Azerbaijan is observing a day of mourning for the victims of an air crash that killed 38 people. At least 29 people survived the deadly crash on Christmas day. Azerbaijan observed a nationwide moment of silence on Thursday, with national flags lowered, traffic coming to a halt at noon, and signals sounding from ships and trains across the country. Earlier, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev declared Thursday a day of mourning and cancelled a planned visit to Russia for an informal summit of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a grouping of former Soviet nations. Aliyev's office said the president "ordered the prompt initiation of urgent measures to investigate the causes of the disaster".

The typical phases of Bayesian network (BN) structured development include specification of purpose and scope, structure development, parameterisation and validation. Structure development is typically focused on qualitative issues and parameterisation quantitative issues, however there are qualitative and quantitative issues that arise in both phases. A common step that occurs after the initial structure has been developed is to perform a rough parameterisation that only captures and illustrates the intended qualitative behaviour of the model. This is done prior to a more rigorous parameterisation, ensuring that the structure is fit for purpose, as well as supporting later development and validation. In our collective experience and in discussions with other modellers, this step is an important part of the development process, but is under-reported in the literature. Since the practice focuses on qualitative issues, despite being quantitative in nature, we call this step qualitative parameterisation and provide an outline of its role in the BN development process.

Robotaxis keep tangling with firefighters on the streets of San Francisco, and the fire chief is fed up. "They're not ready for prime time," Chief Jeanine Nicholson said. Nicholson is talking about the driverless taxis from Waymo and Cruise that are picking up passengers and dropping them off in designated sections of the city. Now those companies want to rapidly expand service throughout the entire city, in unlimited numbers, in any kind of weather, day or night. And state regulators appear ready to approve their request.

Sean Chou thinks robots are stupid. "All you have to do is type in'YouTube robot fail,' says Chou, CEO of Chicago-based AI startup Catalytic. Here, we'll make it easier: click to see robots fail. And even though they're getting smarter all the time and serving industry in novel ways, Chou is firm in his belief that "we're pretty far from'Terminator.'" It's that they're rising much more slowly than some of the more breathless media coverage might have you believe -- which is great news for most of those who think robots and other AI-powered technology will soon steal their jobs. The consensus among many experts is that a number of professions will be totally automated in the next five to 10 years. A group of senior-level tech executives who comprise the Forbes Technology Council named 13, including insurance underwriting, warehouse and manufacturing jobs, customer service, research and data entry, long haul trucking and a somewhat disconcertingly broad category titled "Any Tasks That ...

Aviation chiefs have urged people to fly drones safely to protect low-flying air ambulances, which are expected to make around 1,000 lifesaving missions during the festive period. Jonathan Nicholson, the assistant director of communications, at the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), asked drone users to fly safely and remain alert for low-flying air ambulances. With thousands of drones expected to be given as presents this Christmas, Mr Nicholson said: 'With more than 400,000 registered drone owners across the UK, and more expected to be added during the festive period as people receive new drones for Christmas, we're asking all drone users to fly safely and to especially be on the lookout for low-flying helicopters. There have been close to 500 close calls between drones and aircraft in the past ten years, with up to 125 in a single year. Air ambulances often fly below the 400ft maximum height for drone flying.

With disinformation and confusion about COVID-19 on the rise, effective patient engagement is taking on an even greater role. Studies have shown that engaged patients show improved health outcomes and that effective tools can enhance service delivery. Communicating with impact is the real key – and innovators and vendors are exploring the best ways to do so. Two such teams are mPulse Mobile and Magellan Rx Management, which recently collaborated to address social isolation and loneliness in nearly 1,800 people with chronic and specialty conditions across the United States. By using mPulse's conversational artificial intelligence platform, the companies say they were able to conduct dialogues via text messages with participants on a variety of health-related topics during a 45-day period.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to make an impact on manufacturing. Data from predictive maintenance is moving into useful analytics. The manufacturing supply chain is getting optimized. AI is helping manufacturers to improve uptime, increase yield, and reduce downtime. Recently we've seen machine learning bring significant benefits to manufacturing.

January's annual Outdoor Retailer Outdoor Snow Show will be hosted virtually Jan. 27-29. Rather than take place at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver, the annual event will be a fully online experience dubbed "Outdoor Retailer Winter Online." In an email, Outdoor Retailer Senior Vice President and Show Director Marisa Nicholson said "developments have made it impossible to bring the event's community together safely and successfully in Denver" due to the ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. She said these included government restrictions and limitations on large gatherings. Outdoor Retailer hosted its first digital show this summer.

The number of new papers on the COVID-19 pandemic is doubling every two weeks, and shows no sign of slowing. Many of these papers are published first on preprint servers, which means they are made public before having undergone peer review. This makes it all the harder to judge their merit. Now, one start-up company says that its platform -- called Scite.ai -- can automatically tell readers whether papers have been supported or contradicted by later academic work. Unlike conventional citation-metrics tools, Scite.ai

In many complex, real-world situations, problem solving and decision making require effective reasoning about causation and uncertainty. However, human reasoning in these cases is prone to confusion and error. Bayesian networks (BNs) are an artificial intelligence technology that models uncertain situations, supporting probabilistic and causal reasoning and decision making. However, to date, BN methodologies and software require significant upfront training, do not provide much guidance on the model building process, and do not support collaboratively building BNs. BARD (Bayesian ARgumentation via Delphi) is both a methodology and an expert system that utilises (1) BNs as the underlying structured representations for better argument analysis, (2) a multi-user web-based software platform and Delphi-style social processes to assist with collaboration, and (3) short, high-quality e-courses on demand, a highly structured process to guide BN construction, and a variety of helpful tools to assist in building and reasoning with BNs, including an automated explanation tool to assist effective report writing. The result is an end-to-end online platform, with associated online training, for groups without prior BN expertise to understand and analyse a problem, build a model of its underlying probabilistic causal structure, validate and reason with the causal model, and use it to produce a written analytic report. Initial experimental results demonstrate that BARD aids in problem solving, reasoning and collaboration.