A key factor that determines the usability of applications based on speech recognition is the latency or lag of the system. In dialogue systems, e.g., long latencies may disrupt the natural turntaking in the human-machine conversation. In other specific applications the lag may even be more critical. A typical example involves systems that use ASR to drive the lip movements of an avatar in real time to support telepresence [3, 4, 5]. The latency in a typical speech recogniser based on a hybrid between Neural Networks (NNs) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is determined by a number of factors: - the hardware (sound card) introduces some lag in digitising the speech samples and making them available to the drivers. Typical values are in the order of milliseconds; - the speech samples are returned by the driver in buffers of a certain size (this could be as long as half a second, but can be reduced to a few ms); - in spectral based feature extraction, speech samples are grouped into windows (frames) often around 25-40 ms in length; - many methods for feature extraction also compute time derivatives of the features, which require a number of frames in the past and the future.

After fifty years of soaring crop yields thanks to fertilizers, pest control, and irrigation, that growth is bottoming out. We solved the food shortfall in the 20th century, but we need to do it again in this century. The UN says crop production must rise 70% by 2050 to meet demand. Startups see cheap sensors and artificial intelligence as the solution. Clever algorithms are processing a deluge of high-resolution data enabling real-time monitoring of crops and their environment for the first time.

And at this juncture in the Internet's evolution it seems very plain, Dear Online Reader, that you are mostly being served a tsunami of content -- accelerated into your attention trough by click-dependent digital business models which require a steady stream of word fodder to engage eyeballs long enough to ambush them with ads. You can weep for the state of the written word -- and let's face it, a whole lot of content isn't even written these days; I mean why expend energy composing actual sentences when you can just livestream a melon being slow-ploded by rubber bands? The second option is what Israeli startup Articoolo has been busy doing. It's built an algorithm that can generate an article on a topic of your choice -- so long as it can be described in between two and five words. Just sum up your subject concisely, tell the machine how many words (max 500) to scribe on your behalf, and select whether you prefer "better readability" or "enhanced uniqueness".

It'll take a long while before the camera is practical, but its size extends its potential uses well beyond medicine. Researchers envision extremely tiny robots that can still visualize the world around them, or self-driving cars whose cameras are virtually invisible. You could also have 360-degree smartphone cameras that take up very little space. And importantly, it takes very little effort to make these lenses -- the Stuttgart team designed and tested its camera in a few hours. Microscopic cameras certainly raise privacy concerns (there's a real risk that people would misuse these cameras for snooping), but they also hint at a world where size isn't an obstacle to smarter devices.

For more than 30 years, Gibbs has advised on and developed product and service marketing for many businesses and he has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books. So the UK has just given itself a national headache. Whether you think the Brexit was the right decision or a dangerous and unmitigated screw-up (as I do), the consequences of the referendum will be non-trivial and take years to complete. But the mechanics of the UK exiting the European Union aside, the question of how people now feel about the Brexit is interesting. Are they awash in jubilation or has buyer's remorse set in?

NFL coaching great Buddy Ryan, who passed away Tuesday at the age of 82, didn't have difficulty finding the spotlight wherever he went. From the New York Jets when they became the first AFL team to win a Super Bowl in 1968, to the Super Bears of 1985 to his last stop as the head man of the Arizona Cardinals in 1994-95, Ryan had a common theme -- "You got a winner in town." One of the best fits for that boisterous personality was his stop as head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles from 1986 to 1990. He was brash, but his teams backed up his words. He made fun of the rich owner, Norman Braman -- "that guy in France" -- who spent a lot of time overseas, and connected with the blue-collar town.

Just three months ago, a ticket-fighting bot was launched in New York City to help drivers challenge parking fines – and it's already been used more than 9,000 times. The DoNotPay bot was first released in London last fall, where it has since successfully disputed 160,000 tickets. The robot lawyer generates documents and answers legal questions, but won't charge you hundreds of dollars in fees. Just three months ago, a ticket-fighting bot was launched in New York City to help drivers challenge parking fines – and it's already been used more than 9,000 times. The first step to fighting against a parking ticket is to sign into the website and a chat screen will appear.

A chatbot programmed by a British teenager has successfully challenged 160,000 parking tickets since its launch last year. About 250,000 people have used the free service so far, said its creator, Joshua Browder. The Do Not Pay bot currently works in the UK and New York in the US. It asks a series of questions to determine the validity of a penalty notice. It can also be used to work out compensation for delayed flights.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Jean-Philip Poulin was feeling "joyful" and "excited" when I interviewed him recently in Montreal. I know this because he showed me his real-time emotion metrics during our conversation, which were being parsed by a machine-learning algorithm that uses heart-rate data transmitted from his Microsoft Band 2 fitness tracker. Poulin is the COO of Sensaura, a Montreal-based software startup that proposes to bridge the gap between consumer wearables and affective computing. If its founders are as successful as they believe they will be, their product will hasten the inevitable future of emotionally intelligent machines: video games will know when you're bored, advertisers will know when you're swayed, and mental health professionals will know when you need a check-in. So far, progress in affective computing has depended on facial recognition software, which reads people's emotions pretty much the same way that people do: by looking at their faces for cues.