Horizon is often seen as potentially becoming China’s equivalent of NVIDIA. The company is founded by Dr Kai Yu, a prominent industry figure with quite the credentials.

Yu led Baidu’s AI Research lab for three years, founded the Baidu Institute of Deep Learning, and launched the company’s autonomous driving business unit.

Furthermore, Yu has taught at Stanford University, published over 60 papers, and even won first place in the ImageNet challenge which evaluates algorithms for object detection and image classification.

China is yet to produce a chipset firm which can match the capabilities of Western equivalents.

With increasing US sanctions making it more difficult for Chinese firms to access American semiconductors, a number of homegrown companies are emerging and gaining attention from investors.

Horizon is just five-years-old and specialises in making AI chips for robots and autonomous vehicles. The company has already attracted significant funding.

Around two years ago, Horizon completed a $600 million funding round with a $3 billion valuation. The company has secured $150 million so far as part of this latest round.

While it’s likely the incoming Biden administration in the US will take a less strict approach to trade with China, it seems Beijing wants to build more homegrown alternatives which can match or surpass Western counterparts.

Chinese tech giants like Huawei are investing significant resources in their chip manufacturing capabilities to ensure the country has the tech it needs to power groundbreaking advancements like self-driving cars.

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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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Humans have travelled the sea in some form for tens of thousands of years—with the earliest crossings occurring around 53,000 to 65,000 years ago (when Australo-Melanesian populations migrated into the Sahul landmass – known today as Australia and New Guinea – from what used to be the Sundaland peninsula.)

It’s often said how we know more about the moon than our oceans, with around 95 percent still unexplored. Arguably, the last major ocean research expedition was between 1872 and 1876 when a converted Royal Navy gunship known as the Challenger travelled close to 70,000 nautical miles and catalogued over 4,000 previously unknown species.

Inspired by the Challenger’s story, IBM has teamed up with non-profit ProMare to make a similarly large impact on ocean research.

The autonomous ship, Mayflower, is named after the ship which carried pilgrim settlers from Plymouth, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. On its 400th anniversary, it was decided that a Mayflower for the 21st century should be built.

Brett Phaneuf, a Founding Board Member of ProMare and Co-Director of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project, said:

“Putting a research ship to sea can cost tens of thousands of dollars or pounds a day and is limited by how much time people can spend onboard – a prohibitive factor for many of today’s marine scientific missions.

With this project, we are pioneering a cost-effective and flexible platform for gathering data that will help safeguard the health of the ocean and the industries it supports.”

Naturally, there are more than a few differences between the original ship and the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS).

Mayflower 2.0 no longer relies solely on wind power and will use a wind/solar hybrid propulsion system with a backup diesel generator. The new ship also trades in a compass and nautical charts for navigation in favour of a state-of-the-art GNSS positioning system with SATCOM, RADAR, and LIDAR.

IBM’s deep learning technology is on-board to help the ship traverse the harsh and rapidly-changing environment of the ocean.

Donald Scott, Director of Engineering at Marine AI (which partnered with ProMare on the project), explained:

“In the middle of the ocean, communications are severely limited. Conditions can change very suddenly, and you don’t have the option to stop and power down.

With MAS, we needed to go beyond the existing technology for unmanned ships, creating a vessel that isn’t just operated remotely and doesn’t simply react to the environment, but learns and adapts independently.

To do this, we had to develop state-of-the-art capabilities around navigation, collision avoidance, communications and more.”

The training of AI models for the MAS began in October 2019. The actual hull for the ship arrived in Plymouth in March and sea trials began. Over the next few months, the ship was fitted with its advanced navigation and research equipment.

Andy Stanford-Clark, CTO of IBM UK & Ireland, added:

“IBM helped put man on the moon and is excited by the challenge of using advanced technologies to cross and research our deepest oceans.

By providing the brains for the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, we are pushing the boundaries of science and autonomous technologies to address critical environmental issues.”

MAS’ voyage couldn’t arrive at a more needed time with humans causing huge amounts of damage to the health of our oceans. A UN report found our oceans are now warmer, more polluted, more depleted, and more acidic than ever before.

Rising sea levels are among the key concerns about the impact on humans, but another is the increasing number of plastics in the sea which is simultaneously causing harm to sealife and ending up in the food we eat.

Professor Richard Thompson, OBE, Director of the Marine Institute, University of Plymouth, commented:

“Microplastics present a substantial challenge to our oceans. Over 700 species come into contact with marine litter which is found from the poles to the equator, and estimates are that the quantity of plastic in the oceans will triple in the decade to 2025.”

However, armed with the right data, it’s not too late to change course and heal our oceans.

MAS is fitted with a range of sensors including acoustic, nutrient, temperature, and water and air samplers. Edge devices will store and analyse all data locally until connectivity is available. When a link has been established, the data will be uploaded to edge nodes onshore.

Unless there are any last-minute delays, MAS is set to depart on its voyage this month. The ship is due to arrive in Plymouth, Massachusetts around two weeks later. Where required, updated deep learning models can be pushed out to the ship.

MAS’ virtual crew will be based in Plymouth, UK but IBM says millions of virtual “pilgrims” will be able to experience the voyage online.

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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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Speaking on Tuesday, Rear Adm. Brian Losey said AI is able to provide tactical guidance as well as anticipate enemy actions and mitigate threats. Adversaries with such technology will have a significant advantage.

Losey is retired from the military but is now a partner at San Diego-based Shield AI.

Shield AI specialises in building artificial intelligence systems for the national security sector. The company’s flagship Hivemind AI enables autonomous robots to “see”, “reason”, and “search” the world. Nova is Shield AI’s first Hivemind-powered robot which autonomously searches buildings while streaming video and generating maps.

During a panel discussion at The Promise and The Risk of the AI Revolution conference, Losey said:

“We’re losing a lot of folks because of encounters with the unknown. Not knowing when we enter a house whether hostiles will be there and not really being able to adequately discern whether there are threats before we encounter them. And that’s how we incurred most of our casualties.

The idea is: can we use autonomy, can we use edge AI, can we use AI for manoeuvre to mitigate risk to operators to reduce casualties?”

AI has clear benefits today for soldiers on the battlefield, national policing, and even areas such as firefighting. In the future, it may be vital for national defense against ever more sophisticated weapons.

Some of the US’ historic adversaries, such as Russia, have already shown off developments such as killer robots and hypersonic missiles. AI will be vital to equalising the capabilities and hopefully act as a deterrent to the use of such weaponry.

“If you’re concerned about national security in the future, then it is imperative that the United States lead AI so we that we can unfold the best practices so that we’re not driven by secure AI to assume additional levels of risk when it comes to lethal actions,” Losey said.

Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams has warned against robots making life-and-death decisions on the battlefield. Williams said it is ‘unethical and immoral’ and can never be undone.

Williams was speaking at the UN in New York following the Project Quarterback announcement from the US military which uses AI to make decisions on what human soldiers should target and destroy.

“We need to step back and think about how artificial intelligence robotic weapons systems would affect this planet and the people living on it,” said Williams during a panel discussion.

It’s almost inevitable AI will be used for military purposes. Arguably, the best we can hope for is to quickly establish international norms for their development and usage to minimise the unthinkable potential damage.

One such norm that many researchers have backed is that AI should only make recommendations on actions to take, but a human should take accountability for any decision made.

A 2017 report by the Human Rights Watch chillingly concluded that no-one is currently accountable for a robot unlawfully killing someone in the heat of a battle.

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Most sci-fi fans will think of Terminator when they hear of killer robots. In the classic film series, a rogue military AI called Skynet gained self-awareness after spreading to millions of servers around the world. Concluding that humans would attempt to shut it down, Skynet sought to exterminate all of mankind in the interest of self-preservation.

While it was once just a popcorn flick, Terminator now offers a dire warning of what could be if precautions are not taken.

As with most technologies, AI will find itself increasingly used for military applications. The ultimate goal for general artificial intelligence is to self-learn. Combine both, and Skynet no longer seems the wild dramatisation that it once did.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Smith seems to agree. Smith points towards developments in the US, China, UK, Russia, Isreal, South Korea, and others, who are all developing autonomous weapon systems.

Wars could one day be fought on battlefields entirely with robots, a scenario that has many pros and cons. On the one hand, it reduces the risk to human troops. On the other, it makes declaring war easier and runs the risk of machines going awry.

Many technologists have likened the race to militarise AI to the nuclear arms race. In a pursuit to be the first and best, dangerous risks may be taken.

There’s still no clear responsible entity for death or injuries caused by an autonomous machine – the manufacturer, developer, or an overseer. This has also been a subject of much debate in regards to how insurance will work with driverless cars.

With military applications, many technologists have called for AI to never make a combat decision – especially one that would result in fatalities – on its own. While AI can make recommendations, a final decision must be made by a human.

Preventing unimaginable devastation

The story of Russian lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov in 1983 offers a warning of how a machine without human oversight may cause unimaginable devastation.

Petrov’s computers reported that an intercontinental missile had been launched by the US towards the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s strategy was an immediate and compulsory nuclear counter-attack against the US in such a scenario. Petrov used his instinct that the computer was incorrect and decided against launching a nuclear missile, and he was right. 

Had the decision in 1983 whether to deploy a nuclear missile been made solely on the computer, one would have been launched and met with retaliatory launches from the US and its allies.

Smith wants to see a new digital Geneva Convention in order to bring world powers together in agreement over acceptable norms when it comes to AI. “The safety of civilians is at risk today. We need more urgent action, and we need it in the form of a digital Geneva Convention, rules that will protect civilians and soldiers.” 

Many companies – including thousands of Google employees, following backlash over a Pentagon contract to develop AI tech for drones – have pledged not to develop AI technologies for harmful use.

Smith has launched a new book called Tools and Weapons. At the launch, Smith also called for stricter rules over the use of facial recognition technology. “There needs to be a new law in this space, we need regulation in the world of facial recognition in order to protect against potential abuse.”

Last month, a report from Dutch NGO PAX said leading tech firms are putting the world ‘at risk’ of killer AI. Microsoft, along with Amazon, was ranked among the highest risk. Microsoft itself warned investors back in February that its AI offerings could damage the company’s reputation. 

“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 PAX’s report.

A global campaign simply titled Campaign To Stop Killer Robots now includes 113 NGOs across 57 countries and has doubled in size over the past year.

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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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Speaking to investors and media at Volvo’s annual event for the capital-markets community, Volvo Group CEO Martin Lundstedt said:

“Partnership is the new leadership. If we are to succeed in the future with speed, quality, and safety – and to gain benefits of autonomous driving – we need to partner up with the best guys. In this world of unknowns, you need a partnership built on trust.”

Volvo is the world’s second-largest truckmaker after Daimler. The carmaker demonstrated its first cabin-less autonomous truck called Vera last year.

By applying AI to trucks, Volvo hopes to disrupt industries from public and freight transport, to forestry and construction.

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO, commented:

“Trucking is the world’s largest network – a network that through online shopping puts practically anything, anywhere in the world, quickly within our reach.

The latest breakthroughs in AI and robotics bring a new level of intelligence and automation to address the transportation challenges we face. We are thrilled to partner with Volvo Group to reinvent the future of trucking.”

The deal with Volvo is a particular boost for Nvidia and its AI technology for self-driving cars after Tesla ditched the firm last year. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company would focus on creating its own chips.

Nvidia debuted its ‘Xavier’ processors for the company’s DRIVE autonomous car platform last year. Xavier was in development for over four years, represents the work of over 2,000 engineers, features more than nine billion transistors, and Nvidia claims it’s the most complex system-on-a-chip (SoC) ever created

During a conference call in August last year, Huang said: “It’s super hard to build Xavier and all the software stack on top of it. If it doesn’t turn out for whatever reason for them [Tesla] you can give me a call and I’d be more than happy to help.”

Nvidia has made a name for itself as the maker of powerful GPUs, traditionally for gaming purposes. The company has been increasingly shifting gears into other computation-heavy areas like AI and machine learning.

Automotive chips accounted for $641 million of Nvidia’s $11.7 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year.

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Iron Man’s on-screen nemesis Thanos had a radical way of reducing humanity’s impact on the Earth, but Downey Jr. hopes to use a more humane solution.

Appearing on-stage at Amazon’s new re:MARS (Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics and Space) conference in Las Vegas, Downey Jr. launched an initiative called Footprint Coalition.

“I don’t pretend to understand the complexities we face as a species, just because I portrayed a genius in my professional life. My scholastic achievement peaked at a correctional finishing,” Downey Jr. joked, in reference to being incarcerated on drug charges and never making it past high school.

“On the flip side, I did play and interesting and iconic character for 11 years, Tony Stark,” he added, saying he liked how Stark went from a “soulless war profiteer to a man who was willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the community.”

Footprint Coalition aims to use robotics and AI in a bid to clean up the Earth and reverse humanity’s carbon footprint. The coalition aims to achieve its goal in a decade.

“Recently, I was at a table with super smart, impressive, expert folks about six months ago, and the following statement was made: ‘between robotics and technology, we could probably clean up the planet significantly, if not entirely within a decade,'”

“Being essentially a 54-year-old child, I said ‘Let’s do it! Let’s commit to a process, let’s form a coalition,’” explained Downey Jr. “I know it’s a kumbaya-type dream. It’s a logistical clusterfuck.”

While the goal of Downey Jr. and the Footprint Coalition sounds ambitious, it’s needed. Scientists warn 2035 is the ‘point of no return’ when it comes to climate change.

Downey Jr. is the first to admit that it’s early days for the Footprint Coalition, and it will take some more technical people to explain how it’s going to work. The coalition’s website is still under construction as of writing, but we’ll be following the project closely.

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