I'll be honest: Even though I'm supposed to be a technology expert, I've long resisted using Siri and my smartphone's voice commands. All the errors were frustrating and often seemed to eat up more time than just typing in commands and opening up apps manually. These days, though, I've found myself using Siri more often. Speech recognition has gotten a lot better, and Siri has gotten a lot smarter and more powerful. You can do virtually anything via your phone's voice commands, from posting to Twitter to finding the best pizza pie to figuring out just how deep 20,000 leagues really is.

Jody Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 together with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines for their central role in establishing the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. The US-based political activist is known across the world for her efforts to enhance understandings of security and related issues in the world today. She is also the chair of the Noble Women's Initiative that she founded in 2006 together with five other women Nobel Peace laureates. She, along with 20 of her fellow Nobel Peace laureates have called for a preemptive ban on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS)--weapons that could operate without human supervision once activated even in matters of killing human beings. The UN's Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) held their third informal government's meet in Geneva from 11-15 April.

The Pentagon's once-secret submarine drones programme is being discussed in the open, with US defence secretary Ashton Carter hinting at their potential use in the disputed South China Sea. Surveillance is the initial function of these unmanned, undersea vehicles, which can operate in shallow water'where manned submarines cannot'. There are also plans to create a'Russian doll' or'mother' sub, which could release a number of far smaller drones to be mines, trackers or missile launchers, reports the Financial Times. The US military hopes the drone development would deter China from dominating the South China Sea. The countries of the South China Sea have long claimed rights to disputed international waters, but as its economic strength has grown, an increasingly confident China has built military bases on artificial islands and militarized one of the disputed Paracel Islands.

Jacob Katuva used to get up at dawn to cycle 12 miles from his village to collect water with his uncles and cousins when he was growing up in Kenya. Now he is part of a research team at the University of Oxford using cloud computing and mobile sensors to monitor water wells and help ensure that thousands of villages in rural Africa and Asia have a safe, secure supply of water. The time spent finding and carrying water, if local wells are not reliable, steals precious time from farming, making a living or going to school. It can even force people to revert to unsanitary water sources shared with animals. Water issues are tied to a cycle of poverty.

Chinese robotics researchers have created a humanoid robot named Jia Jia, who can move her arms, make different facial expressions, and respond to human conversation. Jia Jia, the product of three years' work by a team at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, greeted the assembled audience at her unveiling by saying: "Hello everyone, I'm Jia Jia. Jia Jia's limited motion and stilted speech shouldn't leave anyone in any doubt she's a robot. However, she looks fairly realistic, with a flexible plastic face, long flowing brown hair, and an eye-catching gold dress. According to the team's director, Chen Xiaoping, particular attention was paid to her eye movements and lip synchronisation.

It's an alt-history sci-fi game (designed from the ground up for virtual reality) where Kennedy was never assassinated and NASA and Russia established a permanent moon base before expanding to the outer reaches of our solar system. In Mindfield's Pollen, you explore the Saturnian satellite Titan, sleuthing for clues and solving puzzles to learn what hides beneath the moon's surface.

Amazon hasn't announced any plans to make its own smartwatch, but a new Indiegogo campaign is promising the next-best thing. Much like the Amazon Echo connected speaker, CoWatch will tap into Amazon's voice services for controlling smart home devices, ordering rides from Uber, adding things to your shopping list, and asking for traffic and weather reports, among other uses. There's no mention of any official involvement from Amazon, but that may not be necessary given that Alexa is now available to third-party hardware makers. Alexa aside, the CoWatch is fairly standard smartwatch fare, using Bluetooth to pair with either an Android phone or iPhone. It has a round, always-on Super AMOLED display, stainless steel and zirconia ceramic body, step counter, heart rate sensor, and water resistance.

Deep learning machines could help decode ISIS as a network and develop strategy for defeat. The use of deep learning machines could help the Pentagon decode the structure of ISIS as a network and allow for a more precisely, developed strategy for its defeat, according to Pentagon Deputy Secretary Robert Work. He was making the case for using artificial intelligence (A.I.) for open-source data crunching, Inverse.com "We are absolutely certain that the use of deep-learning machines is going to allow us to have a better understanding of ISIL as a network and better understanding about how to target it precisely and lead to its defeat," said Secretary Work, according to DoD's website. Speaking at an event organized by the Washington Post, Work said he had his epiphany while watching a Silicon Valley tech company demonstrate "a machine that took in data from Twitter, Instagram, and many other public sources to show the July 2014 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down in real time."

Police are investigating a reported mid-air collision between a drone and a British Airways jet from Geneva that was approaching London's Heathrow Airport. BA said the Airbus A320 was not damaged when the object hit the nose of the plane, which landed safely with no injuries reported to anyone on board. Since April last year there have been 25 near misses between aircraft and drones, figures from the UK Airprox Board suggest. A dozen of these were denoted "Class A" which indicates there was a serious risk of collision. The Heathrow incident comes only weeks after the British Airline Pilots Association called for rules governing the use of drones to be enforced more strictly.

Gaza City - Majd Oweida arrived at the Erez crossing on February 23, en route to the occupied West Bank, in the hope of fulfilling a lifelong dream to organise a programme that introduces talented Palestinians to the world. This was to be the first time that Majd, a 23-year-old electrical engineer, would set foot in a part of Palestine outside the electrified fence surrounding the besieged Gaza Strip. Excited, he posted a selfie to Facebook, in which he held up his Israeli-issued entry permit. But as soon as he entered the Israeli zone of the Erez crossing terminal, Majd's trip took an unexpected turn. His colleagues, including his brother Amjad, lost contact with him for hours. Suspecting he was being subjected to a routine interrogation, they continued to wait after they reached the Israeli side of the crossing.