Google is launching its rival to Amazon's Echo, the Google Home, in the UK as the battle for the living room hots up. The smart speaker, which can play music, control Internet of Things devices, and answer questions, will cost British customers £129, some £20 more than Amazon's Echo, when it launches in Britain on 6 April. Google first launched the Home in the US in November, alongside the introduction of the Pixel phone and Google Assistant AI. Google Assistant is a voice-controlled digital assistant that runs on phones, Google Home and even smart TVs, and can provide context-aware assistance, knowing what sort of environment it's in. Since the initial launch, Google Assistant has gradually come to more Android phones, as well as Android Wear-based smartwatches.

UberEats, the food delivery service introduced by ride sharing giant Uber, will expand across more than 40 towns and cities in the UK before the end of the year as it continues to compete with rivals Deliveroo and JustEat. Uber, whose car-hailing app has caused upheaval in the taxi industry, disrupted the takeaway market in London when it launched UberEats in June last year. The app is now also available in Manchester and Birmingham and more than 1 million customers have downloaded it since its launch, according to the company. "It's clear from the response we've seen in London, Manchester and Birmingham that there's huge appetite from people to order food at the touch of a button from their favourite local restaurants," Jambu Palaniappan, regional manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa at UberEats, said. "We're really excited about the future of the business which is why we're investing heavily in an ambitious plan to launch the app in at least 40 towns and cities in the UK by the end of the year," he added.

WASHINGTON – The world's largest manufacturer of civilian drones is proposing that the craft continually transmit identification information to help government security agencies and law enforcement figure out which might belong to rogue operators. DJI, a Chinese company, said in a paper released Monday that radio transmissions of an identification code, possibly the operator's Federal Aviation Administration's registration number, could help allay security concerns while also protecting the operator's privacy. The paper suggests steps that can be taken to use existing technologies to develop an identification system, and that operators could include more identification information in addition to a number if they wish. Anyone with the proper radio receiver could obtain those transmissions from the drone, but only law enforcement officials or aviation regulators would be able to use that registration number to identify the registered owner. Law enforcement agencies and the U.S. military raised security concerns last year after FAA officials proposed permitting more civilian drone flights over crowds and densely populated areas.

Global AI investment fever has hit Russia, with a recently launched $100 million fund making its inaugural investments. Announced in late 2016, the fund is backed by Larnabel VC, the venture arm of the Gutseriev family, one of the richest in Russia, and VP Capital, the investment vehicle of Belarussian businessman Viktor Prokopenya. The joint fund is sector-agnostic. "We are interested in a wide range of companies that apply AI technologies in interesting, unique, and impactful ways. We don't restrict ourselves to specific industries or sectors. We are interested in every application of artificial intelligence, from fintech to entertainment, to education, and beyond," Prokopenya told East-West Digital News.

The other day, I went to meet someone in downtown Sydney, Australia. On my way, back on the local train, I looked at my mobile to check my emails and found a message asking me whether I would like to meet the person I had just connected with on my LinkedIn network. So, was this some form of artificial intelligence (AI) at play? We now live in a brave new world where AI is the next frontier. We keep hearing about bots, chatbots, teacherbots, digital assistants, machine learning, deep learning and many more such words and often wonder what do they mean.

Ubisoft's blockbuster videogame franchise Assassin's Creed might be coming to TV, says the company. Ubisoft's blockbuster videogaming franchise Assassin's Creed didn't exactly kill at the box office, but is the company going to try for another bite at the golden apple by bringing the historical adventure series to the small screen? During a Reddit AMA, franchise content chief Aymar Azaizia indicated that that was the plan. Asked if he could address rumors of a TV series, Azaizia declined to be specific but offered that, "it's like the move guys, we will take our time, to get sure we deliver something we can be proud of, but if you wander [SIC] if it's on our plan… YES." (emphasis in original). "We have been in talk[s] with great partners, and are at the very early stages of creating a TV series so it won't be anytime soon, but I would f***ing love it! He also said that while any production decisions around the show were far off, his "gut feeling" is that the company would go for live action rather than CGI animated.

Artificial intelligence has already stolen the headlines in 2017 by defeating poker champions and ordering us cups of coffee. Besides this, there are ways the technology is being used to improve the world. AI is the most important investment for companies in the near future. IDC predicts a widespread adoption of cognitive systems and AI will drive worldwide revenues from nearly $8bn in 2016 to more than $47bn in 2020. Banking, securities and investments and manufacturing have been identified as the industries with the most lucrative short-term opportunities but there are also many ways in which artificial intelligence is being used for philanthropic purposes.

Visitors at Cebit in Hanover last week had a chance to do what some people in Switzerland have been doing for almost a year now: take a ride on an autonomous shuttle. Two such shuttles have been operating in Sion since the summer of 2016, despite the program being shorty halted in September due to a small accident. Although the shuttles do not require a driver, a safety attendant is on board at all times to make sure they run smoothly and to stop the vehicles in an emergency. The shuttles are build by french company, Navya, and the fleet management software is developed by Swiss start-up Bestmile. Testing in Switzerland is expected to continue until October.

This article presents a logical formalization of the emotional appraisal theory, i.e., it formalizes the cognitive process of evaluation that elicits an emotion. This formalization is psychologically grounded on the OCC cognitive model of emotions. More specifically, we are interested in event-based emotions, i.e., emotions that are elicited by the evaluation of the consequences of an event that either happened or will happen. The formal modelling presented here is based on the AfPL Probabilistic Logic, a BDI-like probabilistic modal logic, which allows our model to verify whether the variables that determine the elicitation of emotions achieved the necessary threshold or not. The proposed logical formalization aims at addressing how the emotions are elicited by the agent cognitive mental states (desires, beliefs and intentions), and how to represent the intensity of the emotions. These are important initial points in the investigation of the dynamic interaction among emotions and other mental states.

Automatic Music Transcription (AMT) is one of the oldest and most well-studied problems in the field of music information retrieval. Within this challenging research field, onset detection and instrument recognition take important places in transcription systems, as they respectively help to determine exact onset times of notes and to recognize the corresponding instrument sources. The aim of this study is to explore the usefulness of multiscale scattering operators for these two tasks on plucked string instrument and piano music. After resuming the theoretical background and illustrating the key features of this sound representation method, we evaluate its performances comparatively to other classical sound representations. Using both MIDI-driven datasets with real instrument samples and real musical pieces, scattering is proved to outperform other sound representations for these AMT subtasks, putting forward its richer sound representation and invariance properties.