In Ukraine's'kill-zone', robots are a lifeline to troops trapped on perilous eastern front The toy is delivered, a Ukrainian soldier whispers into the radio. In the dead of night, he and his partner move quickly to roll out their cargo from a van. Speed is crucial as they are within the range of deadly Russian drones. The fifth brigade's new toy is an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), a robot that provides a lifeline for Ukrainian troops at the front in Pokrovsk and Myrnograd, a strategic hub in eastern Ukraine. Russian forces are relentlessly trying to cut off Ukraine's supply routes in the area.

Tens of thousands of Californians are turning to a crowdsourced, nonprofit app called Watch Duty for critical, up-to-the-moment disaster updates as deadly fires continue to rage through the state. The app, which uses a mixture of official government and volunteer data to track wildfires, surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's Threads as the most downloaded app on the Apple App Store on Wednesday. Social media users have encouraged residents in affected areas to download the app in order to track the fire's rapid movements and stay aware of possible evacuation orders. Apps like Watch Duty, which have seen a surge in interest in recent years, may become even more important as climate change-related natural disasters intensify in scope and scale. It gives you updates on fires nearby, evacuation notices, and even will show you where an evacuation center is if you need to evacuate!

If you receive an evacuation warning, don't wait to pack your "go-bag" and make sure to remember your essential items. Fire has broken out in large swaths of Los Angeles County since Tuesday morning, prompting the evacuation of tens of thousands of people in the Pacific Palisades, Altadena and Pasadena communities. More than 1,100 homes, businesses and other buildings have burned and at least two people are dead in wildfires burning across L.A. County, making this one of the most destructive firestorms to hit the region in memory. Firefighters have been fighting three blazes, starting with the Palisades fire that's burned through more than 11,000 acres as of Wednesday morning. In the hills above Altadena, the Eaton fire started on the same day and has charred more than 10,000 acres.

This communication presents preliminary findings from comparing two recent chatbots, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard, in the context of fire engineering by evaluating their responses in handling fire safety related queries. A diverse range of fire engineering questions and scenarios were created and examined, including structural fire design, fire prevention strategies, evacuation, building code compliance, and fire suppression systems (some of which resemble those commonly present in the Fire Protection exam (FPE)). The results reveal some key differences in the performance of the chatbots, with ChatGPT demonstrating a relatively superior performance. Then, this communication highlights the potential for chatbot technology to revolutionize fire engineering practices by providing instant access to critical information while outlining areas for further improvement and research. Evidently, and when it matures, this technology will likely be elemental to our engineers' practice and education.

The European Union and the United States have urged allies of Ukraine to keep up with their funding as the war with Russia nears the two-year mark, with no resolution to the fighting in sight. Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised sustained US support for Ukraine in a meeting on Tuesday with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy despite a row in the US Congress on approving new funding. "We are determined to sustain our support for Ukraine and we're working very closely with Congress in order to work to do that. I know our European colleagues will do the same thing," Blinken told Zelenskyy at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Jake Sullivan, US President Joe Biden's national security adviser, joined the meeting and told Zelenskyy that the US and its allies were determined "to ensure that Russia fails and Ukraine wins". Zelenskyy thanked the Biden administration and the "bipartisan support" in the US Congress.

During the evacuation of a building, the rapid and accurate tracking of human evacuees can be used by a guide robot to increase the effectiveness of the evacuation [1],[2]. This paper introduces a near real-time human position tracking solution tailored for evacuation robots. Using a pose detector, our system first identifies human joints in the camera frame in near real-time and then translates the position of these pixels into real-world coordinates via a simple calibration process. We run multiple trials of the system in action in an indoor lab environment and show that the system can achieve an accuracy of 0.55 meters when compared to ground truth. The system can also achieve an average of 3 frames per second (FPS) which was sufficient for our study on robot-guided human evacuation. The potential of our approach extends beyond mere tracking, paving the way for evacuee motion prediction, allowing the robot to proactively respond to human movements during an evacuation.

If you receive an evacuation order, it's time to go. Portions of northern Santa Cruz County and southern San Mateo County were put under an evacuation warning this week as the atmospheric river slammed into the state, dumping rain on burn-scarred areas prone to flooding and mudslides. Part of the city of Watsonville was ordered to evacuate Tuesday night. L.A. County said residents who live near the Lake and Bobcat fire areas should "be ready" for possible evacuations beginning Wednesday afternoon. Even if you're not in a generally flood-prone area, with this storm, "everyone should be prepared," said Bryan La Sota, a coordinator for L.A. County's Emergency Management Department.

Fox News' senior foreign affairs correspondent Greg Palkot reports from Kyiv on how Ukrainians are coping under Russian drone and missile attacks. KYIV, Ukraine - A "cold" war is building here in Ukraine at the hands of Vladimir Putin. As their progress slows on the battle front, Russian forces have been targeting civilian infrastructure. With winter closing in, and power, heat and water going, it could be Moscow's most dangerous tactic. "Militarily it's absolutely nothing," Ukrainian Member of Parliament Oleksiy Goncharenko explained, "but yes, it can cause a lot of suffering for civilians."

In search and rescue missions, robots can potentially help save survivors faster than human emergency responders alone would. In our experimental virtual reality simulation environment we have a system which comprises a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and a virtual "spokesperson". The UAVs and the spokesperson are equipped with natural language capabilities through which they can communicate with the survivors to convince them to evacuate. If they fail to do so they can ask the human operator to intervene. We use reinforcement learning to automatically learn a policy to be followed when a UAV has located survivors.

Hurricane prediction still poses challenges for researchers, who scramble to produce accurate predictions of the formation, track, and intensity of tropical cyclones in order to give residents in the storm's path the information they need to prepare or evacuate. To make matters worse, the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season has already produced 20 named storms, nearly double the average observed since 1991 – and the season isn't over for another two months. Now, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have employed AI techniques to better predict hurricane intensity compared to the most widely used U.S. models. "There are several research components around tropical cyclones that are interesting," explained PNNL data scientist and study co-author Wenwei Xu in an interview with Datanami. "But over the years, the tropical cyclone track prediction has been progressing very rapidly, so the accuracy has been increasing a lot. However, the intensity forecast [is] an area that suffers still."