A new tool with cutting-edge image recognition AI lets you visualize the future effects of climate change on any place in the world -- including your own home. The project, titled "This Climate Does Not Exist," lets you enter the address of your current home or your favorite travel destination and see what it could look like years later once climate change has taken its toll. You can see how Disneyland will look like covered in smog, the way extreme smog blanketed Beijing in 2014. You can see what your childhood home will look like after it is flooded by rising sea levels, the way floods devastated Indonesia in 2020 after widespread deforestation. Jakarata floods: Thousands caught in floods in Jakarta, Indonesia's sinking capital Extreme weather events due to climate change are already impacting corners of the globe.

There is an increasing demand for piloted autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to operate in polar ice conditions. At present, AUVs are deployed from ships and directly human-piloted in these regions, entailing a high carbon cost and limiting the scope of operations. A key requirement for long-term autonomous missions is a long-range route planning capability that is aware of the changing ice conditions. In this paper we address the problem of automating long-range route-planning for AUVs operating in the Southern Ocean. We present the route-planning method and results showing that efficient, ice-avoiding, long-distance traverses can be planned.

San Francisco, London, Montreal, Paris, and New York have all developed a reputation for being hotbeds of artificial intelligence research over the years. Sydney and Melbourne, Australia's two biggest cities, have not. But that could be about to change. Google announced Monday that it plans to set up a new Google Research Australia lab in Sydney as part of a 1 billion Australian dollar ($729 million) investment in Australia. The lab will research everything from AI to quantum computing.

In this paper, we present an algorithm for creating a synthetic population for the Greater Melbourne area using a combination of machine learning, probabilistic, and gravity-based approaches. We combine these techniques in a hybrid model with three primary innovations: 1. when assigning activity patterns, we generate individual activity chains for every agent, tailored to their cohort; 2. when selecting destinations, we aim to strike a balance between the distance-decay of trip lengths and the activity-based attraction of destination locations; and 3. we take into account the number of trips remaining for an agent so as to ensure they do not select a destination that would be unreasonable to return home from. Our method is completely open and replicable, requiring only publicly available data to generate a synthetic population of agents compatible with commonly used agent-based modeling software such as MATSim. The synthetic population was found to be accurate in terms of distance distribution, mode choice, and destination choice for a variety of population sizes.

Apple is stepping up its plans to enter the car market and aims to launch a self-driving electric vehicle in 2025, according to a report. The tech company's much-rumoured automotive project has bolstered its ambitions under new leadership and is pushing for a fully self-driving vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals, said Bloomberg. The car's interior would be designed for hands-off driving, with one possible design featuring passengers sitting around a U-shaped seating formation. Apple's below-the-radar car venture – known as Project Titan – was dealt an apparent blow in September when the executive in charge of its development, Doug Field, defected to Ford. But the iPhone maker appears undaunted by the challenge of entering the competitive electric vehicle market despite a number of senior leadership changes at Titan this year, Field's the most significant among them.

Machine learning (ML) is how a system learns and adapts its processes from the patterns found in large amounts of data. When we think of machine learning, some prominent examples come to mind. For instance, the way product recommendations on Amazon are eerily similar to Google searches you've done. The scope of machine learning extends far beyond what we know of and see in our daily lives. Since machine learning is a relatively new field, the limits of its application are constantly pushed outward.

The fronds of the coconut tree swayed gently in the cooling breeze blowing from the sea. The turquoise blue waters of the shallow lagoon shimmered in the evening sunlight. Children played on the white sand. The whitewashed clinic building was set among a grove of coconut and mango trees. The clinic had a doctor's room with an old-fashioned high back revolving chair and a room where most procedures could be done.

The Tom Hanks' vehicle "Finch" is "Cast Away" revisited. Instead of a young(ish) Hanks stranded on a desert island, we have an old Hanks stranded in a post-apocalyptic world, where a solar flare has destroyed the ozone layer. The UV rays are deadly. The temperature in direct sunlight is 150 degrees, and the empty, dust-covered and windswept streets are littered with desiccated corpses.. Hanks plays the eponymous Finch Weinberg, a tech genius, who lives in St. Louis, Mo., in a warehouse with his real dog Goodyear and his R2D2-like robo-dog Dewy. Finch can only go outside if he wears a spacesuit-like outfit with a space helmet and cooling device attached.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up when all is said and done, but the environmental cost could be significantly higher, with nearby lakes contaminated for decades, according to a new study. A group of researchers, led by those at the University of Tsukuba, have found that Lake Onuma on Mount Akagi could be contaminated with radioactive cesium-137 (137CS) for roughly 30 years after the disaster. The researchers used the fractional diffusional method and determined that radioactivity concentration will happen for up to 10,000 days following the accident. Just after the nuclear accident, the radioactivity concentration declined sharply, but that decline slows greatly in the months and years that follow. Lake Onuma is a closed lake and has a limited amount of inflow and runoff water. Japan's Lake Onuma could be contaminated with radioactive cesium-137 (137CS) for roughly 30 years after the Fukushima disaster, a new study has found'Previous investigations have used the two-component decay function model, which is the sum of two exponential functions, to fit the measured 137Cs radioactivity concentration,' one of the study's co-authors, Professor Yuko Hatano, said in a statement.

To mark Israel's Memorial Day in 2021, the Israel Defense Forces musical ensembles collaborated with a company that specializes in synthetic videos, also known as "deepfake" technology, to bring photos from the 1948 Israeli-Arab war to life. They produced a video in which young singers clad in period uniforms and carrying period weapons sang "Hareut," an iconic song commemorating soldiers killed in combat. As they sing, the musicians stare at faded black-and-white photographs they hold. The past comes to life, Harry Potter style. For the past few years, my colleagues and I at UMass Boston's Applied Ethics Center have been studying how everyday engagement with AI challenges the way people think about themselves and politics. We've found that AI has the potential to weaken people's capacity to make ordinary judgments.