Senior Pentagon officials have arrived in Ukraine to discuss efforts to end the war with Russia, the US military has said. The team, led by US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, is expected to meet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Thursday when he returns from a trip to Turkey. Reports began surfacing on Wednesday that the US and Russia had prepared a new peace plan, containing major concessions from Ukraine. Neither Washington nor Moscow has officially confirmed the plan. Earlier in the day, at least 26 people were killed in a Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine's western city of Ternopil, officials there said.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll says the Army is developing small drones based on Ukraine lessons, envisioning every infantryman having a drone for future missions.

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Former U.S. Army Intel and Special Ops soldier Brett Velicovich joins'America's Newsroom' to discuss the Defense Department's push to increase military drone production and Ukraine's drone strike on Russia. EXCLUSIVE: Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said U.S. soldiers are improvising with government credit cards to buy and test battlefield gear as they adapt to the exploding drone threat -- as the Army shifts its long-term posture toward countering China in the Indo-Pacific. In an interview with Fox News Digital, Driscoll described how elite units like the 75th Ranger Regiment are bypassing the Pentagon's cumbersome procurement system to test new drones, sensors and weapons in real time. At the same time, he said the Army is aligning with the Pentagon's assessment of China as the nation's "pacing threat," building a force optimized for the Indo-Pacific but still capable of deploying worldwide at a moment's notice. After a visit with the regiment at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Georgia, on Tuesday, Driscoll said Rangers "basically just use their corporate credit card to go online and purchase things to test, and they will find what works."

Just before 3 a.m. one night this month, Scott Slumpff was awakened by the ding of a text message. "An ALERTCalifornia anomaly has been confirmed in your area of interest," the message said. Slumpff, a battalion chief with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, sprang into action. The message meant the agency's new artificial intelligence system had identified signs of a wildfire with a remote mountaintop camera in San Diego County. Within minutes, crews were dispatched to the burgeoning blaze on Mount Laguna -- squelching it before it grew any larger than a 10-foot-by-10-foot spot.

Cal Fire and other agencies use a network of over 1,000 cameras statewide to track wildfires before, during and after. The public can now access the network, too. Wildfire season is almost here, and there's a new way you can help firefighters -- from anywhere. The University of California San Diego and state fire agencies have partnered to launch a public website for people to watch live camera feeds across the state. The program called ALERTCalifornia also helps firefighters fight fires by using a network of more than 1,000 live camera sensors to track the fires before, during and after.

The half-dozen industry leaders who recently convened for this virtual roundtable found immediate common ground in the staunch belief that as powerful a tool as AI is to help smart communicators do their jobs even better, its value is very much linked to human input and guidance. "Technology tools and intelligence data can help us become more performative," says Aaron Kwittken, founder and CEO of PRophet, an AI-driven, SaaS platform designed for and by PR pros. "But sometimes we focus too much on the artificial side of AI, as opposed to the augmented side." The assembled leaders were quick to detail some of the key PR functions in which AI can either enhance or expedite their efforts. Myriad media benefits "AI should be feeding us suggestions for content creation, giving us a first draft, creating a list of pitch targets and taking a first swing at how we might personalize the pitch to individual reporters," offers Nationwide CCO Brian Grace.

ChatableApps, a U.K. startup commercialising the work of auditory neural signal processing researcher Dr. Andy Simpson, has quietly picked up seed money from Mark Cuban. The company has built a smartphone app that provides hearing assistance by removing background noise in near real-time. Alongside Simpson, the company's co-founders are Brendan O'Driscoll, Aidan Sliney and George Boyle -- the original team behind the music discovery app Soundwave (acquired by Spotify) -- and later joined by CEO Giles Tongue, formerly of wearable tech startup NURVV, who has been tasked with taking the business forward. "Dr Andy Simpson is our CSO [chief science officer] and inventor," Tongue tells me. "He brings together the auditory neuroscience, auditory perception, neural signal processing and artificial Intelligence, is an AI maverick and contrarian thinker, and this unusual intersection are what has led to the creation of our proprietary ground up neuroscience-led AI. His prolific research had over 400 citations before he went into stealth mode."

Kremlin analysts could have used Twitter as a source of military intelligence to inform their actions in the 2014 Russia–Ukraine conflict, a study has found. University of California experts showed that location-tagged tweets by Ukraine residents could have been used to map out sentiments towards Russia in real-time. The map they made of pro-Kremlin regions turned out to bear a striking resemblance to the actual areas to which Russia dispatched its special forces. Specifically, this included Crimea and regions in the far east of Ukraine -- where the incoming forces would have been most likely to be seen as liberators. In contrast, the data could also reveal those areas where dispatching forces would have lead to greater resistance and corresponding casualties and costs.

The increased demand is adding to a big problem in the agricultural industry: a labor shortage that is unlikely to improve soon, according to farmers and researchers. It means berries that would otherwise be sold might instead rot in the field. Technologists think automation eventually could help producers pick specialty crops like berries, apples, peaches and snacking tomatoes, just as high-tech combines from companies such as Deere & Co. already are helping farmers of commodity crops harvest grains. Autonomous robots that run along tracks also are ferrying bins inside greenhouses, cutting down the walking workers have to do, growers and industry researchers say. But unlike in manufacturing, where artificial intelligence and computer vision power factory arms that move car parts or handle food in predetermined ways, agricultural fields pose a challenge for machines.