BEIJING – China's navy carried out drills in the South China Sea to simulate fending off an aerial attack, state media said on Friday, as China and the United States trade barbs over who is responsible for heightened tensions in the disputed waterways. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed concern during a visit to Beijing on Thursday over China's efforts to militarize the seas. His remarks came after a flurry of U.S. activity in the region, including reports last week that U.S. Air Force B-52 bombers had flown near disputed islands that drew a sharp rebuke from China. China's navy carried out a simulated missile attack in an unspecified area of the South China Sea using three target drones making flyovers of a ship formation at varying heights, the official army newspaper said. The drills were part of efforts by an also unspecified training base to prepare for real-life combat against aerial targets after China's leadership said some training failed to prepare troops effectively, the paper said.

Google may be pitching its artificial intelligence and machine learning tools for a new military project. The search giant has been winding down its involvement with the Pentagon's controversial Project Maven, but Google's Cloud team is now talking with members of the US special operations community, according to Defense One. A document distributed last month at the Special Operations Forces Industry Conference (SOFIC) in Tampa, Florida described how Google Cloud's AI tools could be used by some special operations forces. Google has been winding down its involvement with the Pentagon's controversial Project Maven, but its Cloud team is now talking with the US special operations community The US Special Operations Forces include specialized units of the military like the Green Berets and the Navy SEALs, among others. 'As part of the Special Operations mission to turn captured enemy material into actionable intelligence, Commands are tasked with collection, exploitation, and dissemination of unclassified material to include documents, images, audio, and video,' according to the document, which was obtained by Defense One. It also notes how Google Cloud's machine learning application programming interfaces (APIs), storage resources and other technologies can help'accelerate exploitation of valuable unclassified intelligence material.'

Sitting in New York City, looking up at the clear June skies, I wonder if I am staring at an endangered phenomena. According to many in the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) industry, skylines across the country soon will be filled with flying cars, quadcopter deliveries, emergency drones, and other robo-flyers. Moving one step closer to this mechanically-induced hazy future, General Electric (GE) announced last week the launch of AiRXOS, a "next generation unmanned traffic" management system. Managing the National Airspace is already a political football with the Trump Administration proposing privatizing the air-control division of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), taking its controller workforce of 15,000 off the government's books. The White House argues that this would enable the FAA to modernize and adopt "NextGen" technologies to speed commercial air travel.

Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com has constructed a fulfillment center that handles as many as 200,000 orders each day - and it only has four employees. That's because the roughly 100,000 square foot facility is run almost entirely autonomously, with human employees solely on site to tend to the robots. According to JD.com, the warehouse leverages'highly-automated sorting technology' to sort up to 16,000 packages per hour with 99.99% accuracy. Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com has constructed a fulfillment center that handles as many as 200,000 orders each day - and it only has four employees Located outside Shanghai, the 100,000 square foot sorting center uses artificial intelligence to scan and inspect packages as they're being processed. JD.com says it handles as many as 200,000 packages each day.

Breathtaking drone footage captured above Kīlauea has revealed the dramatic changes taking place as the volcano continues to spew ash and gas from its summit more than a month into the current eruption. The flyover mission led by the US Geological Survey and Office of Aviation Services on Thursday aimed to investigate the activity within the Halema'uma'u crater, which has been subjected to rapid changes as Kīlauea rumbles with explosions and small earthquakes. As scientists remotely explore the area using unmanned aircraft, the volcano has shown no sign of letting up; just this morning, it launched a plume 6,000 feet above sea level in yet another explosive event. Look at The Boring Company's high-speed underground transport system Oh deer it's the piddling pool: Animals take over family's garden Kīlauea's summit has been steadily caving in as activity continues, bringing the huge pit crater down with it. The footage captured on June 13 shows how the steep crater walls have slumped in toward the center; now, scientist say the deepest part of Halema'uma'u sits at about 300 m (1,000 ft) below the crater rim.

Drones armed with computer vision software could enable new forms of automated skyborne surveillance to watch for violence below. One glimpse of that future comes from UK and Indian researchers who demonstrated a drone surveillance system that can automatically detect small groups of people fighting each other. The seed idea for researchers to develop such a drone surveillance system was first planted in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three and injured hundreds in 2013. It was not until the Manchester Arena bombing that killed 23 and wounded 139--including many children leaving an Ariana Grande concert--when the researchers made some progress. This time, they harnessed a form of the popular artificial intelligence technique known as deep learning.

JERUSALEM/BERLIN (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that a roughly one-billion-euro ($1.18 billion) drone deal with Germany would strengthen bilateral security relations and give a boost to Israel's defense industry.

For the military, video surveillance delivered by drones is a blessing and a bit of a curse. The advantages of having eyes in the sky are obvious, whether they're over broad swaths of land or more focused areas. The widely used MQ-9 Reaper, for example, can fly for 27 hours at 25,000 feet, covering about 1,500 miles, and unarmed drones can stay aloft for even longer. Smaller, man-portable and micro drones can see over the hill, around the corner, or watch over an entire town. They provide a view that commanders otherwise wouldn't have, and they do it without putting personnel at risk.

Nasa has flown a large, remotely piloted predator drone equipped with detect-and-avoid technologies through the national airspace system for the first time without a safety chase plane following it. The space agency says the'milestone' flight over California moves the US closer to normalising unmanned aircraft operations in airspace used by commercial and private pilots. The test used a non-military version of the Air Force's MQ-9 Predator B called Ikhana that is 36 feet (11 meters) long and has a 66-foot (20-meter) wingspan. It paves the way for large remotely-piloted aircraft to be used in all kinds of services, from fighting forest fires to providing emergency search and rescue operations, according to Nasa. The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California and entered controlled air space almost immediately.

Last summer, a sign appeared on the door to a stuffy, windowless room at the office of Manhattan artificial-intelligence startup Clarifai. "Chamber of secrets," it read, according to three people who saw it. The notice was a joking reference to how the small team working inside was not permitted to discuss its work with others at Clarifai. Former and current employees say the group was working on a controversial Pentagon project using machine-learning algorithms to interpret drone-surveillance imagery--and that Clarifai's secrets were less safe than they should have been. A lawsuit filed by former employee Amy Liu this month alleges that Clarifai's computer systems were compromised by one or more people in Russia, potentially exposing technology used by the US military to an adversary.