Coordinating with public health officials, offering students laptops and showing them how to connect, creating Wi-Fi hubs for neighborhoods that lack them, developing new systems for distributing school lunches and offering in-person learning hubs for students whose parents were essential workers are among the many specific recommendations included in a new book about K-12 learning during a pandemic. 

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has successfully demonstrated 2 Tbit/s Free-Space Optical (FSO) communication using small optical communication terminals that can be mounted on satellites and HAPS, marking a world first for this technology.

This experiment involved horizontal free-space optical communication between two types of small portable optical terminals developed by NICT: a high-performance FX (Full Transceiver) installed at NICT Headquarters (Koganei, Tokyo) and a simplified ST (Simple Transponder) installed at an experimental site 7.4 km away (Chofu, Tokyo). Despite the difficult conditions of an urban environment with atmospheric turbulence that disrupts laser beams, the system maintained a stable total communication speed of 2 Tbit/s via Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) transmission of 5 channels (400 Gbit/s each). This is the first time in the world that terabit-class communication has been realized using terminals miniaturized enough to be mounted on satellites or HAPS.

Moving forward, NICT plans to further miniaturize the terminals for implementation onboard a 6U CubeSat. NICT aims to conduct free-space optical communication demonstrations at speeds of up to 10 Gbit/s between a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite (altitude approx. 600 km) and the ground in 2026, and between a satellite and HAPS in 2027. Through these experiments, NICT will demonstrate compact, ultra-high-speed data communication capabilities and pave the way for the realization of Beyond 5G/6G Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN).

Throughout the naval forces and across U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), the need to advance national defense applications of artificial intelligence is profound. And the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) continues to answer the call. Announced today, NPS’ brand new Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (MSAI) degree will confer the advanced knowledge, skills, and practices necessary to develop, assess, and deploy AI for the U.S. Navy, the joint force and our allied and partner militaries. Graduates through the new program will be prepared to lead AI integration within their communities and across the DOD.

An Osaka Metropolitan University-led research team conducted a review that examined the theoretical foundations of Artificial Superintelligence and explored how misaligned AI systems could optimize for wrong objectives, leading to patient harm and systemic failures.

Using satellite imagery and government data, researchers measured a 5 percent increase in voluntary, or non-subsidized, cover crop adoption by Arkansas farmers. Using data from 2013-2019, agricultural economists with the experiment station showed that cover crop adoption in Arkansas had the greatest association with a soybean-to-soybean cash crop rotation. The finding came out of research seeking to pinpoint how farmers were using cover crops and where, to help policymakers develop more targeted incentives for using cover crops.