission, more than 200 incidents (PDF) involving drone batteries, stemming from fire, smoke, and explosions, were recorded between 2012 and 2017. Not every drone-battery incident results in an injury, but each pilot and expert I interviewed had a story about an exploding or fiery lithium battery going off especially after it had repeatedly crashed to the ground inside a drone.

More than three decades ago, it was quite amazing to see KITT--an advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-powered, self-aware black car--from the American TV series Knight Rider, perform some unbelievable acts. Today, we are all building KITTs--unmanned and autonomous ground and aerial vehicles that can walk, jump, float, swim, glide, fly and conquer almost all terrains with their designs that can take precise and accurate action, making them highly efficient performers. In the realm of AI, we are now transferring the knowledge to our machines to perform tasks and make them intelligent decision makers through machine learning (ML), a core area of AI. These are technical objects designed and built by people like us. Truly, this belief turned my passion into a profession, and in hindsight, I have found robots to be technologically complex beings, much needed to support humanity.Robotics is interdisciplinary and thus a combination of mechanical, electronics and computer science has lead to Mechatronics being one of the most coveted fields and as this meets AI, we produce Intelligent Robots.Technical classification of Robots are based on locomotion such as stationary, wheeled, legged, swimming and flying robots.

What if a parent could feel safe allowing a drone to walk their child to the bus stop? That might occur sooner than you think with a new avenue of artificial intelligence, being studied by Purdue University researchers, that creates brain-inspired computing to allow systems such as drones, vehicles and robots to operate without human intervention. Drones are going to become more commonplace. The Federal Aviation Administration reports that 420,000 of them will be in the air by 2021. New research at Purdue's Center for Brain-inspired Computing Enabling Autonomous Intelligence, or C-BRIC, could direct drones and other robotic devices and machines to do even more through advanced artificial intelligence.

Local authorities have established areas around the airport that are safe to fly for drone operations and qualify for automatic authorization,

The provision is tucked in a huge bill that provides $1.7 billion in disaster relief and authorizes programs of the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates drones. The House approved the measure Wednesday by a 398-23 vote, and the Senate is expected pass it on to President Donald Trump's desk in the coming days. The White House signaled support of the drone provision in July.

Recently, I picked up Kai-Fu Lee's newest book, AI Superpowers. Kai-Fu Lee is one of the most plugged-in AI investors on the planet, managing over $2 billion between six funds and over 300 portfolio companies in the US and China. With a foothold in both Beijing and Silicon Valley, Lee looks at the power balance between Chinese and US tech behemoths--each turbocharging new applications of deep learning and sweeping up global markets in the process. In this post, I'll be discussing Lee's "Four Waves of AI," an excellent framework for discussing where AI is today and where it's going. I'll also be featuring some of the hottest Chinese tech companies leading the charge, worth watching right now.

Killing comes in degrees of intimacy. At one extreme there is the example of Freddie Oversteegen, a hero of the Dutch resistance, who as a 14-year-old-girl used to pick up German soldiers and collaborators in bars, lure them into the woods, and once in a secluded spot shoot them dead. Long after the war, she told an interviewer that when seeing a man she had just shot fall, "you want to help them to get up". At the far extreme, perhaps, were the crew of Enola Gay, who killed 80,000 civilians with one bomb, dropped on Hiroshima from miles above. Drone pilots are even safer and further from their victims than high-altitude bombers.