A woman from Cairns, Australia, used Siri to call an ambulance for her one-year-old daughter when she stopped breathing. Stacey Gleeson grabbed her iPhone and ran to the child's room to help her but dropped it as she turned on the light. She shouted at the handset to activate Siri and told it to get the emergency services on speakerphone as she began CPR. Ms Gleeson told the BBC she feels it may have saved her daughter's life. She instructed Siri to call an ambulance on speakerphone and was able to communicate with the emergency services while resuscitating Giana.

Quick thinking and Apple's digital assistant have saved the life of a little girl in Australia. Stacey Gleeson called on Siri after realizing her one-year-old daughter had turned blue and stopped breathing. 'Hey Siri, call me the ambulance', Gleeson yelled at her white iPhone that laid on the carpet across the room, which prompted the digital hero to dial for help. Stacey Gleeson (pictured) called on the power of Siri after realizing her one-year-old daughter had turned blue and stopped breathing. 'Hey Siri, call me the ambulance', Gleeson yelled, which prompted the digital hero to dial for help -- allowing her to focus on reviving her daughter Stacey Gleeson caught a glimpse of Giana on the baby monitor and saw she had turned blue and stopped breathing.

In an interview with iTnews, Philip Scorgie, who joined Allens last month from Chicago-based Mayer Brown, said that he expects large Australian law firms to begin adopting cloud-based cognitive computing systems within the next year. But he believes predictions that'robot lawyers' will replace humans are overstated. He instead views cognitive computing as augmenting, rather than replacing, human capabilities, for example by assisting lawyers to handle large data volumes to produce structured documents. The CIO also said that nervousness around the access foreign governments might have to firms' sensitive client data has meant the legal sector has been hesitant to adopt cloud technologies, particularly in Australia and Europe. But he added that doing so carried a risk that in-house legal teams would do so and handle more work themselves.

Smartphones are great devices, but not for everything. There are often times when having a device on you is the last thing you need, particularly if you are not using the screen. Amazon, Google and Apple are all betting that screen-less, intelligent, voice interaction will play a large role in the future of the internet at least in the home (if not the office, the car etc.). This article looks at some of the trends and recent announcements that suggest that voice control interfaces linked to artificial intelligence (AI) platforms is the future of the internet. There were two major milestones in the technology calendar this week.

Apple needs to change its attitude and approach to customer data, back away from the big data corner it has painted itself into, and use its upcoming World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) to lay out some sort of artificial intelligence vision. Amazon has Alexa and its Echo. Google has Home, Assistant and a bevy of other services. Meanwhile, Apple has its long-in-the-tooth Siri that reportedly will be opened up to third party developers. Over the last two years, Apple has dug its heels in on privacy, vilified ad models to some degree and knocked Silicon Valley rivals (read Facebook and Google) for using customers as the products and collecting too much information.

Melbourne researchers have developed a robotic arm to send signals to the brain that could enable amputees to regain a sense of touch and increased movement to missing limbs. The joint project between St Vincent's Hospital's Aikenhead Centre for Medical Discovery and Melbourne University is looking at how arm and brain signals communicate. Two recent breakthroughs have seen researchers decode the complex signals the human brain uses to control movement, as well as discovering a way of passing messages directly from a brain to a mechanical arm. Research has been ongoing for several years, but scientists believe they are even closer to simulating a'normal' arm and to control the movement of a prosthetic limb in the same way they move a normal human arm and hand. They hope to breakthrough in the next couple of years as understanding of how the brain reads and interprets signals increases.

We introduce Bayesian Poisson Tucker decomposition (BPTD) for modeling country--country interaction event data. These data consist of interaction events of the form "country $i$ took action $a$ toward country $j$ at time $t$." BPTD discovers overlapping country--community memberships, including the number of latent communities. In addition, it discovers directed community--community interaction networks that are specific to "topics" of action types and temporal "regimes." We show that BPTD yields an efficient MCMC inference algorithm and achieves better predictive performance than related models. We also demonstrate that it discovers interpretable latent structure that agrees with our knowledge of international relations.

I've been re-reading Frank Harrell's Regression Modelling Strategies, a must read for anyone who ever fits a regression model, although be prepared - depending on your background, you might get 30 pages in and suddenly become convinced you've been doing nearly everything wrong before, which can be disturbing. I wanted to evaluate three simple modelling strategies in dealing with data with many variables. Using data with 54 variables on 1,785 area units from New Zealand's 2013 census, I'm looking to predict median income on the basis of the other 53 variables. The features are all continuous and are variables like "mean number of bedrooms", "proportion of individuals with no religion" and "proportion of individuals who are smokers". None of these is exactly what I would use for real, but they serve the purpose of setting up a competition of strategies that I can test with a variety of model validation techniques.

Our most powerful 21st-century technologies – robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech – are threatening to make humans an endangered species. From the moment I became involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil, the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and many other amazing things. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. Ray and I were both speakers at George Gilder's Telecosm conference, and I encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were over. I was sitting with John Searle, a Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were talking, Ray approached and a ...

Switzerland will become the first country in the world to hold a nationwide referendum on the introduction of a basic income on Sunday. The proposal, if passed, would give every adult legally resident in Switzerland an unconditional income of 2,500 Swiss francs ( 1,755; 2,554) a month, whether they work or not. Supporters point to the fact that 21st-Century work is increasingly automated, with more and more traditional jobs, in factories, retail and even in finance and accounting, being done by machines. And they do not need salaries. The campaign has staged some eyecatching demonstrations, including one in which hundreds of "robots" danced through the streets of Zurich, promising to "free" humans from the daily grind of Monday to Friday work, just to pay the bills. "The robots are saying'we don't want to grab your work and make you suffer'," said campaigner Che Wagner.