Conservative mayor Lord Houchen called for “civility” in the upcoming Tory leadership contest, shortly after Suella Braverman’s made some eyebrow-raising comments about the party’s direction.
The former home secretary and current backbencher – who is expected to run as Conservative leader – criticised people who lean further to centre over the weekend.
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She told The Telegraph: “If we don’t recover the votes we deliberately, and arrogantly, spurned, we will turn the Conservative Party into the 21st Century version of the 20th Century Liberal Party.
“We can do better than being a collection of fanatical, irrelevant, centrist cranks, who make it our business to insult our should-be voters for not being as smug and self-righteous as we are.”
Asked what he made of these comments on Sky News on Sunday, Houchen said the Tory party leadership should not be based on the past, but the future.
He also there should not be any “blue-on-blue attacks”.
Houchen added: “If we want to spend the next two, three, four, five months fighting with each other that goes to the cause of the election defeat just two weeks ago.
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“And I would implore Suella, as well as every other leadership contender, to conduct this leadership contest with civility. Let’s come together and let’s offer a positive option to the country.”
He said voters “want a party that isn’t going to fight like cats in a sack”, adding that the electorate thought the Tories cared more about “in-fighting and positioning within the Conservative Party and within the government than caring about our country”.
The mayor suggested any future Tory leader needs to rule out working with Reform too, as they are a “symptom not a cause” of the problem.
But Braverman called for a deal with the populist party only a few weeks ago.
Speaking to GB Newsearlier this month, she said there was “only room for one Conservative Party on the right of British politics”.
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The backbencher said: “There’s very little I disagree with when it comes to Nigel Farage and I met thousands of people throughout this campaign, and many, many people said to me, I’m a lifelong Tory voter, but I’m going to vote Reform.”
“They are feeling betrayed. They feel let down. They feel politically homeless because of our failures,” she added.
“So we have to address the issue of Reform. I’m not really interested in the form of what that takes, but we need to find an accommodation with Reform, with Nigel Farage, so that we can take the fight to Labour and win the next election.”
Before the exchequer’s secretary James Murray was elected to parliament, he was the deputy mayor of London under Sadiq Khan.
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He held this role from 2016 to 2019 – meaning he was in office when his boss Khan allowed a six-metre high cartoon baby blimp of the then-US president to float across the capital.
It was part of a wider protest against the divisive politician’s first formal visit to the UK in 2018.
Phillips recalled the famous blimp on his programme this morning, asking Murray: “Do you now wish you hadn’t chosen to insult him in this way?”
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The minister replied: “Look there’s been a lot of history between the mayor and President Trump but what’s important for me is being a minister in the government is that we have a relationship with the US, which is an incredibly strong one, and one that’s in our national interests and good for our national security.”
Phillips hit back: “It’s quite tricky to have a good relationship with somebody when one of your colleague has described him as a neo-Nazi and your former boss called him literally a few weeks, a racist, a sexist and a homophobe.”
“Is that the way diplomacy these days under Labour?” Phillip asked.
Murray said: “In the past there have been comments on all sides of this relationship, but what it’s important for me is the strength of a relationship –”
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Phillips cut him off, saying: “The strength of a relationship with someone who called you a neo-Nazi is not going to be very strong, is it?”
He said the UK-US “transcends any individuals”, and “it’s in our interests in terms of national security and economy” to get along well.
Phillips pushed: “You understand why this is an issue, don’t you?”
He noted that Lammy is now calling Trump’s running mate JD Vance is his friend and that chancellor Rachel Reeves is talking about a trade deal with the US.
He said: “You’re all going to have change your tune aren’t you?”
Murray said Labour have “never” changed their tune in their approach to the US, and that it is up to American voters to choose their president.
A top Tory has been called out for interrupting a cabinet minister and heckling jim from the dispatch box.
Shadow health secretary Victoria Atkins, who is expected to run for the party leadership, had to be rebuked by the deputy speaker for her “abominable” behaviour in the Commons.
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On Friday afternoon, the new environment, food and rural affairs secretary Steve Reed began his first speech as a member of government by talking about the Labour’s plan to “get Britain building again”.
It was part of the parliamentary debate on the King’s Speech.
But, he was interrupted repeatedly by Tories – first by Tory backbencher and former party chair Richard Holden, who stood up to indicate he wanted to speak.
But Reed refused to give way, saying there was not enough time for Holden’s speech and that other “members should have spoken for less time” earlier in the three-hour debate.
Reed then attacked the Conservatives for neglected parts of the country.
The shadow housing, communities and local government secretary, Kemi Badenoch, who is also expected to try out for Tory leader, then attempted to cut in.
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But Reed said: “I am very sorry but there are only three minutes left and I need to cover the points that have been raised. They had their time.”
He resumed by talking about how Labour plans to increase the number of mental health professionals.
Atkins then jumped up and leant across the despatch box while shouting at Reed, seemingly irate.
The deputy speaker Sir Christopher Chope had to shout: “Order. The right honourable member for Louth and Horncastle [Atkins] has behaved abominably.”
According to The Guardian, a spokesperson for Atkins’ office said: “Conservative MPs were trying to get answers about their budgets for farming, flood defences and food security, which the minister ignored.
“She will always stand up fearlessly for farmers and our rural area in Westminster, even if that means a rare admonishment from the Chair.”
Reed wrapped up his speech by reeling off the “Tories’ failure”, calling his opponents “the party of broken dreams”.
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Closing the debate, Reed said: “After 14 years of chaos, there is once again hope for our environment, hope for our countryside and hope for our rural communities. I welcome the king’s speech, I recommend it to this house.”
Over the weekend, clips of this exchange were picked up by other MPs….
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This happened during my first experience of a debate in the chamber. The behaviour of several Conservative MPs was appalling. After the debate, I asked a group of them why they behaved that way. I was accused of rudeness myself for having the temerity to ask. Absolutely shocking. https://t.co/PuS57iyTqI
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Absolutely shocking. https://t.co/PuS57iyTqI— Max Wilkinson MP (@mpmwilko) July 20, 2024\n\n\n","options":{"_hide_media":{"label":"Hide photos, videos, and cards","value":false},"_maxwidth":{"label":"Adjust width","placeholder":"220-550, in px","value":""},"_theme":{"value":"","values":{"dark":"Use dark theme"}}},"provider_name":"Twitter","title":"Max Wilkinson MP on Twitter / 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This happened during my first experience of a debate in the chamber. The behaviour of several Conservative MPs was appalling. After the debate, I asked a group of them why they behaved that way. I was accused of rudeness myself for having the temerity to ask. Absolutely shocking. https://t.co/PuS57iyTqI
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Mark Zuckerberg has praised former President Donald Trump’s reaction to his attempted assassination at a Pennsylvania rally last weekend.
The Meta CEO ― in a recent interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang ― recalled seeing the Republican presidential nominee get up after he was shot before pumping his right fist in the air, moments seen in widely-shared photos from the shooting that killed one rally attendee.
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Zuckerberg described the Trump rally scene, which featured an American flag waving in the sky, as “one of the most badass things” he’s seen in his life.
“On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy,” Zuckerberg said.
The Meta CEO, who once criticised Trump over his executive order on immigration back in 2017, hasn’t endorsed the Republican nominee or President Joe Biden as they look to win a second White House term in November.
“I’ve done some stuff personally in the past, I’m not planning on doing that this time,” said Zuckerberg, who noted that he’s not looking to back a presidential candidate in the election.
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Zuckerberg’s remarks arrive after fellow multi-billionaire and the richest person in the world Elon Muskendorsed Trump following his assassination attempt.
Musk has reportedly pledged to donate $45 million a month to America PAC, a political action committee working to elect Trump.
Zuckerberg, elsewhere in his interview with Chang, claimed users on Meta’s platforms “actually want” to see less political content and they hope to use the sites to “connect with people.”
Meta’s Instagram announced earlier this year that the platform wouldn’t “proactively recommend” political content from accounts users don’t follow.
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“I think you’re going to see our services play less of a role in this election than they have in the past,” Zuckerberg said.
Trump — whose Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack before being reinstated last year — has referred to Facebook as the “enemy of the people” and seemingly warned Zuckerberg he’d send him to prison if he were to return to the Oval Office.
Trump, in comments on TikTok, recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that he’s against banning the Chinese-owned platform as “you need competition” before blasting Facebook and Instagram.
“That’s, you know, that’s Zuckerberg,” the former president said.
Biden, too, claimed he’s “never been a big Zuckerberg fan” back in 2020 and referred to the Meta CEO at the time as “a real problem.”
President Joe Biden sent a message on Friday: He’s not going anywhere.
Beset by poor polls, calls from within his own party to step aside and, as of Wednesday, even Covid-19, Biden said he was eager to return to campaigning.
“I look forward to getting back on the campaign trail next week to continue exposing the threat of Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda while making the case for my own record and the vision that I have for America: one where we save our democracy, protect our rights and freedoms, and create opportunity for everyone,” Biden said in a campaign statement.
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“The stakes are high, and the choice is clear. Together, we will win.”
The message appeared to be a rebuke to a growing number of rank-and-file Democrats who have said publicly they would like to see him step aside in favour of Vice President Kamala Harris or another Democrat at the top of the party’s presidential ticket.
Speculation had risen ahead of the weekend that Biden may be reconsidering his decision to stay in the race. Axios reported several unspecified “top Democrats” believed the pressure from within the party to step aside would keep rising and persuade Biden “as soon as this weekend” to quit.
That idea was quickly and publicly rejected by the White House.
“Wrong. Keep the faith,” posted White House spokesperson Andrew Bates on social media early on Friday in response to a story that Biden’s family had discussed an exit strategy for him. Bates had similarly described another account of exit preparations as “fan fiction.”
Still, despite the Biden camp’s public steadfastness, defections continued to grow to around 30 Democrats on Capitol Hill. Friday morning saw one of the most significant yet in Representative Zoe Lofgren (Democrat, California), a 15-term congresswoman who was one of Trump’s impeachment trial managers and the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Space, Science and Technology Committee.
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“As I am aware that you have been provided data indicating that you in all likelihood will lose the race for President, I will not go through it again,” Lofgren said in a public letter to Biden.
“Simply put, your candidacy is on a trajectory to lose the White House and potentially impact crucial House and Senate races down ballot. It is for these reasons that I urge you to step aside from our Party’s nomination to allow another Democratic candidate to compete against and beat Donald Trump in the November election.”
As one of the longest-serving Democrats in the House and an ally of former speaker Representative Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, California), Lofgren has the respect of many members of the House Democratic caucus and could be influential in convincing others to publicly join her call.
There was already a small cavalcade of public defections from Biden on Friday morning. Representatives Jared Huffman (Democrat, California), Chuy García (Democrat, Illinois), Marc Veasey (Democrat, Texas) and Mark Pocan (Democrat, Wisconsin) issued a joint statement for Biden to step aside that said he had “lifted up, empowered, and prepared” younger Democratic leaders like Harris for this moment.
Representatives Greg Landsman (Democrat, Ohio) and Sean Casten (Democrat, Illinois) each issued their own statements on Friday calling for Biden to abandon his reelection bid. “There is too much on the line, and we have to be able to make that case to the American people about the change we need and the country we all deserve,” Landsman wrote.
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And on Thursday, The New York Times reported that Representative Jamie Raskin (Democrat, Maryland), another impeachment manager and the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, had written a letter to Biden earlier in the month to try to persuade him to drop out, comparing him to an effective but tired pitcher late in a tight baseball game.
“There is no shame in taking a well-deserved bow to the overflowing appreciation of the crowd when your arm is tired out, and there is real danger for the team in ignoring the statistics,” he wrote.
Biden also received more bad news in the form of an estimate from noted polling expert Nate Silver. In his newsletter, Silver said Biden was now polling 4 points behind Trump and had hit a new low in Silver’s election forecast model, with only a 26% chance of winning the Electoral College vote.
But even that estimate may be slightly optimistic, according to Silver.
“However, the model is designed to be cautious around party conventions: it’s shaving a little bit off Trump’s numbers and also hedging toward its pre-convention forecast. If Trump sustains these numbers, the forecast will continue to get worse for Biden,” he wrote.
The United Nations’ top court on Friday said Israel is illegally occupying the Palestinian regions it has controlled since 1967 and must end its presence in them — a landmark statement that boosts momentum for a change in Israeli policy.
The court found that Israel is committing major violations of international law, including “de facto annexation” of occupied land and breaking the global prohibition against racial discrimination and apartheid. It concluded that Israel should take steps like evacuating settlers and making reparations to affected Palestinians. It also emphasised Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and said other countries are obliged to cease support for Israel’s occupation and to help end the policy “as rapidly as possible.”
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The advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice covers Israeli practices in the occupied West Bank, in East Jerusalem (which Israel claims as its own territory) and in the Gaza Strip.
The opinion from the panel of 15 judges from around the world, selected by the UN General Assembly, is non-binding and has no immediate consequences.
The ICJ previously issued an opinion in 2004 saying Israel’s construction of a “separation wall” in the West Bank was illegal, yet the wall is still standing 20 years later.
Still, the assessment from the court will likely increase pressure on Israel and its allies, including the US, for progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Opponents of the status quo ― in which little movement is occurring toward a settlement, while America and other Western states provide Israel with military and diplomatic support regardless of its treatment of Palestinians ― now have a new basis to say these conditions are illegitimate.
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Meanwhile, the ICJ has found that various ongoing Israeli practices, from demolishing Palestinian homes to imposing “a regime of comprehensive restriction” on Palestinian movement, hinder the chances of Palestinian statehood ― which could bolster the argument that the longer the current situation persists, the less likely peace becomes.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boosted that impression in a reaction to the ICJ opinion that rejected any idea of reconsidering the occupation.
“The Jewish people are not occupiers in our own land, neither in our eternal capital Jerusalem nor in the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria,” he argued, using a religiously tinged term for the West Bank that is popular among far-right Israelis. “No fraudulent decision from The Hague can distort this historical truth.”
Israel declined to participate in the ICJ’s proceedings around the advisory opinion, though more than 50 other nations did present their views.
“The United Nations’ top court said that other countries are obliged to cease support for Israel’s occupation.”
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On Thursday, Israel’s parliament voted against the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state, backing a resolution that called the prospect “an existential danger to the State of Israel.”
Many members of Israel’s security establishment and supporters of the country abroad argue the opposite: that reaching an agreement is the only way to lower tensions and respect Israel’s stated identity as a Jewish and democratic state.
Experts in international law described Friday’s opinion as more significant and far-reaching than what they had expected from the court.
The court affirmed Palestinian rights in the regions they see as the heart of the future state that they and most countries believe is key to peace.
It also took on Israel’s claim that it no longer has international responsibilities as an “occupying power” in Gaza, despite almost fully controlling access to the territory.
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The Friday opinion directly challenged that claim, arguing: “The court is of the view that Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip has not entirely released it of its obligations under the law of occupation.”
In another striking move, the court pushed back on an argument from the US that it should not consider Israel’s treatment of Palestinians for fear of jeopardising potential negotiations between the two sides, calling that idea a “matter of conjecture.”
The court did not consider Israel’s actions in its current military operation in Gaza because it crafted its opinion based on a request submitted by the UN General Assembly in December 2022, before that offensive began.
The court’s consideration of the Israeli occupation is separate from the case it is considering between South Africa and Israel, in which the former argues the latter may be committing genocide against Palestinians through its ongoing offensive in the Gaza Strip. The court has said there is a “plausible” risk of genocide, and issued three orders requiring Israel to change its conduct to do more to shield civilians. Those orders, known as provisional measures, are meant to be binding, but Israel has largely maintained the policies the court criticised, such as limits on the provision of aid to Gaza.
The Friday opinion is also distinct from the action that another body, the International Criminal Court, is considering in relation to Israel-Palestine. The ICC’s top prosecutor is seeking arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister and defence minister and three leaders of the Palestinian militant faction Hamas for alleged war crimes during the October 7 attack and Israel’s military response in Gaza since.
When deciding what material to use for infrastructure projects, metals are often selected for their durability. However, if placed in a hydrogen-rich environment, like water, metals can become brittle and fail. Since the mid-19th century, this phenomenon, known as hydrogen embrittlement, has puzzled researchers with its unpredictable nature. Now, a study published in Science Advances brings us a step closer to predicting it with confidence.
The work is led by Dr. Mengying Liu from Washington and Lee University in collaboration with researchers at Texas A&M University. The team investigated formation of cracks in initially flawless, crack-free samples of a nickel-base alloy (Inconel 725), which is primarily known for its strength and corrosion resistance. There are currently several working hypotheses that attempt to explain hydrogen embrittlement. The results of this study show that one of the more well-known hypotheses — hydrogen enhanced localized plasticity (HELP) — is not applicable in the case of this alloy.
Plasticity, or irreversible deformation, is not uniform throughout a material, but is instead localized to certain points. HELP hypothesizes that cracks initiate at the points with the highest localized plasticity.
“As far as I know, ours is the first study that actually looks in real time to see where cracks initiate — and isn’t at locations of highest localized plasticity,” said co-author Dr. Michael J. Demkowicz, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University and Liu’s PhD advisor. “Our study tracks both the localized plasticity and the crack initiation locations in real time.”
Tracking crack initiation in real time is crucial. When examining a sample after a crack has appeared, the hydrogen has already escaped from the material, making it impossible to understand the mechanism that led to the damage.
“Hydrogen easily escapes from metals, so you can’t figure out what it does to embrittle a metal by examining specimens after they’ve been tested. You have to look while you’re testing,” said Demkowicz.
This study helps to lay the groundwork for better predictions of hydrogen embrittlement. In the future, hydrogen may replace fossil fuels as a clean energy source. If this change occurs, all of the infrastructure currently used to store and use fossil fuels would become susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement. Predicting embrittlement is crucial for preventing unexpected failures, making a future hydrogen economy possible.
The experiments for this study, as well as the preliminary data analysis, were conducted at Texas A&M, with Liu providing further data analysis and manuscript preparation at Washington and Lee. This paper is co-authored by Liu, Demkowicz and Texas A&M doctoral student Lai Jiang.
Understanding how soft materials fail under stress is critical for solving engineering challenges as disparate as pharmaceutical technology and landslide prevention. A new study linking a spectrum of soft material behaviors — previously thought to be unrelated — led researchers to identify a new parameter they call the brittility factor, which allows them to simplify soft material failure behavior. This will ultimately help engineers design better materials that meet future challenges.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Simon Rogers and graduate student Krutarth Kamani specialize in determining how soft materials yield to stress and have shown how solid and liquid physical states can exist together in the same material. This area is of high interest due to its importance to industrial, environmental and biomedical applications.
Along the way, the team identified a communication breakdown among the scientists who work in this area, causing a bottleneck between a theoretical understanding of soft material behavior and real-world applications.
When soft materials — natural or synthetic — deform under pressure, they eventually reach a critical point where they either return to their original form or undergo permanent deformation, like stretching or breaking a piece of elastic. This process is known as yielding. A gradual yielding transition is termed ductile behavior, while an abrupt one is referred to as brittle behavior, the researchers said.
“At a recent conference, we realized that all of us who study soft materials from all over Europe and North America couldn’t agree what the connection is between brittle and ductile behavior nor how to define it.”
In the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, instead of viewing soft material behavior as one or the other — brittle or ductile — Rogers’ team considers a spectrum of yielding behaviors. This allowed the team to build a continuum model, which led to them uncovering the brittility factor. This factor is critical in determining how and why soft materials fail.
Essentially, brittility affects how a material deforms permanently under stress. The team’s model indicates that the higher the brittility factor, the less a soft material will deform permanently before yielding.
As in the team’s past studies, the model was developed and tested using data from numerous experiments that subjected various soft materials to stress while measuring the individual strain responses using a device called a rheometer.
“We didn’t expect this study to explain as much as it does,” said Rogers, who is also an affiliate at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the U. of. I. “What we ended up with was a way to bring a whole bunch of soft material behaviors together under the same physics umbrella. Previously, they’d been studied independently or maybe all been applied simultaneously, but never thought of as being physically or mathematically connected.”
This finding will allow researchers to explain precisely why some materials are more resistant to rapid yielding than others, a question that has eluded researchers for decades.
“This single parameter amazingly connects so many puzzling observations researchers have come across over the years,” Kamani said.
“This work marks the point at which we are approaching the crest of the hill in understanding soft materials behavior,” Rogers said. “We’ve always felt like each step takes us higher, but with no end in sight. Now we can see the top of the hill, and we are closer to the top and free to move forward in whatever direction we would like.”
The National Science Foundation supported this research.
The world around us is constantly being flash photographed by adaptive radar systems. From salt flats to mountains and everything in between, adaptive radar is used to detect, locate and track moving objects. Just because human eyes can’t see these ultra-high frequency (UHF) ranges doesn’t mean they’re not taking pictures.
Although adaptive radar systems have been around since World War II, they’ve hit a fundamental performance wall in the past couple of decades. But with the help of modern AI approaches and lessons learned from computer vision, researchers at Duke University have broken through that wall, and they want to bring everyone else in the field along with them.
In a new paper published July 16 in the journal IET Radar, Sonar & Navigation, Duke engineers show that using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) — a type of AI that revolutionized computer vision — can greatly enhance modern adaptive radar systems. And in a move that parallels the impetus of the computer vision boom, they have released a large dataset of digital landscapes for other AI researchers to build on their work.
“Classical radar methods are very good, but they aren’t good enough to meet industry demands for products such as autonomous vehicles,” said Shyam Venkatasubramanian, a graduate research assistant working in the lab of Vahid Tarokh, the Rhodes Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke. “We’re working to bring AI into the adaptive radar space to tackle problems like object detection, localization and tracking that industry needs solved.”
At its most basic level, radar is not difficult to understand. A pulse of high-frequency radio waves is broadcast, and an antenna gathers data from any waves that bounce back. As technology has advanced, however, so too have the concepts used by modern radar systems. With the ability to shape and direct signals, process multiple contacts at once, and filter out background noise, the technology has come a long way in the past century.
But radar has come just about as far as it can using these techniques alone. Adaptive radar systems still struggle to accurately localize and track moving objects, especially in complex environments like mountainous terrain.
To move adaptive radar into the age of AI, Venkatasubramanian and Tarokh were inspired by the history of computer vision. In 2010, researchers at Stanford University released an enormous image database consisting of over 14 million annotated images called ImageNet. Researchers around the world used ImageNet to test and compare new AI approaches that became industry standard.
In the new paper, Venkatasubramanian and his collaborators show that using the same AI approaches greatly improves the performance of current adaptive radar systems.
“Our research parallels the research of the earliest users of AI in computer vision and the creators of ImageNet, but within adaptive radar,” Venkatasubramanian said. “Our proposed AI takes as input processed radar data and outputs a prediction of the target’s location through a simple architecture that can be thought of as paralleling the predecessor of most modern computer vision architectures.”
While the group has yet to test their methods in the field, they benchmarked their AI’s performance on a modeling and simulation tool called RFView®, which gains its accuracy by incorporating the Earth’s topography and terrain into its modeling toolbox. Then, continuing in the footsteps of computer vision, they created 100 airborne radar scenarios based on landscapes from across the contiguous United States and released it as an open-source asset called “RASPNet.”
This is a valuable asset, as only a handful of teams have access to RFView®. The researchers, however, received special permission from the creators of RFView® to build the dataset — which contains more than 16 terabytes of data built over the course of several months — and make it publicly available.
“I am delighted that this groundbreaking work has been published, and particularly that the associated data is being made available in the RASPNet repository,” said Hugh Griffiths, Fellow Royal Academy of Engineering, Fellow IEEE, Fellow IET, OBE, and the THALES/Royal Academy Chair of RF Sensors at University College London, who was not involved with the work. “This will undoubtedly stimulate further work in this important area, and ensure that the results can readily be compared with each other.”
The scenarios included were handpicked by radar and machine learning experts and have a wide range of geographical complexity. On the easiest side for adaptive radar systems to handle is the Bonneville Salt Flats, while the hardest is Mount Rainier. Venkatasubramanian and his group hope that others will take their ideas and dataset and build even better AI approaches.
For example, in a previous paper, Venkatasubramanian showed that an AI tailored to a specific geographical location could achieve up to a seven-fold improvement in localizing objects over classical methods. If an AI could select a scenario on which it had already been trained that is similar to its current environment, it should substantially improve in performance.
“We think this will have a really big impact on the adaptive radar community,” Venkatasubramanian said. “As we move forward and continue adding capabilities to the dataset, we want to provide the community with everything it needs to push the field forward into using AI.”
This work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-21-1-0235, 20RYCORO51, 20RYCOR052).
