An upstart Japanese political party said Tuesday it will install an artificial intelligence as leader after its maverick founder quit following a disastrous showing in recent elections. The Path to Rebirth party, which was launched in January by Shinji Ishimaru, a former mayor of a small city in western Japan, does not have a policy platform and its members are free to set their own agendas. Ishimaru unexpectedly came second in the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election thanks to a successful online campaign but he quit the party after it failed to pick up any seats in this year's upper house elections. The new leader will be AI, Koki Okumura, a doctoral student of AI research who described himself as an assistant to the new leader, told a news conference. Shinji Ishimaru, leader of The Path to Rebirth party, holds a news conference in August in Tokyo.

Formation control is essential for swarm robotics, enabling coordinated behavior in complex environments. In this paper, we introduce a novel formation control system for an indoor blimp swarm using a specialized leader-follower approach enhanced with a dynamic leader-switching mechanism. This strategy allows any blimp to take on the leader role, distributing maneuvering demands across the swarm and enhancing overall formation stability. Only the leader blimp is manually controlled by a human operator, while follower blimps use onboard monocular cameras and a laser altimeter for relative position and altitude estimation. A leader-switching scheme is proposed to assist the human operator to maintain stability of the swarm, especially when a sharp turn is performed. Experimental results confirm that the leader-switching mechanism effectively maintains stable formations and adapts to dynamic indoor environments while assisting human operator.

The Yemen-based branch of Al Qaeda said on Sunday that its leader, Khaled Batarfi, had died. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, known as A.Q.A.P., released a video announcing Mr. Batarfi's death, showing images of him wrapped in a white funeral shroud overlaid with a black Al Qaeda flag. It did not explain how he had died. The United States government once considered Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to be one of the world's most dangerous terrorist organizations. The group tried and failed at least three times to blow up American airliners, and has been targeted by American drone strikes for two decades.

It might come as a surprising fact that there are presently 14 Chinese AI organizations valued at $1 billion. These unicorns worth consolidated comes to $40.5 billion, as per a report China Money Network released during the World Economic Forum's Summer Davos gathering in Beijing. Just to place these numbers in context. Google purchased DeepMind for over $500 million in 2014. Chinese voice recognition giant iFlytek Co. has a market capitalization of 63 billion yuan ($9.2 billion).

KIEV - Ukraine's election has catapulted Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a 41-year-old stand-up comedian and television star with no political experience, into the nation's top job. As leader of a country dependent on international aid and battling separatists, Zelenskiy will have to deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, deep economic problems and possibly rebellious elites. Here is a look at the main challenges facing Ukraine's sixth president: Voters expect the new commander-in-chief to end a five-year war with Moscow-backed separatists in the industrial east. The conflict has claimed some 13,000 lives since 2014 and is a huge burden on the economy and society. Despite numerous attempts to staunch the bloodletting, the conflict regularly claims the lives of soldiers and civilians, and a solution is nowhere in sight.

DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan – Pakistani Taliban militants chose a religious scholar as their new chief in place of Mullah Fazlullah, the insurgent leader who ordered the assassination of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai and was killed earlier this month in a U.S. drone strike. Mohammad Khurasani, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban, said Saturday that the executive council of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan appointed Mufti Noor Wali Mahsud as its new chief and Mufti Mazhim, aka Mufti Hafzullah, as his deputy. Khurasani conceded for the first time that Mullah Fazlullah was killed in the drone attack in Afghanistan's Kunar province. He did not say when and where the TTP executive council met to choose the new leader. A ruthless leader, Fazlullah ordered the beheading of dozens of opponents when his band of insurgents controlled Pakistan's picturesque Swat Valley from 2007 until a massive military operation routed them out in 2009. Fazlullah rose to prominence through his radio broadcasts in Swat demanding the imposition of Islamic law, earning him the nickname "Mullah Radio."

After the need to find a new leader, or let's say on a parallel track with the need to find a new leader, it's the most important issue facing the company right now. Uber and others--Google and Tesla and the auto companies--have invested a lot of money in developing technology for self-driving cars because technologists believe that the technology is still good and will eventually become so pervasive that most of us won't drive cars around anymore. If you're the company that controls that technology, then you could in theory control the transportation network that runs that technology. So Uber sees a day where it won't need drivers with cars. It doesn't want to have to pay somebody else for the technology to make autonomous vehicles happen.

Maoist Nepali Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal resigned on Wednesday, leaving a leadership vacuum weeks before the second round of local elections. Dahal took office only nine months ago. The municipal and village assembly vote is the first in the past two decades. The prime minister's exit from government was somewhat expected under a power-sharing deal with the Nepali Congress Party. It came earlier than predicted though after the Communist UML opposition party threatened to block Dahal's speech in parliament, saying the government had created local and municipal bodies without due legal process.

A little-known extremist cleric was chosen Wednesday to be the new leader of the Afghan Taliban, just days after a U.S. drone strike killed his predecessor. But within hours of the Taliban's announcement that the group's council of leaders had unanimously selected Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, opposition to him emerged -- a sign that rifts within the insurgency could widen and possibly drive the Taliban further from peace talks with the government of Afghanistan. The Taliban called on all Muslims to support Akhundzada as a matter of religious obligation and declared three days of official mourning for Mullah Mohammed Akhtar Mansour, who was slain Saturday by a U.S. drone in Pakistan. The announcement came as a suicide bomber struck a minibus carrying court employees in Kabul, killing at least 11 people, an official said. The Taliban promptly claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Afghan Taliban named an Islamic legal scholar who was one of former leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour's deputies to succeed him Wednesday after confirming Mansour's death in a U.S. drone strike over the weekend. Within an hour of the announcement, a Taliban suicide bomber attacked a shuttle bus carrying court employees west of the Afghan capital of Kabul, killing as many as 11 people and wounding several others, including children. New Taliban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada was named in a United Nations report last year as former chief of the Sharia-based justice system under the Taliban's five-year rule over Afghanistan, which ended with their ouster in 2001. Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of a feared network blamed for many deadly bomb attacks in Kabul in recent years, and Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, son of Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, will serve as deputies. The announcement, following a meeting of the Taliban's main shura, or leadership council, ended days of confusion during which the Taliban declined to confirm the death of Mansour in a drone strike in Pakistan on Saturday.