A new drone surveillance system can spot when someone in a crowd is acting violently. It uses artificial intelligence and is going to be tested at a university festival in India later this year. The system assesses the way each person in a crowd is standing via two cameras on the drone. To continue reading this premium article, subscribe for unlimited access. Existing subscribers, please log in with your email address to link your account access.

The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) has awarded a "call when needed" contract to four U.S. companies for small UAS services. The contract will allow the agency to obtain fully contractor-operated small drones that are ready when needed to support wildland fire operations, search and rescue and other resource missions. "This contract reinforces our commitment to partnering with industry to provide our employees with the latest technology in carrying out their responsibilities as stewards of our nation's public lands while also ensuring their safety is paramount," says Ryan Zinke, DOI Secretary. "These contracted small UAS will supplement the manned firefighting fleet by providing the capability to operate during dense smoke/inversion situations which often occur and have heretofore hampered the aggressive prosecution of destructive wildfires," says Jeff Rupert, director of the DOI's Office of Wildland Fire.

Drones have become a hot topic these days and cities, companies, organizations are deploying it for various purposes. Companies like real estate agencies, wedding photographers, and farmers are using drones, commercially. For the safe and secure flights in Canada, the state has come up with new drone rules. Earlier the rules included, drones weighing more than 250 gms, would operate 9 km away from airports, no more than 90-meter altitude, no more than 500 meters from the operator and should remain within the sight. Now, new Transport Canada rules are being proposed that includes dividing drones into weight classes and permits and liability insurance for heavier drones.

Pedestrians walk along a sidewalk in Tokyo. Japan is responding to a government campaign to get the country's chronically overworked populace to leave the office by 3 p.m. on the last Friday of every month and go spend some cash. They call it Premium Friday. Japanese companies have long been known for their widespread practice of overtime, with employees toiling late into the night after the official end of the business day. Japanese drone startup Blue Innovation has offered a technological solution, a special drone called T-Frend designed to reduce overtime by flying around the office after hours, playing loud music and taking pictures of any staff who are still working and reporting them to management.

Videos of a model-less fashion show in Saudi Arabia have caused a social media stir with people ridiculing it online. The "ghost fashion show" which took place Wednesday replaced the usual six-foot-tall fashion models with flying robots. Clothes and accessories from top designers including Dolce & Gabbana sailed down the runway hanging from a drone, reported the New Arab. The event organizers said this was the first time a drone was used for a fashion show in the kingdom, while Twitter rebranded it as "fashion for ghosts." The audiences were restricted to females and there was a strict social media ban.

Drone-based surveillance still makes many people uncomfortable, but that isn't stopping research into more effective airborne watchdogs. Scientists have developed an experimental drone system that uses AI to detect violent actions in crowds. The team trained their machine learning algorithm to recognize a handful of typical violent motions (punching, kicking, shooting and stabbing) and flag them when they appear in a drone's camera view. The technology could theoretically detect a brawl that on-the-ground officers might miss, or pinpoint the source of a gunshot. As The Verge warned, the technology definitely isn't ready for real-world use.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Wednesday urged Congress to approve legislation giving the federal government new powers to disable or destroy threatening drones, according to testimony viewed by Reuters. David Glawe, DHS's undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, and the department's deputy general counsel Hayley Chang, will tell the Senate committee that oversees the department that it needs new authority. 'Terrorist groups overseas use drones to conduct attacks on the battlefield and continue to plot to use them in terrorist attacks elsewhere,' the officials' testimony said. Officials said the number of drone flights over sensitive areas or suspicious activities has jumped from eight incidents in 2013 to an estimated 1,752 incidents in 2016, citing federal statistics. 'This is a very serious, looming threat that we are currently unprepared to confront.

Automated surveillance is going to become increasingly common as companies and researchers find new ways to use machine learning to analyze live video footage. A new project from scientists in the UK and India shows one possible use for this technology: identifying violent behavior in crowds with the help of camera-equipped drones. In a paper titled "Eye in the Sky," the researchers describe their system. It uses a simple Parrot AR quadcopter (which costs around $200) to transmit video footage over a mobile internet connection for real-time analysis. An algorithm trained using deep learning estimates the poses of humans in the video and matches them to postures the researchers have designated as "violent."

Parrot may have scaled back its drone division and shifted some of its focus toward workers, but that doesn't mean it's downplaying the consumer side of things. The company has unveiled the Anafi, a folding drone that takes some not-so-subtle potshots at DJI's Mavic Air. It's not just the portability -- the Anafi touts a 21-megapixel camera that promises 4K HDR video at 100Mbps, including 2.8X lossless zoom. The camera isn't good as the Mavic Air's in some respects, as it's only using two-axis mechanical stabilization (software and a wide lens handle the third axis). Still, it represents a big improvement over the 1080p video and no-gimbal design of Parrot's Bebop drones. The flight time is a solid but unspectacular 25 minutes (extendable by charging from a USB-C battery bank) with a 2.5-mile range, although Parrot is promising "super quiet flights."

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last September, it ravaged the island's electrical grid and communications systems. For weeks, many of the approximately 5 million Puerto Ricans living in the mainland U.S. were unable to reach their loved ones. While recovery groups worked to restore power and deliver aid, cell providers scrambled to repair their networks. To get its service back up and running, AT&T tried something new: the Flying COW, a tethered drone that beamed mobile data signals up to 40 miles in all directions. "As soon as we turned it on, people just started connecting to it instantly," says Art Pregler, AT&T's Unmanned Aircraft Systems program director.