When viewed on a cosmic scale, humanity lives on a tiny grain of sand floating in an unimaginably-deep ocean. Huge expanses of space separate even the closest stars, ensuring that, should any sufficiently intelligent life form want to spread across the galaxy, it would take a momentous effort to launch across the interstellar seas. As we look toward the stars, hoping that we may visit them some day, many would argue that interstellar travel is impossible. After all, the nearest-known star system is over 4 light-years away. Let's think about that for a moment: It takes light 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the sun's surface to our planet's atmosphere.

This paper addresses the problem of localizing audio sources using binaural measurements. We propose a supervised formulation that simultaneously localizes multiple sources at different locations. The approach is intrinsically efficient because, contrary to prior work, it relies neither on source separation, nor on monaural segregation. The method starts with a training stage that establishes a locally-linear Gaussian regression model between the directional coordinates of all the sources and the auditory features extracted from binaural measurements. While fixed-length wide-spectrum sounds (white noise) are used for training to reliably estimate the model parameters, we show that the testing (localization) can be extended to variable-length sparse-spectrum sounds (such as speech), thus enabling a wide range of realistic applications. Indeed, we demonstrate that the method can be used for audio-visual fusion, namely to map speech signals onto images and hence to spatially align the audio and visual modalities, thus enabling to discriminate between speaking and non-speaking faces. We release a novel corpus of real-room recordings that allow quantitative evaluation of the co-localization method in the presence of one or two sound sources. Experiments demonstrate increased accuracy and speed relative to several state-of-the-art methods.

New lip-reading technology developed at the University of East Anglia could help in solving crimes and provide communication assistance for people with hearing and speech impairments. The visual speech recognition technology, created by Helen L. Bear, PhD, and Prof Richard Harvey of UEA's School of Computing Sciences, can be applied "any place where the audio isn't good enough to determine what people are saying," Bear said. Those include criminal investigations, entertainment, and especially where are there are high levels of noise, such as in cars or aircraft cockpits, she said. Bear said unique problems with determining speech arise when sound isn't available -- such as on video footage -- or if the audio is inadequate and there aren't clues to give the context of a conversation. The sounds '/p/,' '/b/,' and '/m/' all look similar on the lips, but now the machine lip-reading classification technology can differentiate between the sounds for a more accurate translation.

R2-D2 may have played a part in defeating the Empire in Star Wars, but it didn't have a phone and its dance skills were terrible. However, soon you could call your friends on your very own droid that's small enough to fit in a backpack. Sharp showed off the prototype earlier this year - but today confirmed it will start selling it in Japan - for 1800. The gadget is an alternative to a conventional smartphone and has its own SIM card to make calls without having to be linked to a mainstream device. Sharp's robot contains a SIM card so it can make calls.

Mark Zuckerberg wants to overtake Elon Musk to become the real-world version of Marvel superhero Tony Stark. The billionaire Facebook founder has expressed his desire (in a Facebook post, of course) to spend 2016 building an artificially intelligent assistant to help run his life at home and work – and directly compared it to Jarvis, the AI companion developed by Stark in the Iron Man films. Previous aims have included spending a year eating only meat from animals he killed himself in 2011, to read two books a month in 2015, and to learn Mandarin in a year in 2010. And when he declares one of the challenges, he goes hard on it: in October last year, he showed off his language abilities, delivering a 20-minute speech to students at Beijing's Tsinghua University entirely in Mandarin. Zuckerberg will start the project by "exploring what technology is already out there". Existing home-automation tools from companies such as Google's Nest, Phillips and Samsung all allow a fairly high level of control of a "smart home", and can be paired with voice control software, including that from Apple, Amazon and Massachusetts-based specialists Nuance.

Unexpected convergent consequences…this is what happens when eight different exponential technologies all explode onto the scene at once. This post (the second of seven) is a look at artificial intelligence. Future posts will look at other tech areas. An expert might be reasonably good at predicting the growth of a single exponential technology (e.g., the Internet of Things), but try to predict the future when A.I., robotics, VR, synthetic biology and computation are all doubling, morphing and recombining. You have a very exciting (read: unpredictable) future. This year at my Abundance 360 Summit I decided to explore this concept in sessions I called "Convergence Catalyzers." For each technology, I brought in an industry expert to identify their Top 5 Recent Breakthroughs (2012-2015) and their Top 5 Anticipated Breakthroughs (2016-2018). Then, we explored the patterns that emerged. At A360 this year, my expert on AI was Stephen Gold, the CMO and VP of Business Development and Partner Programs at IBM Watson.

Secretive electric car company Faraday Future hopes to have its first vehicles rolling off the assembly line in 2018. The announcement was made as officials marked the start of construction on a planned 1 billion Las Vegas-area production plant, not far from rival Tesla's Gigafactory. While it's clear the company plans to create an electric car, a prototype has yet to be unveiled and there are no specifics yet on what kinds of cars it might manufacture. The company, backed by Chinese entrepreneur Jia Yueting, currently has about 700 employees in the U.S. It unveiled a concept car in January, but hasn't put a vehicle on the market. Faraday Future puts the size of the Apex Industrial Park facility at 3 million square feet, or nearly the size of the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center close to the Las Vegas Strip.

It is the luxury speedboat that could leave you shaken, but not stirred. Luxury car maker Aston Martin, the supplier of James Bond's cars, has revealed the design for its first foray onto water. The firm hopes to produce a series of powerboats, which is boasts will be as luxurious and hi-tech as its cars. The AM37 yacht will enter production later this year, and will be launched in Monaco. There will be two captains chairs and a wrap-around bench set to accommodate 8 of your friends to take along for the journey.

There are companies out there working fast and furious to develop artificial intelligence in computers and what will that mean for our human society? Will developers develop themselves out of a job? Can computer artificial intelligence evoke human emotion and move people to buy products and services? If so, I am out of a job. In all seriousness, it will be interesting to see the applications and if it will be used to assist the human race, or to replace it.

Chinese internet giant Alibaba has built artificial intelligence that it hopes will be able to correctly predict the outcome of reality TV talent show I'm a Singer. According to Tech in Asia, Alibaba's technology uses performance information such as "voice pitch and energy," and maps that against factors such as song choice and real-time audience response. The results will be shown online, pitching the technology, named'Ai', against the judges as the show is aired. The experiment is being held as a "proof-of-concept" for the technology, with Alibaba suggesting that it'll be used for purposes closer to its core business of online retail in the future. It's not the only internet company to be testing new technology on reality TV shows in Asia.