A data graphic is not only a static image, but it also tells a story about the data. It activates cognitive processes that are able to detect patterns and discover information not readily available with the raw data. This is particularly true for time series, spatial, and space-time datasets. Focusing on the exploration of data with visual methods, Displaying Time Series, Spatial, and Space-Time Data with R presents methods and R code for producing high-quality graphics of time series, spatial, and space-time data. Practical examples using real-world datasets help you understand how to apply the methods and code.

From self-driving cars to robot lorries, autonomous vehicles are the future of road transportation. But who's in pole position, who's stuck in the pit lane and how far away is the starting grid? Autonomous vehicles are already on our roads. At the cutting edge there are self-driving cars being tested in pilot programmes, and they are proving perfectly capable of motoring alongside human drivers. But beyond robotic cars, many high-end vehicles available today are already practically capable of driving themselves either under the guise of passenger safety or driver convenience.

In a disused military aircraft hangar buried deep in a granite hillside, Johan Tofeldt flicks a switch on the future of mining. "Look, no hands!" he beams, as the truck lurches backwards and executes a precise reverse. "It's a little heavy on the clutch, but then it's not designed for driver comfort." The cheerful Swede is sitting in a standard Volvo FMX heavy duty truck, a haulage industry workhorse. But where once there was a narrow bed behind the seat there is now a laptop and a tangle of wires.

A huge, hidden shift is taking place in the way companies use Facebook to talk to customers. In the old days, companies used to deal with customers' complaints publicly, on their Facebook walls or on Twitter. But in the last couple of years the majority of "social customer care" has gone private -- inside the direct messaging channels of Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Whatsapp, and others. Now, 10,000 companies are already developing artificially intelligent chatbots to handle those private conversations. Socialbakers, the social media management company, did a study of 256 companies, looking at 3.1 million private messages and 1.5 million Facebook wall posts. The question we wanted to know was: How big is the potential market for A.I. chatbots inside Messenger and other apps?

There is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Knowledge typically comes down to knowing facts while understanding is the application of knowledge to the mastery of systems. You can know a lot while understanding very little. Just as an example, IBM's Watson artificial intelligence system that defeated the TV Jeopardy champs a few years ago knew all there was to know about Jeopardy questions but didn't really understand anything. Ask Watson to apply to removing your appendix its knowledge of hundreds of medical questions and you'd be disappointed and probably dead.

In the 1990s, fashion's relationship with robots was the stuff of fantasy. On the runway of Alexander McQueen's imaginative Spring/Summer 1999 show, two robotic arms spray-painted a white dress worn by Shalom Harlow. Today, the industry's relationship with automation is much more practical. In the distribution centres of e-commerce giants like the Yoox Net-a-Porter Group and Amazon (which, in 2012, paid 775 million to acquire Kiva Systems, a manufacturer of robotic fulfilment systems used by Gap, Gilt Groupe and Saks 5th Avenue) software-controlled robots routinely navigate giant warehouses, picking and transporting inventory faster and more accurately than humans, enabling services like same-day delivery. "Automated storage and retrieval systems provide high storage density as well as inventory accuracy and management, yet require a smaller footprint," explains Steve Crease, director of operations at Yoox Net-a-Porter Group, which uses ASRS to deliver its "key service level" of same-day delivery.

HYDERABAD: After being ranked among the best universities in the country, the University of Hyderabad (UoH) here on Wednesday was placed among the most productive organisations involved in artificial intelligence research in India by a UK-based journal. According to the study published in Science & Technology Libraries Journal, United Kingdom, UoH has been ranked 7th among 160 organisations, as most-productive organisation involved in artificial intelligence research in India. The top 20 most productive organisations involved in artificial intelligence research in India published 53 or more papers each and contributed 2,219 papers. The average citation per paper achieved by the total papers of these 20 organisations was 4.68, and eight organisations achieved a higher average citation per paper ratio than the group average. The institutions listed include Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras (10.21);

Toyota and Volkswagen are the latest in a string of auto industry giants to partner with ride-hailing companies, as the future of "mobility services" steers toward less ownership and more self-driving cars. Toyota and Uber announced a partnership Tuesday in which Toyota, valued at 177 billion, will invest an undisclosed amount to collaborate with Uber to develop autonomous cars. Volkswagon has invested 300 million in Gett, a taxi-hailing service that operates in 60 cities in Israel, Russia, the United States, and Britain, allowing the Israeli startup to expand in Europe, The Wall Street Journal reported. Tuesday's announcements are the latest in a series of major investments by the automakers to compete with Apple (whose 500 billion value is as much as seven major automakers combined) and Google, as the everyday commute appears poised to undergo a massive transformation. The focus on autonomous cars comes as Tesla, another tech startup, is attempting revolutionize the electric car and battery technology.

A former McDonald's chief executive has warned that raising the minimum wage will spur unemployment as companies will instead employ robots that work for less. "I guarantee you if a 15 minimum wage goes across the country you're going to see a job loss like you can't believe," said Edward Rensi in an appearance on Fox Business Network Tuesday. "It's cheaper to buy a 35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making 15 an hour bagging French fries." The minimum wage has been a hot topic this spring, with some states and employers deciding to up their minimum wage to 15 an hour in the coming years. California will raise its minimum wage to 15 an hour by 2022.

Any-angle pathfinding is a fundamental problem in robotics and computer games. The goal is to find a shortest path between a pair of points on a grid map such that the path is not artificially constrained to the points of the grid. Prior research has focused on approximate online solutions. A number of exact methods exist but they all require super-linear space and pre-processing time. In this study, we describe Anya: a new and optimal any-angle pathfinding algorithm. Where other works find approximate any-angle paths by searching over individual points from the grid, Anya finds optimal paths by searching over sets of states represented as intervals. Each interval is identified on-the-fly. From each interval Anya selects a single representative point that it uses to compute an admissible cost estimate for the entire set. Anya always returns an optimal path if one exists. Moreover it does so without any offline pre-processing or the introduction of additional memory overheads. In a range of empirical comparisons we show that Anya is competitive with several recent (sub-optimal) online and pre-processing based techniques and is up to an order of magnitude faster than the most common benchmark algorithm, a grid-based implementation of A*.