Accurate crop-type classification from satellite time series is essential for agricultural monitoring. While various machine learning algorithms have been developed to enhance performance on data-scarce tasks, their evaluation often lacks real-world scenarios. Consequently, their efficacy in challenging practical applications has not yet been profoundly assessed. To facilitate future research in this domain, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for evaluating supervised and SSL methods for crop-type classification under real-world conditions. This benchmark study relies on the EuroCropsML time-series dataset, which combines farmer-reported crop data with Sentinel-2 satellite observations from Estonia, Latvia, and Portugal. Our findings indicate that MAML-based meta-learning algorithms achieve slightly higher accuracy compared to supervised transfer learning and SSL methods. However, compared to simpler transfer learning, the improvement of meta-learning comes at the cost of increased computational demands and training time. Moreover, supervised methods benefit most when pre-trained and fine-tuned on geographically close regions. In addition, while SSL generally lags behind meta-learning, it demonstrates advantages over training from scratch, particularly in capturing fine-grained features essential for real-world crop-type classification, and also surpasses standard transfer learning. This highlights its practical value when labeled pre-training crop data is scarce. Our insights underscore the trade-offs between accuracy and computational demand in selecting supervised machine learning methods for real-world crop-type classification tasks and highlight the difficulties of knowledge transfer across diverse geographic regions. Furthermore, they demonstrate the practical value of SSL approaches when labeled pre-training crop data is scarce.

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? Copenhagen airport shut after sighting of'unidentified drones' Authorities in Denmark have closed Copenhagen airport after unidentified drones were sighted nearby, causing about 15 flights to be diverted, police and airport officials told the AFP news agency. "The airspace over Copenhagen airport has been closed since 8:30pm (18:30 GMT) due to two to three unidentified drones. No aircraft can take off or land," airport spokeswoman Lise Agerley Kurstein said.

How is Russia replenishing its military? What is a'coalition of the willing'? How China forgot promises and'debts' to Ukraine How are Europe, the US pulling apart on Ukraine? A Ukrainian drone attack killed three people and injured 16 near the town of Foros on the Crimean Peninsula, the Russian-appointed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, wrote in a post on Telegram. Russia's Ministry of Defence said the attack occurred "using strike drones equipped with high-explosive payloads", in a resort area "where there are no military targets whatsoever".

British fighter jets have conducted a Nato air defence mission over Poland as part of an allied response to Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace, the Ministry of Defence said. The RAF Typhoon jets were deployed over Poland on Friday night as part of the military alliance's mission to bolster its eastern flank. Tensions have escalated following repeated Russian violations of Nato members' airspace this month - with a drone detected over Romania and then warplanes in Estonia's airspace following the incursions into Poland. Russia has denied or downplayed the violations. Defence Secretary John Healey said the RAF flights sent a clear signal: Nato airspace will be defended.

Life event service is a direct digital public service provided jointly by several governmental institutions so that a person can fulfill all the obligations and use all the rights that arise due to a particular event or situation in personal life. Life event service consolidates several public services related to the same life event into one service for the service consumer. This paper presents an ontological analysis of life event services, which is based on the works by Guarino, Guizzardi, Nardi, Wagner, and others. The purpose of the ontological analysis is to understand the meanings of life event, proactive public service based on life event, and other related notions. This kind of ontological analysis is crucial because for implementing the hardware and software architectures of e-government and digital public services, it is essential to agree upon the precise meanings of the underlying terms.

If you were asked to envisage an actor, a neurotic person might spring to mind, while the thought of an salesperson may conjure up someone who is chatty and extraverted. While some consider these lazy stereotypes, a comprehensive new study suggests that such common assumptions are actually true. Using data from 68,540 people, researchers have identified the personality traits that typify more than 260 job roles. They found that actors, journalists, town planners, authors and graphic designers are among those that tend to be more neurotic. Meanwhile, PR managers, marketers, psychologists, dental assistants and film directors are generally more extraverted. 'People often have stereotypes about the personality traits typical of different jobs, and it turns out that many of these intuitions are quite accurate,' said study author Dr René Mõttus at the University of Edinburgh.

We introduce EuroCropsML, an analysis-ready remote sensing machine learning dataset for time series crop type classification of agricultural parcels in Europe. It is the first dataset designed to benchmark transnational few-shot crop type classification algorithms that supports advancements in algorithmic development and research comparability. It comprises 706 683 multi-class labeled data points across 176 classes, featuring annual time series of per-parcel median pixel values from Sentinel-2 L1C data for 2021, along with crop type labels and spatial coordinates. Based on the open-source EuroCrops collection, EuroCropsML is publicly available on Zenodo.

Russia has started tactical fighter jet exercises over the Baltic Sea with the goal of testing readiness to perform combat and other special operations, the country's defence ministry has said, a day after Moscow said its jets had scrambled to intercept United Kingdom military planes over the Black Sea. "The main goal of the exercise is to test the readiness of the flight crew to perform combat and special tasks as intended," Russia's defence ministry said on Tuesday. "The crews of the Su-27 [fighter jets] of the Baltic Fleet fired from airborne weapons at cruise missiles and mock enemy aircraft," the ministry announced on the Telegram messaging channel, adding that as well as improving skills, Russian fighter pilots are on "round-the-clock combat duty" guarding the air space of Russia's Kaliningrad exclave. Wedged between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic coast, Kaliningrad is Moscow's westernmost state and was part of Germany until the end of World War II. Given to the Soviet Union at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the enclave has roughly 1 million residents – mainly Russians but also a small number of Ukrainians, Poles and Lithuanians.

We build world-changing solutions by combining data and product development expertise with a design thinking approach. Always more than just a software company, we have worked on smart machinery and industrial automation, production lines, complex device integrations, banking backbones, and management automatics: in short, advancing the new industrial revolution. Our code makes elevators move and heating systems run. Our software helps to grow useful bacteria and makes business decisions. It can analyze satellite images and is used to provide self-service to millions of people.

The road to fully autonomous vehicles is long and marred by technological challenges, from the cost of developing the technology and commercial expansion, all the way through public acceptance and safety concerns. And that's if people even want to give up driving in the first place. But there's something that can help this transition, that can bridge the divide between the autonomous believers and self-driving sceptics: remote-controlled vehicles. And no, we're not talking about toy cars, these are real, adult-sized, remotely-driven automobiles. In this piece, I'm going to explain how they work, the commercial and technological implications, and if they can help ease us into an autonomous future.