Drone-maker DJI announced a new hobby aircraft today, one that weighs just a shade under a pound, fits in a jacket pocket, and is capable of flying itself. At that price, it hovers in DJI's lineup between the $499 DJI Spark, the gesture-controlled flyer released last year, and the more capable $999 Mavic Pro. The Mavic Air is tiny, half the size of a Mavic Pro, and about half the weight at just 15 ounces. When folded up, it's about the size of a paperback novel. At a press event in New York on Tuesday, DJI exec Michael Perry announced the Mavic Air by pulling it out of the pocket of his puffy Patagonia vest.

Drone company DJI unveiled Tuesday a new foldable, portable drone called the Mavic Air. The Mavic Air, which sits in the company's lineup between the entry-level DJI Spark and prosumer Mavic Pro series, will begin shipping on Jan. 28 for $799. Whereas the Spark's video abilities are more limited, the DJI Mavic Air can capture 4K video at 30 frames per second, making it a more viable choice for people who want to record top-quality footage. At just 430 grams, the Mavic Air is also significantly lighter than the Mavic Pro, which weighs 734 grams fully-loaded. Meanwhile, it's the company's first drone to include a microSD card slot as well as 8GB of onboard storage, meaning users can save photos and videos directly to the aircraft if they don't have a memory card.

Yesterday's leak might have spoiled the surprise, but DJI was still enthusiastic about unveiling its new Mavic Air drone in rainy New York this morning. While last year's Spark was all about making drones accessible to a new generation of pilots, the $799 Mavic Air is a high-performance creative machine that just happens to be incredibly small. When folded up, the Mavic Air is about as tall and wide as a smartphone -- it's so tiny, in fact, that a spokesperson had a few crammed into his vest without looking the least bit frumpy. Despite its diminutive size, the Mavic Air can float around for up to 21 minutes on a single charge. DJI claims that's the longest flight time you'll find in a drone this small.

Their Head of EMEA Phil Cox gives us his top predictions for the year ahead.

Late last year, we wrote about how Australia was paying a stupendous amount of money to try using drones and artificial intelligence to detect sharks off of popular beaches. We were skeptical, mostly because it's hard to make a convincing argument that shark attacks are actually that big of a problem, in Australia or anywhere else, compared to other, bigger problems that we might want to address first. One of those bigger problems, in Australia and in many other places, is drowning--in Australia in 2016, about 120 people drowned on the Australian coast, 60 times more people than were fatally attacked by sharks. Fortunately, the drones doing the shark spotting also happen to carry life preserver pods along with them, and last week, a drone being used for training managed to save a pair of struggling swimmers 700 meters off the coast of New South Wales. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, lifeguards were using the drone during a training session when "a call came through of two distressed swimmers."

DJI is supposed to be unveiling a new drone on January 23rd, but the cat might already be out of the bag. Kanzhaji has posted photos and details of the Mavic Air, a foldable drone that would reportedly slot neatly between the diminutive Spark and the existing foldable drone, the Mavic Pro. You'd get 60FPS 4K video recording instead of the Pro's 30FPS, an additional backward proximity sensor and 32-megapixel spherical photos. The Mavic Air would borrow a bit from the Spark, but mostly in visual cues: it appears to be smaller (and stubbier), and it'll come in multiple colors with a sleeker, glossier shell. It's not certain when the Air would ship or how much it would cost.

A U.S. company will be deploying the world's most advanced undersea search vessels in a renewed bid to search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which went missing on March 8, 2014, with 239 people on board. Texas-based Ocean Infinity -- which has signed a "no cure, no fee" deal with the Malaysian government to find the jetliner -- will for the first time use a swarm of eight drone-like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to scour a remote part of the southern Indian Ocean, where the ill-fated plane is believed to have gone down. The company will be paid only if it succeeds in locating the plane, which is believed to have gone down while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. According to the Daily Beast, Ocean Infinity will conduct the new search with the latest technology north of the original search area, where an underwater operation for more than three years yielded no concrete clues. Talking about the technology that the company will use, the Daily Beast reported that the system was being used for the first time and that while en route from the Caribbean to the search site, the command ship, Seabed Constructor, paused several times to carry out trials at depths similar to those at the Indian Ocean search site.

After less than eight months of development, the algorithms are helping intel analysts exploit drone video over the battlefield. Earlier this month at an undisclosed location in the Middle East, computers using special algorithms helped intelligence analysts identify objects in a video feed from a small ScanEagle drone over the battlefield. A few days into the trials, the computer identified objects -- people, cars, types of building -- correctly about 60 percent of the time. Just over a week on the job -- and a handful of on-the-fly software updates later -- the machine's accuracy improved to around 80 percent. Next month, when its creators send the technology back to war with more software and hardware updates, they believe it will become even more accurate. It's an early win for a small team of just 12 people who started working on the project in April.

The emergence of driverless cars, autonomous trading algorithms, and autonomous drone technologies highlight a larger trend in which artificial intelligence is enabling machines to autonomously carry out complex tasks on behalf of their human stakeholders. To effectively represent their stakeholders in many tasks, these autonomous machines must interact with other people and machines that do not fully share the same goals and preferences. While the majority of AI milestones have focused on developing human-level wherewithal to compete with people or to interact with people as teammates that share a common goal, many scenarios in which AI must interact with people and other machines are neither zero-sum nor common-interest interactions. As such, AI must also have the ability to cooperate even in the midst of conflicting interests and threats of being exploited.

You're sitting in the bleachers and the roar of powerful engines starts rising in the distance; seconds later the pack of Ferrari race cars speed past and you crane your neck around trying to see what position your favourite driver is in. That's the typical experience of car racing fans today, but if a partnership between Intel Corp. and Ferrari Motor Sports is a success, it might be much different tomorrow. A new system that involves artificial intelligence and a fleet of drones shooting video was showcased by Intel at CES 2018 booth this year. Not only could it change the fan experience for auto racing, it's also providing Ferrari drivers more insight into their performance. Intel CEO announced the three-year partnership on stage during his keynote.