In 2016, an estimated 65.6 million people across the globe were forced from their homes by everything from war to human rights violations. Climate change and global warming are exacerbating the problem of displaced persons, with millions of people expected to be forced to relocate to other -- often cooler -- countries. The problem is becoming so widespread that New Zealand is even considering creating a new visa specifically for those displaced by climate change. Once they make the difficult decision to leave their home, refugees face a slew of other questions: To which country do they flee? Where in that country should they go?

Tue 23 Jan 2018 12.47 EST Last modified on Tue 23 Jan 2018 12.48 EST The computer scientist Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who has died aged 93, was on the programming team for the computer that in 1951 became the first in the world to be sold commercially: the Ferranti Mark I. She led a successful campaign at Ferranti for equal pay for male and female programmers, almost two decades before the Equal Pay Act came into force. As a young mother in the mid-1950s she set up on her own as a home-based software consultant, making her one of the world's first freelance programmers. Modest about her own pioneering achievements, she is on record (in an interview with computer historian Janet Abbate) as saying that her biggest contribution was to be "the grandmother of the web". In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), the eldest of her four children, proposed a system to access and exchange documents across the internet, and soon afterwards built the first web server, website and browser.

Rumors have been swirling as of late that Apple is getting ready to release its new Amazon Echo and Google Home rival very soon, and now we have an official launch date for the HomePod. Apple on Tuesday announced that the $349 HomePod will hit store shelves on Feb. 9. The Cupertino tech giant will start taking pre-orders on its website this Friday, Jan. 26, in the US, UK, and Australia. The Siri-backed smart speaker is slated to arrive in France and Germany this spring. Getting to this point has already been a long road for Apple, which unveiled the HomePod in June and planned to start selling it in December, in time for the holidays.

Company's delayed, £319 smart speaker pitched as music-first wireless speaker that can be voice-controlled via Siri Tue 23 Jan 2018 09.44 EST Last modified on Tue 23 Jan 2018 11.13 EST Apple's delayed £319 HomePod smart speaker will finally be available to buy on Friday in the UK, US and Australia. The 17.8cm tall HomePod is pitched as a music-first wireless speaker that can be controlled by voice using Apple's Siri assistant, which can also set timers, reminders, check the weather and control smart home devices. "It brings advanced audio technologies like beam-forming tweeters, a high-excursion woofer and automatic spatial awareness, together with the entire Apple Music catalogue and the latest Siri intelligence, in a simple, beautiful design that is so much fun to use," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing. The HomePod was announced in June to ship before the end of 2017, but Apple was forced to delay shipping in November as the product needed more work. Apple could only watch as Amazon got an over three-year head start with the Echo – while Google's Home is 14 months old – and it now has some catching up to do. Ben Wood, chief of research at CCS Insight, said: "This is a critically important device for Apple given the significant head start Amazon and Google have in this area.

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.