People are rushing to trade in their iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus devices before the iPhone X releases on Nov. 3. Decluttr, a site that buys electronics from consumers, said iPhone 8 trade-ins are "unusually high" as Apple gears up to launch the 10th anniversary device. Decluttr said it has seen more trade-ins of the 8 and 8 Plus received than any other previous new iPhone launched. The iPhone 8 was released last month and was revealed alongside the iPhone X. The iPhone X has more features than the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, like the Face ID and Animoji.

Cambit pieces can be assembled to create a dozen different imaging systems. The cameras in our phones and tablets have turned us all into avid photographers, regularly using them to capture special moments and document our lives. One notable feature of camera phones is they are compact and fully automatic, enabling us to point and shoot without having to adjust any settings. However, when we need to capture photos of high aesthetic quality, we resort to more sophisticated DSLR cameras in which a variety of lenses and flashes can be used interchangeably. This flexibility is important for spanning the entire range of real-world imaging scenarios, while enabling us to be more creative. Many developers have sought to make these cameras even more flexible through both hardware and software.

Diversity was a central theme in the ACM SIGIR 2017 held in Shinjuku Ward in Tokyo, Japan. Fuji, a view of Shinjuku sky-scrapers, including the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (Office), as seen from Keio Plaza the conference hotel, and fireworks celebrating the 40th anniversary. The colorfulness of the fireworks and the circles within and enclosing the logo represent diversity and inclusion." SIGIR 2017 featured a session on Women in IR (Information Retrieval) organized by Laura Dietz of the University of New Hampshire on the first day, just before the welcome party. A week before the conference, I received an email from the secretary of the session, Maram Hasanain, a graduate student in computer science (CS) at Qatar University, asking if I would like to prepare a one-minute introduction of myself for the session. I was so overwhelmed by her beautifully written e-mail, and the excitement of a first-time contact with someone from Qatar, that I immediately accepted her invitation.

Consider the job of an intelligence analyst--someone who has to sift through vast amounts of information and figure out the bigger narrative. The raw data this hypothetical analyst looks at could be anything from a report on the ground, to government statements, to items in the local media. The analyst's job--looking at data, synthesizing it in a report--is rich territory for artificial intelligence to help out, according to a new company called Primer. Primer has developed an AI system that's in part intended to augment the job of an intelligence analyst at a spy agency. Intelligence isn't the only field they're working in--their partners include Walmart and a sovereign wealth fund in Singapore--but it's perhaps the most intriguing.

While Samsung and Apple are busy preparing their Amazon Echo rivals, LG has launched a new Bluetooth speaker that banks on levitating technology to capture the attention of consumers. The LG PJ9 is a portable speaker that utilizes magnetic technology to keep it floating in the air for hours, and it is now available in the electronics company's home country. On Tuesday, LG officially launched the PJ9 Bluetooth speaker in South Korea, just two months after the product made its debut in the U.K. back in August. The company proudly shared that what makes its speaker noteworthy is the 360 degrees audio it provides thanks to its unique design and floating technology. LG says the PJ9 is capable of delivering good sound quality because the speaker itself is floating above the Woofer Station, as per Korea Herald. LG's Bluetooth speaker has two components: an egg-shaped speaker and a large docking base, which works as a subwoofer and charger.

The Intel Nervana AI Academy for Students program was created to work collaboratively with students at innovative schools and universities doing great work in the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence space. I had the opportunity to get to know Intel Student Ambassador Karandeep Singh Dhillon and learn about how he became interested in deep learning and how he wants to make it easy for anyone to understand and apply to real-life situations. Tell us about your background and what got you started in technology. My parents bought me a computer when I was in 6th grade and by the time I was in 8th grade would make small Bash programs to help me automate tasks. I loved to create those small programs and I decided that I wanted to learn more and would take Computer Science courses for my undergraduate degree.

But the robo-dogs were discontinued in 2005 after increased competition in the Asian markets led to massive cost cutting. Now, Sony is set to release a new robot dog which could allow users to control home appliances, in a similar way to Amazon's Echo. Sony launched its artificial intelligence based robotic dog named Aibo in 1999. The robot's personality was shaped by its interactions with its owner and surroundings. The initial ERS-110 Aibo model hardware included a 64-bit RISC processor, 16 megabytes of RAM, sensors (touch, camera, range-finder, microphone, acceleration, angular velocity), a speaker and actuators (legs, neck, mouth, tail).

For the past 12 months, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has been slurping up video feeds, social media data, traffic information and other data from Hangzhou city for its City Brain project. The stated goal was to improve life in Hangzhou by letting artificial intelligence process this data and use it to control aspects of urban life. It seems to have worked. The trial has been so successful that the company is now packaging the system for export to other places in China – and eventually the rest of the world. Using AI to optimise Hangzhou has had many positive effects.

We've discussed some of Sony's absurdly priced endeavors recently -- the absurdly priced Xperia Touch projector comes to mind -- and now here is another one. The Xperia Hello, a robotic assistant designed to rival Amazon's Alexa speakers, is now available for preorder in Japan. The price is advertised as 149,880 yen at Sony Stores, which is equivalent to about $1,300. Devices will ship starting November 18th. What do all those dollars buy you with the Xperia Hello?

Devices like Amazon's Echo and Google Home can usually deal with requests from a lone person, but like us they struggle in situations such as a noisy cocktail party, where several people are speaking at once. Now an AI that is able to separate the voices of multiple speakers in real time promises to give automatic speech recognition a big boost, and could soon find its way into an elevator near you. The technology, developed by researchers at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was demonstrated in public for the first time at this month's Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies show in Tokyo. It uses a machine learning technique the team calls "deep clustering" to identifies unique features in the "voiceprint" of multiple speakers. It then groups the distinct features from each speaker's voice together, allowing it to disentangle multiple voices and then reconstruct what each person was saying.