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Category: robotics/AI

The experimental tool is among several that aim to combine sensors and AI to give U.S. operators a new edge.

TAMPA, Florida — As tomorrow’s elite soldiers work to persuade local populations to support them, they may be able to sense how their messages are being received by detecting invisible biometric signals. Or when pinned down by enemy fire, they may make hand gestures to designate targets for close air support, or operate swarms of drones with just a few voice commands.

Those were just a few of the superhuman abilities that researchers at U.S. Special Operations Command recently showed off in a series of demonstrations that brought together sensors, data, and AI, SOFWERX chief technology officer Brian Andrews said Tuesday at Defense One’s Genius Machines event here. SOFWERX is a prototyping and innovation partnership run by SOCOM and a non-profit company called DEFENSEWERX.

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In late 2019, photos and footage showing Russia’s Uran-9 combat robot deployed in Syria appeared online. They became a rare visual evidence of the Uran-9 combat deployment in the war-torn country, which, according to official sources, took place in 2018.

The Uran-9 multipurpose unmanned ground combat vehicle was officially unveiled by Russian military equipment manufacturer JSC 766 UPTK during the Army-2016 International Military-Technical Forum in Russia in September 2016. The vehicle is designed to provide remote reconnaissance and fire support to a variety of tasks conducted by the counter-terrorism, reconnaissance and military units in urban environments.

The Uran-9 can be used fully autonomously on a predefined road or manually operated by one man from a truck control station or via a small backpack control station.

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A computational model could improve the selection of tumor antigens for personalized cancer vaccines that are now in early-stage clinical trials.

Every cell in the is coated with fragments of proteins called antigens that tell the what’s inside the cell. Antigens presented on that are infected by foreign invaders or have become rogue cancers prompt an immune attack. Such antigens are often used in vaccines to spur immune responses against, for example, viruses like the flu. But to make vaccines that effectively stimulate attack against cancer, researchers need to predict exactly which tumor-specific antigens will be displayed on and hence would be the best ones to put in a cancer vaccine.

Now, scientists at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Massachusetts General Hospital have developed a new computational tool that could help with this task. The researchers turned to machine learning to analyze a diverse set of more than 185,000 human antigens that they discovered, and generated a new set of rules that predict which antigens are presented on the surface of a person’s cells. The findings, published today in Nature Biotechnology, could aid in the development of new treatments that stimulate the immune system to attack cancer as well as viruses and bacteria.

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Given that opportunity, the acquisition of Habana is only a component of a wide attack on the market and that it’s not clear how it fits with the other acquisitions and projects, the initial response to the Habana acquisition should be a shrug. Intel is like a VC firm in that it only needs one of the multiple initiatives to hit in order to end up in the black.

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As the cars we drive become increasingly sophisticated, the technology that underpins them poses a unique set of challenges.

“Currently, technology is more likely to create distractions in vehicles than it is to combat it,” Alain Dunoyer, SBD Automotive’s head of autonomous research and consulting, said in a statement sent to CNBC via email earlier this month.

“These days, cars have a shopping list of features which has led to tasks that were historically quite simple becoming drastically more complicated and distracting,” he added.

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Rather than representing an entirely different take on the flying car, the helicopter’s new brains are more equivalent to the “self-driving” features you see in contemporary cars — an effort to make vehicles safer and more accessible than ever before.

“Today, we design our lives around traffic and make decisions about where we live and work based on how hard it is to get there,” Mark Groden, Skyryse CEO and founder, said in a statement. “To get there, we need to make urban flying as safe as riding an elevator and as accessible and affordable as riding a bus.”

The technology behind the feat called “Flight Stack” allows for either full or partial autonomous flight — think of it like cruise control on a car.

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