The rise of advanced air mobility (AAM) is expected to become a multibillion-dollar industry in the near future. Market-based mechanisms are touted to be an integral part of AAM operations, which comprise heterogeneous operators with private valuations. In this work, we study the problem of designing a mechanism to coordinate the movement of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, operated by multiple operators each having heterogeneous valuations associated with their fleet, between vertiports, while enforcing the arrival, departure, and parking constraints at vertiports. Particularly, we propose an incentive-compatible and individually rational vertiport reservation mechanism that maximizes a social welfare metric, which encapsulates the objective of maximizing the overall valuations of all operators while minimizing the congestion at vertiports. Additionally, we improve the computational tractability of designing the reservation mechanism by proposing a mixed binary linear programming approach that is based on constructing network flow graph corresponding to the underlying problem.

Object detection algorithms particularly those based on YOLO have demonstrated remarkable efficiency in balancing speed and accuracy. However, their application in brain tumour detection remains underexplored. This study proposes RepVGG-GELAN, a novel YOLO architecture enhanced with RepVGG, a reparameterized convolutional approach for object detection tasks particularly focusing on brain tumour detection within medical images. RepVGG-GELAN leverages the RepVGG architecture to improve both speed and accuracy in detecting brain tumours. Integrating RepVGG into the YOLO framework aims to achieve a balance between computational efficiency and detection performance. This study includes a spatial pyramid pooling-based Generalized Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (GELAN) architecture which further enhances the capability of RepVGG. Experimental evaluation conducted on a brain tumour dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of RepVGG-GELAN surpassing existing RCS-YOLO in terms of precision and speed. Specifically, RepVGG-GELAN achieves an increased precision of 4.91% and an increased AP50 of 2.54% over the latest existing approach while operating at 240.7 GFLOPs. The proposed RepVGG-GELAN with GELAN architecture presents promising results establishing itself as a state-of-the-art solution for accurate and efficient brain tumour detection in medical images.

Take it from U.S. Air Force Captain Kyle McAlpin when he says that scheduling C-17 aircraft crews is a headache. An artificial intelligence research flight commander for the Department of Air Force–MIT AI Accelerator Program, McAlpin is also an experienced C-17 pilot. "You could have a mission change and spend the next 12 hours of your life rebuilding a schedule that works," he says. It's a pain point for crew of 52 squadrons who operate C-17s, the military cargo aircraft that transport troops and supplies globally. This year, the Air Force marked 4 million flight hours for its C-17 fleet, which comprises 275 U.S. and allied aircraft.

We've heard it for years: 5G is coming. And yet, while high-speed 5G internet has indeed slowly been rolling out in a smattering of countries across the globe, many barriers remain that have prevented widespread adoption. One issue is that we can't get faster internet speeds without more efficient ways of delivering wireless signals. The general trend has been to simply add antennas to either the transmitter (i.e., Wi-Fi access points and cell towers) or the receiver (such as a phone or laptop). But that's grown difficult to do as companies increasingly produce smaller and smaller devices, including a new wave of "internet of things" systems.

Among the newly selected 2020 class of fellows of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) are three members of the MIT community: Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu Chair Professor in the MT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Richard Lippmann and Daniel Rabideau, members of the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization, confers the rank of fellow on senior members whose work has advanced innovation in their respective fields and has furthered the IEEE mission to foster the development of technology to benefit society. Balakrishnan was elevated to fellow for his contributions to the design and application of mobile sensing systems. These contributions include advances in mobile and sensor computing, internet congestion control and routing, overlay networks and peer-to-peer systems, and data management. His current research interests are in networking, sensing, and perception for a world of mobile devices connected to cloud services running in large data centers.

Singapore will adopt a human-centric approach to AI, and focus on the use of the technology to deliver impactful social and economic benefits for its citizens. The government has initially identified five key sectors: Transport and Logistics, Smart Cities and Estates, Healthcare, Education, Safety, and Border Security (about 300,000 people cross the border with Malaysia daily). The city-state of Singapore was the recipient of the Smart City award in 2018. The vast array of solutions developed by the government from dynamic public bus routing algorithms to real-time parent-teacher portals, or even predictive analytics for water pipe leaks, have proved that Singapore systematically pursues the application of innovative digital technologies to improve people's lives. "We believe that AI is a transformative technology. The fact that computers and systems can now see, hear, understand, and speak, is transformational. It will transform our economy and societies, and disrupt our politics. It will alter the nature of jobs, and the skills our people will need." said Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, who is also Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation Programme Office, during the Smart City Expo World Congress opening ceremony.

BARCELONA, SPAIN – A growing push to put cities on a digital path to a greener future risks excluding groups like the poorest, disabled and elderly, and will fail to benefit those people unless technology is used to help meet their needs, rights advocates have warned. They also called for women to be given a bigger say in urban planning that is based on high-tech tools such as big data and artificial intelligence, while speaking at an international conference on "smart cities" in Barcelona this week. "My fear is that smart cities end up benefiting the elite white men," said Catherine D'Ignazio, an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the United States, she said, national politics and other social spheres are shaped by "the privilege hazard," in which a small, dominant group -- often of rich, older men -- make decisions for others whose lives and experiences they know little about. One way to counteract that is to produce and use data that dive into key areas of discrimination, such as gender and race, she added. Berkeley-based consultancy World Enabled, which works for the inclusion of people with disabilities, collaborated with the University of California to analyze nearly 1,200 projects with digital elements run by six international development agencies.

Singapore is tapping artificial intelligence as the next part of its "Smart Nation" project, the city-state's foreign minister announced Tuesday. The strategy identifies five areas -- transportation, smart cities, healthcare, education and public safety -- where AI can be used to make big change. As part of its strategy, Singapore also announced the creation of a National AI Office to "drive the national AI agenda." The office will work to enjoin efforts underway in the city-state's research, industry and government sectors to tackle key challenges. Vivian Balakrishnan, who leads the Smart Nation Initiative for Singapore, and serves as its foreign minister, officially announced the new strategy at the opening session of Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

BARCELONA: Singapore hopes to be a "living laboratory" for developing artificial intelligence (AI) solutions globally - an ambition that plays to its strengths, according to Minister-in-charge of the Smart Nation initiative Vivian Balakrishnan. Dr Balakrishnan, who is also Foreign Affairs Minister, was speaking at the opening session of the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday (Nov 19), where he made a pitch for Singapore's attractiveness as an AI hub. For example, testing solutions in Singapore would be facilitated by agile regulations, as the country has just "a single layer of government". "We understand science, technology, engineering. We get it and we're able to make decisions quickly, pivot instantly and seek opportunities that new technology will provide," said Dr Balakrishnan.

Singapore, ranked the smartest city in the world in certain polls, has warned cities they must get a handle on artificial intelligence (AI) if they are to succeed as'smart cities', trusted by citizens and enterprises to manage data correctly. The warning came at Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona today (November 19), as Singapore, awarded city of the year at the 2018 show, shared the stage with local politicians from Barcelona and Madrid at the 2019 kick-off. Vivian Balakrishnan, minister for foreign affairs for the government of Singapore, set out Singapore's own AI strategy, as a geographically-constrained but tech-savvy city state. "This technology will change the world, and cities that master AI will get ahead -- those that don't will be left behind," he said. "The fact computers and systems can now see hear, speak and understand is transformational. It will transform our economy, disrupt our politics, alter the nature of our jobs -- and it will define the next phase of our'smart nation' journey."