JERUSALEM – Beginning Oct. 7, when Hamas terrorists used remote controlled drones to disarm tanks and knock out surveillance cameras during its surprise attack on Israel, through to last week, when a Hezbollah drone from Lebanon landed directly in an army base in northern Israel, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly becoming part of the weapons arsenal used by Iranian-backed non-state players in their war against the Jewish state. While Israel has in place what it calls "an aerial defense array" – used multiple times over the past three months to thwart "hostile aircraft" from Gaza and Lebanon – as UAVs become easier to obtain, manufacture, enhance and weaponize, Israel, as well as other countries around the world, are racing to contend with an ever more lethal form of combat that is already outpacing existing military defense systems. "The Israeli – and the U.S. – militaries have been using drones for a long time, especially in counterterrorism, for intelligence gathering or for precision strikes in order to distinguish between civilians and fighters," Dr. Liran Antebi, program director of advanced technologies and national security at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, told Fox News Digital. Xtend's Griffon Counter UAVs, with speeds of up to 93.1 miles per hour, and AI technology are being used by the IDF to identify and kill rogue drones. "However, what was once the silver bullet used by democracies in counterterrorism and to act in more ethical ways, is now in the hands of terrorists or non-democratic states and is being used in the opposite way," she said.

Lior Rokach is a computer scientist. He is a professor and the former chair of the Department of Software and Information Systems Engineering (SISE) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). Lior was born in 1972 in Holon, Israel. He completed his B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. in 1998,1999, and 2004 respectively at Tel-Aviv University. His research interests lie in designing and analyzing Machine Learning and Data Mining algorithms and their applications in Recommender Systems, Cyber Security, and Medical Informatics.

Reco, a company using AI to map a company's data sharing, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Insight Partners, with participation from Zeev Ventures, BoldStart, Angular Ventures, Jibe Ventures, CrewCapital and Cyber Club London. CEO Ofer Klein said the proceeds will to toward product development and supporting the company' go-to-market efforts. Reco is Klein's second venture after Kwik, an internet of things platform for "connected customer experiences." Nakash led research at the Office of the Prime Minister in Israel prior to joining Reco, while Shapira, who also worked at the Office of the Prime Minister, was the head of algorithms at heads-up display startup Guardian Optical Technologies. "The distributed workforce is getting bigger. And each of these introduces new security risk," Klein told TechCrunch in an email interview.

Israeli printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturer CADY has successfully raised $3 million USD to develop an AI-based software for inspection of circuit board designs. The software uses machine learning to compare the components of a circuit board with the design of the board, ensuring that everything is in the right place and that there are no mistakes in the final product. This provides quality control and makes the manufacturing process significantly faster and more efficient. CADY's CEO Gilad Shapira highlighted the industry's demand for advanced AI-based inspection technology: "Along with the chip market, the electrical circuit market also experiences an immense increase in recent decades in terms of the complexity of the design and the inspection of the schematics. Each circuit made for automotive, computers, cellphones and other electronic devices is becoming much denser and more complex, embedded with more components, and thus harder to inspect."

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are starting to play a bigger role in retail, foreshadowing what's to come in the new decade of the 2020s. Walmart, for instance, hopes to reduce checkout theft by turning to cameras powered by AI, with deployments underway in some 1,000 stores. "The retailer began investing in the surveillance program, dubbed Missed Scan Detection, several years ago in an effort to combat shrinkage – loss due to several causes including theft, scanning errors, waste and fraud," the report stated. "The AI-powered cameras were rolled out to more than 1,000 stores about two years ago, and the retail giant has seen positive results since then, according to [Walmart spokeswoman LeMia] Jenkins, who said shrinkage has reduced in stores where the cameras have been added." By incorporating visual recognition technology and artificial intelligence into their business models, retailers such as Neiman Marcus, IKEA, H&M and west elm are leveraging mobile devices and AI to provide advanced customer services.

As Europe (together with Australia and Israel) are glued to their TV sets watching the 64th Eurovision song competition, we asked ourselves What makes a Eurovision song memorable? We are a group of artists, musicians and programmers that wanted explore human creativity and challenge it. We have created a Eurovision AI song that celebrates Eurovision – its melodrama, kitsch and camp, its humor and its gimmicks. The result is comprised entirely of material written and composed by Artificial Intelligence, titled "Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears". The project team fed hundreds of Eurovision songs – melodies and lyrics – into a neuron network.

Futurists say in-store shopping experiences will be highly personalized before too long. Salespeople will know your likes and dislikes seemingly off the top of their heads, and they'll know to highlight the items you're most likely to find attractive. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help drive that kind of bespoke experience, and Mystore-E intends to establish an early foothold in the market with an adaptable, on-premise platform designed for retail outlets. It's well on its way: The two-year-old Tel Aviv startup recently raised $2.2 million in a seed round and secured an exclusive partnership with Signet Jewelers. "Mystore-E cares deeply about the future of … shopping," CEO Asaf Shapira said. "Our goal is to create a personalized shopping experience that benefits retail stores, while also catering to the customers' wants, needs, and style preferences."

First, there were mom-and-pop stores and boutiques. Then came malls and, with them, big retail chains. After that, we got the online experience -- where with just a click we can access thousands of products, order them, try them on and send them back if they don't suit us. Americans do over 90 percent of their shopping in physical stores, and the launch of physical stores by online companies, including Amazon and Warby Partner, is one of the latest trends in retail, according to New York data company CB Insights. So startups worldwide are also striving to bring new technologies to stores, to help improve the buying experience and sales.