On Tuesday, Microsoft announced a slew of accessibility updates for Xbox players on consoles and PCs. These include keyboard key remapping using controllers, easier-to-get-to accessibility shortcuts and a new section in the Microsoft Store. In a reminder that inclusive design can help everyone, one of the new features will let anyone set up a new controller without getting up to press a pair button on the console. Wireless controller pairing no longer requires direct console contact. "From the comfort of a couch, wheelchair, hospital bed, etc., players can now put their console into pairing mode using an Xbox media remote, digital assistant voice command, or previously paired controller to connect a new controller to their console," the company wrote today in a blog post.

We present a self-supervised and self-calibrating multi-shot approach to imaging through atmospheric turbulence, called TurbuGAN. Our approach requires no paired training data, adapts itself to the distribution of the turbulence, leverages domain-specific data priors, and can generalize from tens to thousands of measurements. We achieve such functionality through an adversarial sensing framework adapted from CryoGAN, which uses a discriminator network to match the distributions of captured and simulated measurements. Our framework builds on CryoGAN by (1) generalizing the forward measurement model to incorporate physically accurate and computationally efficient models for light propagation through anisoplanatic turbulence, (2) enabling adaptation to slightly misspecified forward models, and (3) leveraging domain-specific prior knowledge using pretrained generative networks, when available. We validate TurbuGAN on both computationally simulated and experimentally captured images distorted with anisoplanatic turbulence.

The coronavirus pandemic has been tough on the global call-center industry, and nowhere more than in the Philippines, the world leader in the field. Hundreds of thousands of employees in the former U.S. colony field queries from the other side of the planet, and for the past year many of them have had to work alone from home through the night, grappling with frequent electricity outages, isolation from friends, and the snores of parents, partners, siblings, or children crammed into tight quarters. What comes after Covid-19 is likely to be even worse. The lockdowns of the past year have accelerated the shift to greater automation in responding to inquiries to lenders, insurers, and telecom operators. And when they do connect with a human, it's more frequently in a chat window with someone who's engaged in multiple conversations at once.

Robots have moved into factories, warehouses, stores and even our homes. Tech startups are developing self-driving bulldozers, drones to inspect work sites and robot bricklayers. In this photo taken Jan. 26, 2018, Mike Moy, an assistant plant manager for Lehigh Hanson Cement Group, inspects a Kespry drone he uses to survey inventories of rock, sand and other building materials at a mining plant in Sunol, California. Robots are coming to a construction site near you. Tech startups are developing self-driving bulldozers, survey drones and bricklaying robots to help the construction industry boost productivity, speed and safety as it struggles to find enough skilled workers.

In fact, unit shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) systems used in infotainment and ADAS systems are expected to rise from just 7 million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), the leading global source of critical information and insight. The attach rate of AI-based systems in new vehicles was 8 percent in 2015, and the vast majority were focused on speech recognition. However, that number is forecast to rise to 109 percent in 2025, as there will be multiple AI systems of various types installed in many cars. "An artificial-intelligence system continuously learns from experience and by its ability to discern and recognize its surroundings," said Luca De Ambroggi, principal analyst-automotive semiconductors, IHS Technology. "It learns, as human beings do, from real sounds, images, and other sensory inputs. The system recognizes the car's environment and evaluates the contextual implications for the moving car." Specifically in ADAS, deep learning -- which mimics human neural networks -- presents several advantages over traditional algorithms; it is also a key milestone on the road to fully autonomous vehicles.

In fact, unit shipments of artificial intelligence (AI) systems used in infotainment and ADAS systems are expected to rise from just 7 million in 2015 to 122 million by 2025, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), the leading global source of critical information and insight. The attach rate of AI-based systems in new vehicles was 8 percent in 2015, and the vast majority were focused on speech recognition. However, that number is forecast to rise to 109 percent in 2025, as there will be multiple AI systems of various types installed in many cars.