Shark attacks are, fortunately, quite rare. However, they do happen and most cases are either fatal or cause life-changing injuries.

Just last week, a fatal shark attack in Australia marked the eighth of the year—an almost 100-year record for the highest annual death toll. Once rare sightings in Southern California beaches are now becoming increasingly common as sharks are preferring the warmer waters close to shore.

Academics from the University of California and San Diego State University have teamed up with AI researchers from Salesforce to create software which can spot when sharks are swimming around popular beach destinations.

Sharks are currently tracked – when at all – by either keeping tabs of tagged animals online or by someone on a paddleboard keeping an eye out. It’s an inefficient system ripe for some AI innovation.

SharkEye uses drones to spot sharks from above. The drones fly preprogrammed paths at a height of around 120 feet to cover large areas of the ocean while preventing marine life from being disturbed.

If a shark is spotted, a message can be sent instantly to people including lifeguards, surf instructors, and beachside homeowners to take necessary action. Future alerts could also be sent directly to beachgoers who’ve signed up for them or pushed via social channels.

The drone footage is helping to feed further research into movement patterns. The researchers hope that by combining with data like ocean temperature, and the movement of other marine life, an AI will be able to predict when and where sharks are most likely to be in areas which may pose a danger to people.

SharkEye is still considered to be in its pilot stage but has been tested for the past two summers at Padaro Beach in Santa Barbara County.

A shark is suspected to have bitten a woman at Padaro Beach over summer when the team wasn’t flying a drone due to the coronavirus shutdown. Fortunately, her injuries were minor. However, a 26-year-old man was killed in a shark attack a few hours north in Santa Cruz just eight days later.

Attacks can lead to sharks also being killed or injured in a bid to save human life. Using AI to help find safer ways for sharks and humans to share the water can only be a good thing.

(Photo by Laura College on Unsplash)

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Despite incidents of reckless flying, drones unlock huge opportunities. We regularly see beautiful photography and videography shot using drones—but, of course, they can do so much more.

Sony has built a stellar reputation in media capture. The company builds great cameras – both for itself and sensors it supplies to other manufacturers (like its new IMX686) – and its software like Vegas Pro is the defacto choice for many creative professionals.

In a press release, Sony wrote:

“Airpeak will support the creativity of video creators to the fullest extent possible, aiming to contribute to the further development of the entertainment industry as well as to improve efficiency and savings in various industries.

Airpeak will also promote this project to enable drone-use with the highest level of safety and reliability in the environments where this has been difficult in the past.”

The focus on supporting video creators is to be expected from Sony, but the mention of various industries suggests the company has bigger plans.

In the photography/videography space alone, Sony will face stiff competition from established players like DJI.

Despite being the current industry leader, DJI has begun diversifying its products in recent years due to a decline in drone popularity for consumer purposes. This is mostly due to increasing restrictions in many countries around where drones can fly and even requiring permits (the FAA, for example, requires users to register all drones over a certain size.)

A patent granted to Sony back in January suggests the company may start relatively simple:

However, Sony could use its AI and robotics expertise to stand out in other exciting areas where drones have a lot of potential such as emergency response, delivering supplies, assisting in warehouses/factories, and even tackling small fires before they spread.

The language Sony uses suggests the company will target a wide range of customers from everyday consumers to large enterprise deployments.

Sony plans to reveal further details about Airpeak in the Spring of 2021.

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Project Maven is a Pentagon initiative aiming to use AI technologies for deploying and monitoring unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Naturally, Google’s involvement with the initiative received plenty of backlash both internally and externally. At least a dozen employees quit Google while many others threatened to walk out if the firm continued building military products.

The pressure forced Google to abandon the lucrative Pentagon contract. However, it just meant that it was happily picked up by another company.

According to Business Insider who broke the news, the company which stepped in to develop Project Maven was Palantir – a company founded by Peter Thiel, a serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and cofounder of PayPal.

Business Insider reporter Becky Peterson wrote that:

“Palantir is working with the Defense Department to build artificial intelligence that can analyze video feeds from aerial drones … Internally at Palantir, where names of clients are kept close to the vest, the project is referred to as ‘Tron,’ after the 1982 Steven Lisberger film.”

In June 2018, Thiel famously said that Google’s decision to pull out from Project Maven but push ahead with Project Dragonfly (a search project for China) amounts to “treason” and should be investigated as such.

Project Maven/Tron is described as being capable of extensive tracking and monitoring of UAVs without human input, but the unclassified information available indicates that it will not be able to fire upon targets. This is somewhat in-line with the accepted norms being established about the use of AI in the military.

Many experts accept that AI will increasingly be used in the military but are seeking to establish acceptable practices. One of the key principles is that, while an AI can track and offer advice to human operators, it should never be able to make decisions by itself which could lead to loss of life.

The rapid pace in which the Project Maven contract was picked up by another company gives credence to comments made by some tech giants that, rather than pull out from such contracts altogether – and potentially hand them to less ethical companies – it’s better to help shape them from the inside.

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The Drone Racing League (DRL) orchestrated its first AI racing competitions this year, with the final of a four-part series held in Texas earlier this month. The races aim to advance the development and testing of fully autonomous drone technologies for real-world applications including disaster relief, search and rescue missions, and space exploration. 

The DRL RacerAI is the first autonomous drone designed to defeat a human in a physical sport. The drone features the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier AI-at-the-edge compute platform in addition to four onboard stereoscopic cameras which enable the AI to detect and identify objects with twice the field of view as human pilots.

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin launched the AlphaPilot challenge, a competition to develop AI for racing drones. A total of 424 developer teams, representing 2300 innovators from over 80 countries, applied to take part.

The AlphaPilot team with the fastest AI code, Team MAVLab from the Netherlands, took home a $1 million prize from Lockheed Martin and was eligible to battle a human pilot to earn a further $250,000.

“The AlphaPilot open innovation challenge is about going fast, taking risks and pushing the boundaries of AI and autonomous flight,” said Lockheed Martin Chief Technology Officer Keoki Jackson.

“We are excited to recognise Team MAVLab and award them with the $1 million prize, but the most energizing part of this competition is seeing how Lockheed Martin’s partnership with DRL inspired great emerging global AI talent to help our world leverage AI and autonomous technologies.”  

Team MAVLab’s AI took on Gabriel “Gab707” Kocher, a top pilot in the Drone Racing League.

Gab707 beat the AI drone by five seconds with a course time of six seconds. Team MAVLab’s AI, while an admirable effort, took almost twice as long at 11 seconds.

While Team MAVLab didn’t win the extra $250,000 this time, both participants can be proud of playing their part in the first human versus AI drone racing competition.

“Robotic sports, like drone racing, push the limits of speed and performance while creating thrilling opportunities to test and refine tech innovation for the real-world – as seen through DRL’s groundbreaking partnership with Lockheed Martin,” said DRL CEO and Founder, Nicholas Horbaczewski.

“We are incredibly excited for Team MAVLab, who designed the winning AI for high-speed racing drones in AIRR, contributing to the future of autonomous flight, which will revolutionise emergency response, aerial surveying, and urban package delivery.”

editor Gury, DRL’s chief technology officer, believes 2023 is the year that AIs overtake their human counterparts at drone racing. Place your bets.

For fans interested in watching the futuristic final of AI-powered drones racing against each other, DRL will air highlights from the AIRR Championship on Sunday, December 29th at 4pm ET on NBC and via @DroneRaceLeague on Twitter.  

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PAX, a Dutch NGO, ranked 50 firms based on three criteria:

1. If technology they’re developing could be used for killer AI.
2. Their involvement with military projects.
3. If they’ve committed to not being involved with military applications in the future.

Microsoft and Amazon are named among the world’s ‘highest risk’ tech companies putting the world at risk, while Google leads the way among large tech companies implementing proper safeguards.

Google’s ranking among the safest tech companies may be of surprise to some given the company’s reputation for mass data collection. Mountain View was also caught up in an outcry regarding its controversial ‘Project Maven’ contract with the Pentagon.

Project Maven was a contract Google had with the Pentagon to supply AI technology for military drones. Several high-profile employees resigned over the contract, while over 4,000 Google staff signed a petition demanding their management cease the project and never again “build warfare technology.”

Following the Project Maven backlash, Google CEO Sundar Pichai promised in a blog post the company will not develop technologies or weapons that cause harm, or anything which can be used for surveillance violating “internationally accepted norms” or “widely accepted principles of international law and human rights”.

Pichai’s promise not to be involved with such contracts in the future appears to have satisfied PAX in their rankings. Google has since attempted to improve its public image around its AI developments with things such as the creation of a dedicated ethics panel, but that backfired and collapsed quickly after featuring a member of a right-wing think tank and a defense drone mogul.

“Why are companies like Microsoft and Amazon not denying that they’re currently developing these highly controversial weapons, which could decide to kill people without direct human involvement?” said Frank Slijper, lead author of the report published this week.

Microsoft, which ranks among the highest risk tech companies in PAX’s list, warned investors back in February that its AI offerings could damage the company’s reputation. 

In a quarterly report, Microsoft wrote:

“Some AI scenarios present ethical issues. If we enable or offer AI solutions that are controversial because of their impact on human rights, privacy, employment, or other social issues, we may experience brand or reputational harm.”

Some of Microsoft’s forays into the technology have already proven troublesome, such as chatbot ‘Tay’ which became a racist, sexist, generally-rather-unsavoury character after internet users took advantage of its machine-learning capabilities.

Microsoft and Amazon are both currently bidding for a $10 billion Pentagon contract to provide cloud infrastructure for the US military.

“Tech companies need to be aware that unless they take measures, their technology could contribute to the development of lethal autonomous weapons,” comments Daan Kayser, PAX project leader on autonomous weapons. “Setting up clear, publicly-available policies is an essential strategy to prevent this from happening.”

You can find PAX’s full risk assessment of the companies here (PDF).

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The propeller-forward designs of most drones are inefficient and reduce flight time. Researchers from MIT, Dartmouth, and the University of Washington have proposed a new hybrid design which aims to combine the perks of both helicopters and fixed-wing planes.

In order to support the new design, a new AI system was developed to switch between hovering and gliding with a single flight controller.

Speaking to VentureBeat, MIT CSAIL graduate student and project lead Jie Xu said:

 “Our method allows non-experts to design a model, wait a few hours to compute its controller, and walk away with a customised, ready-to-fly drone.

The hope is that a platform like this could make more these more versatile ‘hybrid drones’ much more accessible to everyone.”

Existing fixed-wing drones require engineers to build different systems for hovering (like a helicopter) and flying horizontally (like a plane). Controllers are also needed to switch between.

Today’s control systems are designed around simulations, causing a discrepancy when used in actual hardware in real-world scenarios.

Using reinforcement learning, the researchers trained a model which can detect potential differences between the simulation and reality. The controller is then able to use this model to transition from hovering to flying, and back again, just by updating the drone’s target velocity.

OnShape, a popular CAD platform, is used to allow users to select potential drone parts from a data set. The proposed design’s performance can then be tested in a simulator.

“We expect that this proposed solution will find application in many other domains,” wrote the researchers in the paper. It’s easy to imagine the research one day being scaled up to people-carrying ‘air taxis’ and more.

The researchers will present their paper later this month at the Siggraph conference in Los Angeles.

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While rare, birds can pose a serious problem to aircraft – from broken windshields to engine failures.

That’s not to say bird strikes themselves are uncommon. Between 1990-2015, there were 160,894 bird strikes on US aircraft. Each year, bird strikes cost US airlines an estimated $1.2 billion.

Only .025% (40) of those strikes resulted in an accident. While the danger to human life is low, few of the aforementioned birds will have survived their impromptu meeting with a jet plane.

The engineers behind the project were inspired by the 2009 US Airways Flight 1549 incident which became known as the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ and received a multi-award winning film adaptation named after Captain Sully.

Shortly after take-off from LaGuardia Airport, the plane struck a flock of geese and lost all engine power. The skilled pilots were able to perform a safe water landing on the Hudson River with zero casualties.

Soon-Jo Chung, Team Leader on the drone project, said:

“The passengers on Flight 1549 were only saved because the pilots were so skilled.

It made me think that next time might not have such a happy ending, so I started looking into ways to protect airspace from birds by leveraging my research areas in autonomy and robotics.”

Using drones to herd birds away can be dangerous. Approach incorrectly and the birds could be spooked into scattering in an uncontrolled manner that could pose an even greater danger.

Birds often respond to changes by others near them for a coordinated response. By positioning the drone as a potential danger rather than imminent, the birds along the edge of a flock can be encouraged to make course changes which affect those further into the flock.

Credit: Soon-Jo Chung/Caltech

Rushing in with a drone will cause the birds to panic and act individually.

Chung and his team built an algorithm with this in mind. When testing on a flock of birds near a field in Korea, the researchers found a single drone could keep a flock of dozens of birds out of a designated airspace.

The current limitation is that it can only control one flock of birds at a time. Chung and his team are exploring how the project can be scaled up.

Most drones today are used for entertainment or military purposes. In recent months, we’ve seen a deeper exploration of how they could offer tangible benefits for things such as emergency response.

Today, we’ve seen another example of a benefit drones could bring to society.

The full paper titled ‘Robotic Herding of a Flock of Birds Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle’ can be found here.

What are your thoughts on the use of drones to keep birds away from airports?

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