Apple will release its brand new HomePod in just a couple of weeks, it has announced. The smart speaker will go on sale on 9 February. Pre-orders will open this Friday, 26 January, it said in a statement. The 7-inch speaker will cost £319 in the UK, as well as similar prices in the US and Australia when it goes on sale at the end of this week. It will go on sale in France and Germany in spring, Apple said – voice assistants often roll out slower than other products, since they rely on having local data and languages.

In the aftermath of the German U-boat campaign in the First World War, many in Europe and the United States argued that submarines were immoral and should be outlawed. The British Admiralty supported this view, and as Blair has described, even offered to abolish their submarine force if other nations followed suit. While British proposals to ban submarines in 1922 and 1930 were defeated, restrictions on their use where imposed that mandated that submarines could not attack a ship until such ships crews and passengers were placed in safety. This reaction to the development of a new means of war is illustrative of the type of ethical and legal challenges that must be addressed as military organizations adopt greater human-machine integration. This article is the final of three that examines the key aspects of human-machine teaming. In the first, I examined the rationale for human-machine teaming through seven'propositions'. The secondarticle examined three forms of human-machine teaming that military organizations might adopt in a closer integration of humans and machines.

Apple's own vision for the future of home audio, the HomePod smart speaker, will begin shipping on February 9th. Pre-orders for the device open this Friday, January 26th, and are open to users in the US, UK and Australia, while those in France and Germany will be waiting until the "spring." It will, as expected, be priced at $349 / £319, and is available in either White or Space Grey. HomePod is Apple's own weapon in the fight against Amazon and Google in the war of smart speakers with voice assistants. Like its rivals, the device can listen to commands, via Siri, allowing you to control your smart home and music playback.

After a recent seminar at Stanford, I had a chat with adjunct professor Jerry Kaplan about artificial intelligence embodiment. The question was: Who are the thinkers and companies who are really pushing AI theory? Some experts believe that for artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence (AGI) to function peacefully and effectively in society, it needs a body. Thoughts vary on the level of embodiment, the mortality of that body, and the complexity of sensing abilities and empathy needed. So I did some research into the current state of robots and AI embodiment to identify the clusters and trends in this area of technology.

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has added an AI-powered chatbot to its apps that can help customers with more than 200 banking task.

Data association, the reasoning over correspondence between targets and measurements, is a problem of fundamental importance in target tracking. Recently, belief propagation (BP) has emerged as a promising method for estimating the marginal probabilities of measurement to target association, providing fast, accurate estimates. The excellent performance of BP in the particular formulation used may be attributed to the convexity of the underlying free energy which it implicitly optimises. This paper studies multiple scan data association problems, i.e., problems that reason over correspondence between targets and several sets of measurements, which may correspond to different sensors or different time steps. We find that the multiple scan extension of the single scan BP formulation is non-convex and demonstrate the undesirable behaviour that can result. A convex free energy is constructed using the recently proposed fractional free energy (FFE). A convergent, BP-like algorithm is provided for the single scan FFE, and employed in optimising the multiple scan free energy using primal-dual coordinate ascent. Finally, based on a variational interpretation of joint probabilistic data association (JPDA), we develop a sequential variant of the algorithm that is similar to JPDA, but retains consistency constraints from prior scans. The performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated on a bearings only target localisation problem.

In the past decade, countries and regions around the globe have developed strategic roadmaps to guide investment and development of robotic technology. Roadmaps from the US, South Korea, Japan and EU have been in place for some years and have had time to mature and evolve. Meanwhile roadmaps from other countries such as Australia and Singapore are just now being developed and launched. How did these strategic initiatives come to be? What do they hope to achieve? Have they been successful, and how do you measure success?

Late last year, we wrote about how Australia was paying a stupendous amount of money to try using drones and artificial intelligence to detect sharks off of popular beaches. We were skeptical, mostly because it's hard to make a convincing argument that shark attacks are actually that big of a problem, in Australia or anywhere else, compared to other, bigger problems that we might want to address first. One of those bigger problems, in Australia and in many other places, is drowning--in Australia in 2016, about 120 people drowned on the Australian coast, 60 times more people than were fatally attacked by sharks. Fortunately, the drones doing the shark spotting also happen to carry life preserver pods along with them, and last week, a drone being used for training managed to save a pair of struggling swimmers 700 meters off the coast of New South Wales. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, lifeguards were using the drone during a training session when "a call came through of two distressed swimmers."

"A collection of smart devices may not make you smarter. There seems to be a gap between what technology has to offer and what we are naturally able to do" Suranga Nanayakkara slips a black ring onto his finger and points. This ring, he explains, helps visually impaired people read by converting text into speech. Nanayakkara points at a poster on the wall more than a metre away, clicks a small button on the side of the ring, and almost instantaneously a female voice starts reading out the poster's header through the headphones he's wearing. Such optical character recognition technology, or OCR, already exists but is often locked inside clunky highlighter-style devices that are slow and cumbersome.

By Varun Mathur Mobile banking was one of the first apps for smartphones. Financial brands led the charge on the first mainstream wearable, the Apple Watch. Now, conversational interfaces including voice-first interfaces are the next frontiers to explore as consumers increasingly look for speed, convenience and security in their banking tasks. Why should banks invest in voice? Because, it is the most natural means of communication and can lead to more personalized interactions.