Panasonic has started a test run of facilities installed at a microwave oven plant in the United Kingdom to allow the plant to run solely on renewable energy. Panasonic installed a system to generate power using green hydrogen, produced without causing carbon dioxide emissions. It is the world's first power generation system using pure hydrogen fuel cells that run on green hydrogen, according to the company. At the plant in Cardiff, Wales, operations powered solely by renewable energy will begin in March next year. Using hydrogen sourced in Wales, the power generation system combines 21 fuel cell generators, two lithium storage batteries and existing solar panels.

New biotech Antiverse has raised seed funding of £1.4 million ($2 million) to develop its artificial intelligence-based platform for discovering therapeutic antibodies. The Cardiff, Wales startup is combining machine learning and phage display techniques to model antibody-antigen binding and says it can cut the time it takes to develop a drug candidate. It's one of the few AI drug discovery companies operating in the antibody category, as most are focused on small molecules. Antiverse – which was co-founded in 2017 by engineers Murat Tunaboylu and Ben Holland – says it will use the cash injection to build a new laboratory in Cardiff and expand its technical team through recruitment of specialist machine learning engineers, laboratory scientists and structural biologists. Antiverse's platform uses next generation sequencing and AI to provide diverse antibody candidates for any given target, according to the company, which reckons its approach is quicker than existing antibody discovery methods which are effective but can be limited and costly.

A close-up of a police facial recognition camera used in Cardiff, Wales. Since 2017, police in the UK have been testing live, or real-time, facial recognition in public places to try to identify criminals. The legality of these trials has been widely questioned by privacy and human rights campaigners, who just won a landmark case that could have a lasting impact on how police use the technology in the future. In a ruling Tuesday, the UK Court of Appeal said South Wales Police had been using the technology unlawfully, which amounted to a violation of human rights. In a case brought by civil liberties campaigner Ed Bridges and supported by human rights group Liberty, three senior judges ruled that the South Wales Police had violated Bridges' right to privacy under the European Convention of Human Rights.

The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), finished about two weeks ago in Cardiff, UK, is one of the top conferences in computer vision & pattern recognition with a competitive acceptance rate of 28%. Compared to others, it's a small event, so you have plenty of time to walk around posters and talk to presenters one-on-one, which I found really nice. I presented a poster on Image Classification with Hierarchical Multigraph Networks on which I mainly worked during my internship at SRI International under the supervision of Xiao Lin, Mohamed Amer (homepage) and my PhD advisor Graham Taylor. In the paper, we basically try to answer the question "Can we do better than Convolutional Neural Networks?". Here I discuss this question and support my arguments by results.

Proceedings of the BMVC 2019 Workshop on Interpretable and Explainable Machine Vision, Cardiff, UK, September 12, 2019.

In one of the first lawsuits to address the use of live facial recognition technology by governments, a British court ruled on Wednesday that police use of the systems is acceptable and does not violate privacy and human rights. The case has been closely watched by law enforcement agencies, privacy groups and government officials because there is little legal precedent concerning the use of cameras in public spaces that scan people's faces in real time and attempt to identify them from photo databases of criminal suspects. While the technology has advanced quickly, with many companies building systems that can be used by police departments, laws and regulations have been slower to develop. The High Court dismissed the case brought by Ed Bridges, a resident of Cardiff, Wales, who said his rights were violated by the use of facial recognition by the South Wales Police. Mr. Bridges claimed that he had been recorded without permission on at least two occasions -- once while shopping and again while attending a political rally.

A man from Cardiff, UK, says the police breached his human rights when they used facial recognition technology, but today a court ruled that the police's actions were lawful. That is, however, hardly the end of the matter. South Wales Police has been trialling automated facial recognition (AFR) technology since April 2017. Other forces around the country are trialling similar systems, including London's Metropolitan Police. Bridges may have been snapped during a pilot called AFR Locate.

LAST December, Ed Bridges was mingling with the crowds of Christmas shoppers on the streets of Cardiff, UK, when the police snapped a picture of him. He has been trying to get them to delete it ever since. Bridges hasn't been convicted of a crime, nor is he suspected of committing one. He is simply one of a vast number of people who have been quietly added to face-recognition databases without their consent, and most often, without their knowledge.

Thousands of attendees of the 2017 Champions League final in Cardiff, Wales were mistakenly identified as potential criminals by facial recognition technology used by local law enforcement. According to the Guardian, the South Wales police scanned the crowd of more than 170,000 people who traveled to the nation's capital for the soccer match between Real Madrid and Juventus. The cameras identified 2,470 people as criminals. Having that many potential lawbreakers in attendance might make sense if the event was, say, a convict convention, but seems pretty high for a soccer match. As it turned out, the cameras were a little overly-aggressive in trying to spot some bad guys.