As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more sophisticated, there is a possibility to harness LLMs to power social media bots. This work investigates the realism of generating LLM-Powered social media bot networks. Through a combination of manual effort, network science and LLMs, we create synthetic bot agent personas, their tweets and their interactions, thereby simulating social media networks. We compare the generated networks against empirical bot/human data, observing that both network and linguistic properties of LLM-Powered Bots differ from Wild Bots/Humans. This has implications towards the detection and effectiveness of LLM-Powered Bots.

Artificial intelligence is proving essential to enhancing and accelerating modern military forces and the US Navy's Office of Naval Research (ONR) is seeing the advantage AI can provide to maintain dominance over increasingly capable adversaries. In 2019 Brett Vaughan became the Navy Chief AI Officer and AI Portfolio Manager at the Office of Naval Research to further take advantage of the strategic value AI can provide. Brett has 30 years of Defense Intelligence and Technology expertise with strengths in military support, strategic communications, GEOINT, Naval Intelligence and Navy R&D allowing him to bring his diverse background to this role to help shape the Navy's current and future plans for AI use, as well as AI development and adoption. The potential of AI is almost infinite, since anything involving data and information has the potential for AI applications. However, the US Navy has limited resources, and pursuing every possible path of AI development is not a viable option.

The world is indeed lucky when our most brilliant minds choose to work for the common good, rather than chasing money or becoming master criminals. So Inhabitat wants to thank young Ryan Honary for his work on an early detection system for wildfires. Sickened by the losses people sustained in the 2018 Camp Fire, California's deadliest wildfire, Honary turned his attention to how to mitigate future disasters. In 2019, Honary won the $10,000 grand prize in the Ignite Innovation Student Challenge for his Early Wildfire Detection Network submission, which provides app technology to firefighters. He was only in fifth grade at the time.

The Navy, through its Office of Naval Research, is pursuing artificial intelligence applications across a broad spectrum of the service's responsibilities to man, train and equip, as well as warfighting, sustainment and readiness. Such a wide range of applications and algorithms come with specific data requirements and data management. Curtis Pelzer, chief information officer at the Office of Naval Research, said ONR's data resides in in several places on their network, and it's the job of the data and analytics team to make sure information is provided and kept in the right sets. AI can help reduce toil across the Navy, give autonomy with unmanned systems, and software codes can increase the speed and quality of human decision-making, according to Brett Vaughan, the Navy's chief artificial intelligence officer and Office of Naval Research portfolio manager. Vaughan said any data could potentially fuel AI, but it depends on what problem one aims to solve.

Robots are complex machines with lots of components. Each of these components has a precise purpose, and when each component acts as expected, it creates a seamless system that can accomplish intricate tasks. This idea scales to networks of robots working in tandem to accomplish even more complex tasks. In this case, when one machine falters or fails to collaborate with the others, it can cause chaos: Picture a drone flying away from its fleet and failing to photograph its assigned area, or a self-driving car getting too close to another and disrupting carefully designed platoon. Making networks like these smarter, more functional, and more efficient is the subject of two research projects at Lehigh University led by Nader Motee, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Powered by a pair of photovoltaic panels and designed to linger in the forest canopy continuously for months, SlothBot moves only when it must to measure environmental changes -- such as weather and chemical factors in the environment -- that can be observed only with a long-term presence. The proof-of-concept hyper-efficient robot, described May 21 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Montreal, may soon be hanging out among treetop cables in the Atlanta Botanical Garden. "In robotics, it seems we are always pushing for faster, more agile and more extreme robots," said Magnus Egerstedt, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and principal investigator for Slothbot. "But there are many applications where there is no need to be fast. You just have to be out there persistently over long periods of time, observing what's going on."

The US Navy and researchers from Florida Atlantic University have revealed plans to develop autonomous robotic'drone battleships' that can launch underwater and aerial attacks in order to protect US coasts. Last month, FAU was awarded $1.25 million by US Navy for research for unmanned marine vehicle platforms. The five-year project will undertake research in support of autonomous marine vehicle platforms for coastal surveillance, coastal surveys, target tracking and protection of at-sea assets. The US Navy and researchers from Florida Atlantic University are developing'motherships' that can launch aerial and underwater drones to protect the coast'Our focus will be on developing a multi-vehicle system that can safely and reliably navigate coastal waters with a high level of autonomy while performing assigned tasks,' said Manhar Dhanak, director of SeaTech, the Institute for Ocean and Systems Engineering in FAU's Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering. The researchers plan to develop new software to better improve multi-sensors and collision avoidance, as well as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

The US Navy is set to roll out a self-driving drone warship that can hunt down enemy submarines. Dubbed the'Sea Hunter', the 132ft (40-metre) ship is designed to travel thousands of miles out at sea without a single crew member on board. Now a prototype of this submarine-stalking autonomous ship that could scour the open seas for months at a time has been officially transferred to the US Navy. The vessel is currently a surveillance platform and has no weapons on board. It can reach speed of 27 knots and uses cameras and radar to track its location and spot other ships.

It might not have the speed of using a net or the finesse of a rod and line, but a military funded robot made out of jelly could give fishermen some competition. Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a swimming robot out of gel that can capture a live fish in its'tentacles'. The robot, which looks remarkably similar to a jellyfish and was partly funded by the US Office of Naval Research, can move by pumping water through their body. The robot (pictured) is made from a jelly like material called hydrogel, which gives it a soft rubbery texture and makes it almost see-through. They can also rapidly curl and uncurl their arms by inflating them with water, giving them a fast and firm grip.

Are robots capable of moral or ethical reasoning? The Office of Naval Research will award $7.5 million in grant money over five years to university researchers from Tufts, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brown, Yale and Georgetown to explore how to build a sense of right and wrong and moral consequence into autonomous robotic systems. "Even though today's unmanned systems are'dumb' in comparison to a human counterpart, strides are being made quickly to incorporate more automation at a faster pace than we've seen before," Paul Bello, director of the cognitive science program at the Office of Naval Research told Defense One. "For example, Google's self-driving cars are legal and in-use in several states at this point. As researchers, we are playing catch-up trying to figure out the ethical and legal implications. We do not want to be caught similarly flat-footed in any kind of military domain where lives are at stake."