The proliferation of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) applications is critically dependent on resilient, high-bandwidth, and low-latency communication links. Existing solutions face critical limitations: TCP's head-of-line blocking stalls time-sensitive data, UDP lacks reliability and congestion control, and cellular networks designed for terrestrial users degrade severely for aerial platforms. This paper introduces AQUILA, a cross-layer communication architecture built on QUIC to address these challenges. AQUILA contributes three key innovations: (1) a unified transport layer using QUIC's reliable streams for MAVLink Command and Control (C2) and unreliable datagrams for video, eliminating head-of-line blocking under unified congestion control; (2) a priority scheduling mechanism that structurally ensures C2 latency remains bounded and independent of video traffic intensity; (3) a UAV-adapted congestion control algorithm extending SCReAM with altitude-adaptive delay targeting and telemetry headroom reservation. AQUILA further implements 0-RTT connection resumption to minimize handover blackouts with application-layer replay protection, deployed over an IP-native architecture enabling global operation. Experimental validation demonstrates that AQUILA significantly outperforms TCP- and UDP-based approaches in C2 latency, video quality, and link resilience under realistic conditions, providing a robust foundation for autonomous BVLOS missions.

Accurate recognition of Emergency Vehicle (EV) sirens is critical for the integration of intelligent transportation systems, smart city monitoring systems, and autonomous driving technologies. Modern automatic solutions are limited by the lack of large scale, curated datasets and by the computational demands of state of the art sound event detection models. This work introduces E2PANNs (Efficient Emergency Pre trained Audio Neural Networks), a lightweight Convolutional Neural Network architecture derived from the PANNs framework, specifically optimized for binary EV siren detection. Leveraging our dedicated subset of AudioSet (AudioSet EV) we fine-tune and evaluate E2PANNs across multiple reference datasets and test its viability on embedded hardware. The experimental campaign includes ablation studies, cross-domain benchmarking, and real-time inference deployment on edge device. Interpretability analyses exploiting Guided Backpropagation and ScoreCAM algorithms provide insights into the model internal representations and validate its ability to capture distinct spectrotemporal patterns associated with different types of EV sirens. Real time performance is assessed through frame wise and event based detection metrics, as well as a detailed analysis of false positive activations. Results demonstrate that E2PANNs establish a new state of the art in this research domain, with high computational efficiency, and suitability for edge-based audio monitoring and safety-critical applications.

Recently, large vision language models (VLMs) have made significant strides in visual language capabilities through visual instruction tuning, showing great promise in the field of remote sensing image interpretation. However, existing remote sensing vision language models (RSVLMs) often fall short in capturing the complex characteristics of remote sensing scenes, as they typically rely on low resolution, single scale visual features and simplistic methods to map visual features to language features. In this paper, we present Aquila, an advanced visual language foundation model designed to enable richer visual feature representation and more precise visual-language feature alignment for remote sensing images. Our approach introduces a learnable Hierarchical Spatial Feature Integration (SFI) module that supports high resolution image inputs and aggregates multi scale visual features, allowing for the detailed representation of complex visual information. Additionally, the SFI module is repeatedly integrated into the layers of the large language model (LLM) to achieve deep visual language feature alignment, without compromising the model's performance in natural language processing tasks. These innovations, capturing detailed visual effects through higher resolution and multi scale input, and enhancing feature alignment significantly improve the model's ability to learn from image text data. We validate the effectiveness of Aquila through extensive quantitative experiments and qualitative analyses, demonstrating its superior performance.

Servizi Elaborazioni Dati SpA is a public company owned by Municipality of L Aquila, it supplies the institution with network services and software applications for distributing services to citizens. The future policy of the company is to enlarge the offer of its services to nearby communities that are unable to set up and maintain their own network and software structures. This paper presents thus a possible architecture model to support small municipalities in supplying public services to citizens, with the aid of SED Spa. Through second level platforms based on Blockchain networks and Multi-agents Systems running on smart contracts, the system will focus on Waste Tax (Ta.Ri) management system in the Fascicolo del Cittadino environment.

The widespread adoption of Federated Learning (FL), a privacy-preserving distributed learning methodology, has been impeded by the challenge of high communication overheads, typically arising from the transmission of large-scale models. Existing adaptive quantization methods, designed to mitigate these overheads, operate under the impractical assumption of uniform device participation in every training round. Additionally, these methods are limited in their adaptability due to the necessity of manual quantization level selection and often overlook biases inherent in local devices' data, thereby affecting the robustness of the global model. In response, this paper introduces AQUILA (adaptive quantization in device selection strategy), a novel adaptive framework devised to effectively handle these issues, enhancing the efficiency and robustness of FL. AQUILA integrates a sophisticated device selection method that prioritizes the quality and usefulness of device updates. Utilizing the exact global model stored by devices, it enables a more precise device selection criterion, reduces model deviation, and limits the need for hyperparameter adjustments. Furthermore, AQUILA presents an innovative quantization criterion, optimized to improve communication efficiency while assuring model convergence. Our experiments demonstrate that AQUILA significantly decreases communication costs compared to existing methods, while maintaining comparable model performance across diverse non-homogeneous FL settings, such as Non-IID data and heterogeneous model architectures.

Studies on public transportation in Europe suggest that European inhabitants use buses in ca. 56% of all public transport travels. One of the critical factors affecting such a percentage and more, in general, the demand for public transport services, with an increasing reluctance to use them, is their quality. End-users can perceive quality from various perspectives, including the availability of information, i.e., the access to details about the transit and the provided services. The approach proposed in this paper, using innovative methodologies resorting on data mining and machine learning techniques, aims to make available the unavailable data about public transport. In particular, by mining GPS traces, we manage to reconstruct the complete transit graph of public transport. The approach has been successfully validated on a real dataset collected from the local bus system of the city of L'Aquila (Italy). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach and implemented framework are both effective and efficient, thus being ready for deployment.

Workplaces should use automation technologies to enhance employees' jobs rather than to replace humans, according to speakers at an event held by the Guardian on 11 July. However, they saw problems in the introduction of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robots, the latter including software as well as physical machines. "Humans should not worry too much about replacement, but need to find new ways to work together with AI," said Chelsea Chen, co-founder of Emotech, a company which makes a voice-operated device called Olly that aims to recognise users' emotions as well the content of speech. Chen said that human employees are likely to remain better at dealing with people's emotions than computers. She says Olly can express excitement in response to what a user says, but that does not make it conscious: "Any job which is highly relevant to people will be really hard to replace."

Enterprise use of artificial intelligence will take a huge step forward over the next year. Rapid adoption of AI and related technologies such as machine learning is expected, and experiments will be seen across various departments and industries. "Companies will experiment with AI in a wide variety of settings and use cases," says Natalia Vassilieva, senior research manager at Hewlett Packard Labs. However, expect it to be difficult to leverage the technology, as it requires a lot of trial and error. "But eventually you will get it right," she says.

Facebook has quietly killed its plans to build massive drones that beam high-speed internet across the globe following'significant internal turmoil' at the company. The so-called Aquila project had twice successfully flown prototype drones but is now being scrapped in favour of new partnerships with firms like Airbus. It follows the announcement that Andrew Cox, head of Aquila project, and Martin Gomez, Facebook's director of aeronautical platforms, have both resigned. The decision means Facebook is shutting down a facility in Bridgwater, Somerset, that had been helping to build the technology. Sixteen people have lost their jobs as a result of the closure.

A photo of the first Aquila high altitude aircraft being built by Facebook in England. Facebook said Tuesday it was shutting down the project, four years after its start. SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook has grounded its Aquila internet drone project after four years. The project, aimed at building a drone that could fly over an isolated area and provide internet coverage, will shut down, the social media company announced Tuesday in a blog post. Facebook is abandoning efforts to build its own aircraft and will close the British facility involved in the project.