During the three years I've spent researching and writing about shyness, one of the most common questions people ask is about the relationship between shyness and technology. Are the internet and the cellphone causing our social skills to atrophy? I often hear this from parents of shy teenagers, who are worried that their children are spending more time with their devices than with their peers. The shy aren't necessarily antisocial; they are just differently social. They learn to regulate their sociability and communicate in indirect or tangential ways.

Jonathan Lazar (jlazar@towson.edu) is a professor of computer and information sciences and director of the Undergraduate Program in Information Systems at Towson University, Towson, MD, and recipient of the SIGCHI 2016 Social Impact Award. Elizabeth Churchill (churchill@acm.org) is a director of user experience at Google, San Francisco, CA, and Secretary/Treasurer of ACM. Tovi Grossman (tovi.grossman@autodesk.com) is a distinguished research scientist in the User Interface Research Group at Autodesk Research, Toronto, Canada. Gerrit C. van der Veer (gerrit@acm.org) is an emeritus professor of multimedia and culture at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands, guest professor of human-media interaction at Twente University, Twente, the Netherlands, of human-computer and society at the Dutch Open University, Heerlen, Netherlands, of interaction design at the Dalian Maritime University, Dalian, China, and of animation and multimedia at the Lushun Academy of Fine Arts, Shenyang, China. Philippe Palanque (palanque@irit.fr) is a professor of computer science at Université Paul Sabatier Paul Sabatier – Toulouse III, France, and head of the Interactive Critical Systems research group of the IRIT laboratory, Toulouse, France. John "Scooter" Morris (scooter@cgl.ucsf.edu) is an adjunct professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California San Francisco and executive director of the Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization and Informatics, a U.S. National Institutes of Health Biomedical Technology Research Resource at the University of California San Francisco. Jennifer Mankoff (mankoff@cs.cmu.edu) is a professor in the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.

Peer review is the process by which experts in some discipline comment on the quality of the works of others in that discipline. Peer review of written works is firmly embedded in current academic research practice where it is positioned as the gateway process and quality control mechanism for submissions to conferences, journals, and funding bodies across a wide range of disciplines. It is probably safe to assume that peer review in some form will remain a cornerstone of academic practice for years to come, evidence-based criticisms of this process in computer science22,32,45 and other disciplines23,28 notwithstanding. While parts of the academic peer review process have been streamlined in the last few decades to take technological advances into account, there are many more opportunities for computational support that are not currently being exploited. The aim of this article is to identify such opportunities and describe a few early solutions for automating key stages in the established academic peer review process. When developing these solutions we have found it useful to build on our background in machine learning and artificial intelligence: in particular, we utilize a feature-based perspective in which the handcrafted features on which conventional peer review usually depends (for example, keywords) can be improved by feature weighting, selection, and construction (see Flach17 for a broader perspective on the role and importance of features in machine learning). Twenty-five years ago, at the start of our academic careers, submitting a paper to a conference was a fairly involved and time-consuming process that roughly went as follows: Once an author had produced the manuscript (in the original sense, that is, manually produced on a typewriter, possibly by someone from the university's pool of typists), he or she would make up to seven photocopies, stick all of them in a large envelope, and send them to the program chair of the conference, taking into account that international mail would take 3–5 days to arrive. On their end, the program chair would receive all those envelopes, allocate the papers to the various members of the program committee, and send them out for review by mail in another batch of big envelopes. Reviews would be completed by hand on paper and mailed back or brought to the program committee meeting. Finally, notifications and reviews would be sent back by the program chair to the authors by mail. Submissions to journals would follow a very similar process.

ACM has recognized 53 of its members as ACM Fellows for major contributions in areas including artificial intelligence, cryptography, computer architecture, high performance computing and programming languages. The achievements of the 2016 ACM Fellows are accelerating the digital revolution, and affect almost every aspect of how we live and work today. "As nearly 100,000 computing professionals are members of our association, to be selected to join the top one percent is truly an honor," explains ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. "Fellows are chosen by their peers and hail from leading universities, corporations and research labs throughout the world. Their inspiration, insights and dedication bring immeasurable benefits that improve lives and help drive the global economy."

A humanoid robot, named Aiko Chihira by its creators at Toshiba and Osaka University, at a 2015 trial in Tokyo's Mitsukoshi department store. Toshiba says it will incorporate speech recognition and synthesis into the robot by 2020. Machines that speak are nothing new. Siri has been answering questions from iPhone users since 2011, and text-to-voice programs have been around even longer. People with speaking disabilities--most famously, Stephen Hawking--have used computers to generate speech for decades.

Blizzard is legendary for supporting games well after they've left store shelves. Diablo II, for instance, got a patch last June, 16 years after the action RPG shipped. However, even a committed developer has its limits. The company has announced plans to end support for both Windows XP and Windows Vista across several games, including Diablo III, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft II and World of Warcraft. This will be a "staggered process," but it's a hard cutoff once a given title loses support -- it won't run until you upgrade.

Nowadays, almost every automaker possesses considerable resources to develop self-driving technology for cars, which is the next big step for the automotive industry. The market for autopilot technology is clearly huge, which is evident by an estimation, that approximately 100 million "connected" cars with the capacity of self-driving will be shipped in 2021. While most auto manufacturers try to invent their own solutions, they will be forced to collaborate with technology companies in fields of both software and hardware to bring self-driving cars to roads. Therefore, in this article I provide a list of the most promising publicly traded tech corporations which should be considered by investors who would like to try to profit from the development of autonomous driving. First of all, let us very briefly look at the technology.

Samsung will reportedly sell "refurbished" Galaxy Note 7 devices that were globally recalled last year after the phones were found to cause battery fires, Korean outlet Hankyung said. The refurbished devices will reportedly come with new cases and a smaller low-capacity battery. The new Note 7 battery will have a capacity between 3,000 and 3,200mAh, compared to its previous 3,500mAh battery. So far, the company has recovered 98 percent of the 3.6 million Note 7 phones sold worldwide. Out of the retrieved devices, 200,000 were used tested to identify the cause of the battery fires.

Last March I wrote about an early experiment using Google's Cloud Vision API to perform deep learning-powered geocoding of 20 million global news images. In that experiment I compiled 20 million photographs that had appeared in online news articles worldwide as monitored by the open data GDELT Project over a period of two months and ran them through Google's Vision API service, which applies state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms to visually analyze an image much as a human would. The API returns a wealth of data about each image, including a list of objects and activities it depicts, recognizable logos, OCR text recognition in almost 80 languages, levels of violence, an estimate of how "happy" or "sad" people in the photograph appear to be and even the precise location on earth the image appears to depict. It is that last category that is so fascinating when it comes to trying to understand the visual geography of the world's news media. One year later the GDELT Project has now processed more than a quarter billion news photographs from news outlets in almost every corner of the world through Google's API – what can we learn through this deep learning powered "visual geocoding" of the world's news imagery?

UPS has completed its first ever drone delivery in the US. The delivery firm used a lorry-mounted octocopter to dispatch a package to a blueberry farm outside Tampa, Florida. The drone launched itself off the lorry's retractable roof with the package in tow, travelling around a quarter of a mile to drop it off at a house before returning to the vehicle, which in the meantime had been driven to a different location. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.