That's what I find myself asking my Amazon Echo voice-activated device more often than any other -- not aloud but on the inside, as the comedian Bobby Collins might say, because you don't really want a robotic presence in your house doubting your commitment to your mutual relationship. Alexa, you might know, is the female persona inhabiting the Echo, a Wi-Fi-enabled black cylinder about the size of a Pringles can, which you prime to answer your questions or perform services by invoking her name. I was given a $179 Echo last year as a gift, and a $49 Echo Dot -- a squashed down version endowed with a lousier speaker but equipped with Bluetooth capability -- as another gift for Father's Day. According to Amazon PR, these devices have ranked among the firm's most popular items. With Christmas approaching, Amazon has been pushing the Dot mercilessly as a gift item, even bundling it in six-packs.

Coalition formation typically involves the coming together of multiple, heterogeneous, agents to achieve both their individual and collective goals. In this paper, we focus on a special case of coalition formation known as Graph-Constrained Coalition Formation (GCCF) whereby a network connecting the agents constrains the formation of coalitions. We focus on this type of problem given that in many real-world applications, agents may be connected by a communication network or only trust certain peers in their social network. We propose a novel representation of this problem based on the concept of edge contraction, which allows us to model the search space induced by the GCCF problem as a rooted tree. Then, we propose an anytime solution algorithm (CFSS), which is particularly efficient when applied to a general class of characteristic functions called $m+a$ functions. Moreover, we show how CFSS can be efficiently parallelised to solve GCCF using a non-redundant partition of the search space. We benchmark CFSS on both synthetic and realistic scenarios, using a real-world dataset consisting of the energy consumption of a large number of households in the UK. Our results show that, in the best case, the serial version of CFSS is 4 orders of magnitude faster than the state of the art, while the parallel version is 9.44 times faster than the serial version on a 12-core machine. Moreover, CFSS is the first approach to provide anytime approximate solutions with quality guarantees for very large systems of agents (i.e., with more than 2700 agents).

Maps of infectious disease---charting spatial variations in the force of infection, degree of endemicity, and the burden on human health---provide an essential evidence base to support planning towards global health targets. Contemporary disease mapping efforts have embraced statistical modelling approaches to properly acknowledge uncertainties in both the available measurements and their spatial interpolation. The most common such approach is that of Gaussian process regression, a mathematical framework comprised of two components: a mean function harnessing the predictive power of multiple independent variables, and a covariance function yielding spatio-temporal shrinkage against residual variation from the mean. Though many techniques have been developed to improve the flexibility and fitting of the covariance function, models for the mean function have typically been restricted to simple linear terms. For infectious diseases, known to be driven by complex interactions between environmental and socio-economic factors, improved modelling of the mean function can greatly boost predictive power. Here we present an ensemble approach based on stacked generalisation that allows for multiple, non-linear algorithmic mean functions to be jointly embedded within the Gaussian process framework. We apply this method to mapping Plasmodium falciparum prevalence data in Sub-Saharan Africa and show that the generalised ensemble approach markedly out-performs any individual method.

Meet SALTO: a powerful new wall-jumping robot built by researchers at UC Berkeley. According to SALTO's makers, the diminutive, one-legged hopper not only has the "highest robotic vertical jumping agility ever recorded," but also the ability to link together multiple jumps in quick succession. SALTO stands for saltatorial locomotion on terrain obstacles, and the motion of the mechanical jumping leg was modeled after galagos -- small jumping primates native to Africa that have stretchy tendons in their legs that allow them to store energy and jump with more force than if they only used their leg muscles alone. The galago is so agile not only because it can make a big leap, but also because it can essentially wind up its legs into a crouched position in mid-flight and immediately leap again upon landing. At just 100 grams and 26 centimeters (10.2 inches) tall when fully extended, SALTO can jump a little bit more than one meter (3.3 feet) high in a single leap.

Microsoft to turn millions of PCs and tablets into smart'home hubs' to take on Amazon's Echo and Google's Home Google's $130 Home speaker went on sale earlier this month Amazon's Alexa has been a huge hit with 5.1m sold Both can do everything from control lights to answer questions Microsoft plans to take them on with a new Home Hub app for Windows PCs Google's $130 Home speaker went on sale earlier this month Amazon's Alexa has been a huge hit with 5.1m sold The app will turn the millions of Windows PCs, laptops and tablets already in homes into a'home hub' that can do everything from control lights to answer questions. Has YOUR Google account been hacked? Researchers say... Apple goes Red for World AIDS day as firm is revealed to... Britain traded with the Middle East 1,300 years ago: Bitumen... The original human ancestor'Lucy' was a tree climbing... Has YOUR Google account been hacked? Researchers say... Apple goes Red for World AIDS day as firm is revealed to... Britain traded with the Middle East 1,300 years ago: Bitumen...

Ron Fearing's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab at UC Berkeley is famous for its stable of bite-sized bio-inspired robots, and Duncan Haldane is responsible for a whole bunch of them. He's worked on running robots, robots with wings, robots with tails, and even robots with hairs, in case that's your thing. What Haldane and the other members of the lab are especially good at is looking to some of the most talented and capable animals for inspiration in their robotic designs. One of most talented and capable (and cutest) jumping animals is a fluffy little thing called a galago, or bushbaby. They live in Africa, weigh just a few kilos, and can leap tall (nearly two meter) bushes in a single bound.

HAL 9000, the sentient computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey, offers an ominous glimpse of a future in which machines endowed with artificial intelligence reject human authority. After taking control of a spacecraft and killing most of the crew, HAL responds to a returning astronaut's order to open the ship's pod bay door in an eerily calm voice: "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." In the recent science-fiction thriller Ex Machina, the seductive humanoid Ava tricks a hapless young man into helping her destroy her creator, Nathan. Her machinations lend credence to Nathan's dark prediction: "One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction."

President Obama is making a push for transparency in his last days in office before handing off the vast counter-terrorism apparatus he has built to President-elect Donald Trump, starting with a major address Tuesday defending his record on national security. Obama's speech, at the U.S. military's Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., will also explain the legal and policy underpinnings that his administration has established over eight years in deciding whether and how to detain, interrogate or kill suspected terrorists. The White House released some details on its legal rationale ahead of the speech. The efforts at transparency were striking for an administration criticized for being secretive by news and watchdog organizations; Obama has used the Espionage Act more times than all other U.S. presidents combined to investigate leaks of government information. The bid for openness also served to make public additional facts that can be used to hold the Trump administration accountable, though the White House downplayed any message to the president-elect.

The United Nations forecasts that the global population will rise from 7.3 billion to nearly 10 billion by 2050, a big number that often prompts warnings about overpopulation. Some have come from neo-Malthusians, who fear that population growth will outstrip the food supply, leaving a hungry planet. Others appear in the tirades of anti-immigrant populists, invoking the specter of a rising tide of humanity as cause to slam borders shut. Still others inspire a chorus of neo-Luddites, who fear that the "rise of the robots" is rapidly making human workers obsolete, a threat all the more alarming if the human population is exploding. They may be the one thing that can protect the global economy from the dangers that lie ahead.

Former Alaska Airlines CIO Veresh Sita has joined Emaar Properties as its chief digital officer, a role in which he will oversee a technology transformation intended to drive growth for the Dubai-based global real estate developer. His core focus is incorporating artificial intelligence, machine learning and internet of things (IoT) into sophisticated properties, or "digital smart cities," Sita says. Emaar Properties is one of the largest real estate developers in the United Arab Emirates and is renowned for building and owning both the tallest building and largest mall in the world. With six business segments and 60 companies, Emaar has a presence in 36 markets across the Middle East, North Africa, Pan-Asia, Europe and North America. One of its key current projects, Dubai Creek Harbour, is expected to be among the most digitally sophisticated housing developments when it's completed in 2018.