Smart displays are a unique type of product. The company is announcing today a new set of features for its smart displays, including an “improved visual experience,” a dark theme, relaxing sounds, gentle alarm and Meet improvements. Instead of sticking to a one-page layout with all your notifications and cards lined up horizontally, Google’s smart displays will now have five tabs at the top the following sections: Your Day, Home Control, Media, Communicate and Discover.

The Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas said Thursday it will be leading a $7.5 million U.S. Department of Defense project to create artificial intelligence technology for military drones. UT researchers will try to develop AI that can help drones to more thoroughly learn information as they fly and to possibly maneuver themselves during emergency situations. Such technology, the school said, could help the defense department lower the number of drones lost due to system failures or damage while flying. Ufuk Topcu, an assistant professor at UT's Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, said developing the AI technology will be a challenge. "Our approach to this unprecedented challenge embraces the fact that developing truly autonomous systems -- in particular, control-oriented learning on the fly -- is beyond the reach of any single (scientific fields)," Topcu said in a written statement. It's not clear what the timeline is for the UT-led project.

We propose a methodology for automatic synthesis of embedded control software that accounts for exogenous disturbances. The resulting system is guaranteed, by construction, to satisfy a given specification expressed in linear temporal logic. The embedded control software consists of three components: a goal generator, a trajectory planner, and a continuous controller. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique through an example of an autonomous vehicle navigating an urban environment. This example also illustrates that the system is not only robust with respect to exogenous disturbances but also capable of handling violation of the environment assumptions.