Compare broadband providers and find the best deal for you with our Best Broadband Deals page. Three has made its Wi-Fi calling service significantly easier to use, which should help customers cut their monthly mobile bills. Previously, users could only take advantage of the feature through Three's additional inTouch app, which delivered a less-than-pleasant user experience. However, customers can now make calls and send texts over a Wi-Fi connection without the app. It's a handy service, allowing users to both save money and stay in touch with friends and family whenever a Wi-Fi network is available, even when signal is poor or non-existent.

An important step in data analysis is data exploration and representation. In this tutorial we will see how by combining a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) together with Cluster Analysis we can represent in a two-dimensional space data defined in a higher dimensional one while, at the same time, being able to group this data in similar groups or clusters and find hidden relationships in our data. More concretely, PCA reduces data dimensionality by finding principal components. These are the directions of maximum variation in a dataset. By reducing a dataset original features or variables to a reduced set of new ones based on the principal components, we end up with the minimum number of variables that keep the maximum amount of variation or information about how the data is distributed. If we end up with just two of these new variables, we will be able to represent each sample in our data in a two-dimensional chart (e.g. a scatterplot). As an unsupervised data analysis technique, clustering organises data samples by proximity based on its variables.

Future projection of climate is typically obtained by combining outputs from multiple Earth System Models (ESMs) for several climate variables such as temperature and precipitation. While IPCC has traditionally used a simple model output average, recent work has illustrated potential advantages of using a multitask learning (MTL) framework for projections of individual climate variables. In this paper we introduce a framework for hierarchical multitask learning (HMTL) with two levels of tasks such that each super-task, i.e., task at the top level, is itself a multitask learning problem over sub-tasks. For climate projections, each super-task focuses on projections of specific climate variables spatially using an MTL formulation. For the proposed HMTL approach, a group lasso regularization is added to couple parameters across the super-tasks, which in the climate context helps exploit relationships among the behavior of different climate variables at a given spatial location. We show that some recent works on MTL based on learning task dependency structures can be viewed as special cases of HMTL. Experiments on synthetic and real climate data show that HMTL produces better results than decoupled MTL methods applied separately on the super-tasks and HMTL significantly outperforms baselines for climate projection.

More and more Japanese companies are seeing benefits from helping Paralympians and their support organizations ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics. In mid-October, Yui Kamiji, bronze medalist in women's wheelchair tennis at the Rio de Janeiro Paralympics, was invited to a meeting with 11 employees at Japan Airlines, an official sponsor of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. The group has been nicknamed the JAL Sports Ambassadors. Kamiji, who belongs to record label Avex Group Holdings Inc., recalled her experience at the Rio Games and how she dealt with the long flight. Asked what wheelchair athletes care most about during long flights, Kamiji said some carry cushions with them, depending on their disability, to avoid developing bedsores.

According to Business Insider, the top jobs of the future will be in technology and healthcare. Either way, success will require empathy. Imagine you're part of a team designing a technology solution to help stop the spread of infectious diseases in hospitals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that two million patients get an infection while in the hospital each year, and 99,000 of them die as a result, so your job could have a serious impact! For Daniel Duarte, Head of Innovation and Customer Experience at SAP Labs Latin America, this is a real task.

Shortly after the hit hero shooter Overwatch launched last May, fans were treated to a slew of new character models themed for the upcoming 2016 Brazil Summer Olympics. That was just the beginning of Blizzard's extra content train, as they released more for Halloween and Christmas. Last week, they teased new stuff to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year, which all goes live today. Players will be excited for the new skins, but the real win is the addition of a long-awaited capture the flag mode to the game. As usual, there are new skins to enjoy, some garbed in traditional Chinese formal wear and adorned with celebratory accoutrements (read: Junkrat has firecrackers).

Robots might one day trace the origin of their consciousness to recent experiments aimed at instilling them with the ability to reflect on their own thinking. Although granting machines self-awareness might seem more like the stuff of science fiction than science, there are solid practical reasons for doing so, explains roboticist Hod Lipson at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Laboratory. "The greatest challenge for robots today is figuring out how to adapt to new situations," he says. "There are millions of robots out there, mostly in factories, and if everything is in the right place at the right time for them, they are superhuman in their precision, in their power, in their speed, in their ability to work repetitively 24/7 in hazardous environments--but if a bolt falls out of place, game over." This lack of adaptability "is the reason we don't have many robots in the home, which is much more unstructured than the factory," Lipson adds.

Google has announced this week that it will invest $1m in computer science research projects in Latin America within the next two to three years. Under the Google Research Awards in Latin America initiative, the search giant will grant one-year cash awards to universities to support the work of faculties and their full-time students. The project for the region will be run out of Google's Engineering Center in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Areas of research Google will support within Computer Science, Engineering and related fields include geo/mapping technology, human-computer interaction as well as information retrieval, extraction and organization, privacy and immersive experiences. Ericsson taps Swedish academia and industry to dig up use cases that might make 5G compelling for operators to invest in.

A team of Airbus engineers are developing a self-flying taxi that is designed to fly above traffic to carry individual passengers and cargo throughout busy cities. The utopian vision is a bit far-fetched, but they plan to start testing a prototype of the vehicle in late 2017. The technical leader of Ford's autonomous car project speaks about what it's like to be driven by a driver-less car, and how big a deal self-driving vehicles will really be. In Airbus's corporate magazine FORUM, project executive Rodin Lyasoff asserts, "In as little as ten years, we could have projects on the market that revolutionize urban travel for millions of people." The project, dubbed Vahana, launched in February 2016 at A3, which is Airbus Group's innovation division based (where else?) in Silicon Valley.

An open letter calling for a ban on lethal weapons controlled by artificially intelligent machines was signed last week by thousands of scientists and technologists, reflecting growing concern that swift progress in artificial intelligence could be harnessed to make killing machines more efficient, and less accountable, both on the battlefield and off. But experts are more divided on the issue of robot killing machines than you might expect. The letter, presented at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was signed by many leading AI researchers as well as prominent scientists and entrepreneurs including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Steve Wozniak. "Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is--practically if not legally--feasible within years not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms." Rapid advances have indeed been made in artificial intelligence in recent years, especially within the field of machine learning, which involves teaching computers to recognize often complex or subtle patterns in large quantities of data.