For the next installment of our interview series with leaders who are transforming the role of the chief human resource officer, David Reimer, the CEO of Merryck & Co. Americas, and I sat down recently with Diane Gherson of IBM. Her insights and perspectives provide a clear window into how technology is fundamentally changing the HR function. Stay tuned for more interviews with other HR leaders. What are your thoughts on the phrase "strategic HR?" What does it mean to you? A. In the old days, strategic meant taking the business strategy and translating that into what it meant for the various functional groups you might have in HR, and to a certain extent, how you would allocate your resources. But then it became much more about actually sitting at the strategy table and focusing more on, given our talent, the things that will give us a competitive advantage.

AI robots and self-driving cars might steal the headlines, but the next big leap in technology will be advances in voice services, according to Google's head of search, Ben Gomes, who says that a better understanding of common language is crucial to the future of the internet. "Speech recognition and the understanding of language is core to the future of search and information," said Gomes . "But there are lots of hard problems such as understanding how a reference works, understanding what'he', 'she' or'it' refers to in a sentence. It's not at all a trivial problem to solve in language and that's just one of the millions of problems to solve in language." Gomes was speaking to the Guardian ahead of Google's 20th anniversary on 24 September, more than seven years after Google launched its first voice service as simple speech-to-text for search. Now built into Google's search and its AI voice assistant which is embedded in billions of smartphones around the globe, voice recognition has become essential in developing countries with low literacy rates.

Despite being a slow-moving disaster, famine is notoriously difficult to predict. The reason for this, experts say, is that severe food shortages are hardly ever about food supply alone. A famine might be triggered by drought or some other climatic interference in crop production, but other powerful forces usually bring the scourge to full bloom: food price inflation, political instability, military conflict and even too much rain. "The root cause of famine is extremely complex," said Franck Bousquet, senior director of the World Bank Fragility, Conflict, and Violence Group (FCV). "Usually, the poorest and most vulnerable are the most affected and the least able to cope with shocks that other populations can absorb. Out of the last 10 major famines, nine have resulted from conflict and war."

Physically-based overland flow models are computationally demanding, hindering their use for real-time applications. Therefore, the development of fast (and reasonably accurate) overland flow models is needed if they are to be used to support flood mitigation decision making. In this study, we investigate the potential of Self-Organizing Maps to rapidly generate water depth and flood extent results. To conduct the study, we developed a flood-simulation specific SOM, using cellular automata flood model results and a synthetic DEM and inflow hydrograph. The preliminary results showed that water depth and flood extent results produced by the SOM are reasonably accurate and obtained in a very short period of time. Based on this, it seems that SOMs have the potential to provide critical flood information to support real-time flood mitigation decisions. The findings presented would however require further investigations to obtain general conclusions; these further investigations may include the consideration of real terrain representations, real water supply networks and realistic inflows from pipe bursts.

I was lucky to be selected to the Square Kilometre Array Big Data Africa School funded by the SKA and the Development of Africa With Radio Astronomy (DARA). It was held in Cape Town, South Africa. Big Data is a cloudy idea. Easy to know when you have it, hard to describe. I like thinking of it as data that is sufficiently large such that it is difficult to draw information from it "easily".

AI assists organisations in reducing operational costs, boosting user experience, elevating efficiency and cultivating revenue. But it also creates a number of security challenges for personal data and forms many ethical dilemmas for organisations. Such challenges for information security professionals mean re-calibration of approaches to data security, data classification and privacy. For regulators, this is translated to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). AI's lifeline is data, and one source of data is the Internet of Things (IoT), which feeds by personal data.

I can't profess to fully understand all of the complexities of localizing services for various languages, nuances, accents and dialects where voice recognition is concerned. However, with Amazon's Alexa ambitions ramping up after its hardware event Thursday, it's worth questioning why the voice assistant's language support is so abysmal. Almost four years after launching, Alexa supports English, French, German and Japanese, with Italian and Spanish on the way. Compare that with Siri, which, within a year of launch, supported all of the above languages, along with Korean, Mandarin and Cantonese -- and some languages were tuned for local differences by that point, too. Apple's voice assistant is now available in 21 languages.

In many parts of the world, mosquitoes are more than just a campsite nuisance -- they carry that cause an estimated 725,000 deaths per year. On Singapore, the effect isn't so terrible -- some mosquitoes carry dengue fever, but it affects less than a dozen people per year. But because it's a city and an island, Singapore is the perfect testing ground to see how easy it might be to get rid of the disease-carrying bugs, all sans gene editing. That's what Alphabet-owned healthcare company Verily hopes to do. The company, along with Singapore's environmental agency, plans to release male mosquitoes that carry Wolbachia, a naturally-occurring bacteria that reduces the bugs' ability to transmit disease and prevents their eggs from hatching.

Listen to the two one after another. Music anymore is digitally recorded and are gust a bunch of 1s and 0s.

INRIX chose its criteria based on a future business model where an autonomous truck powered by electric batteries or diesel-hybrid motors would cross long highway miles and then be taken over by people who would pilot the rigs through crowded cities to the final loading dock or port, said Avery Ash, INRIX's autonomous vehicle director.