Street lamps constitute the densest electrically operated public infrastructure in urban areas. Their changeover to energy-friendly LED light quickly amortizes and is increasingly leveraged for smart city projects, where LED street lamps double, for example, as wireless networking or sensor infrastructure. We make the case for a new paradigm called SLaaP--street lamps as a platform. SLaaP is proposed as an open, enabling platform, fostering innovative citywide services for the full range of stakeholders and end users--seamlessly extending from everyday use to emergency response. In this article, we first describe the role and potential of street lamps and introduce one novel base service as a running example. We then discuss citywide infrastructure design and operation, followed by addressing the major layers of a SLaaP infrastructure: hardware, distributed software platform, base services, value-added services and applications for users and'things.' Finally, we discuss the crucial roles and participation of major stakeholders: citizens, city, government, and economy. Recent years have seen the emergence of smart street lamps, with very different meanings of'smart'--sometimes related to the original purpose as with usage-dependent lighting, but mostly as add-on capabilities like urban sensing, monitoring, digital signage, WiFi access, or e-vehicle charging.a The future holds even more use cases: for example, after a first wave of 5G mobile network rollouts from 2020 onward, a second wave shall apply mm-wave frequencies for which densely deployed light poles can be appropriate'cell towers.'

Sky internet appears to have been hit by network problems, causing issues for people trying visit websites and use other online services. Hundreds of reports were registered by Down Detector, while users also complained of problems on social media. "Can someone stick 50p in the meter or reconnect the wires?" one customer wrote on Twitter. "Sky internet is down again!" Similar outage reports spread online last month, after network issues in Cornwall left people unable to connect to the internet.

"This is a bill being sold as a privacy bill, but it's a wolf in sheep's clothing," Matt Cagle, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said in an interview. The ACLU, Electronic Frontier Foundation and other civil liberties groups held a virtual rally Thursday night to rail against the bill, calling it vaguely worded and potentially dangerous for low-income communities hit hard by the coronavirus. Their remarks were the latest shots fired from a campaign to halt the legislation. The bill's fate in California--which has pushed for more aggressive privacy protections in recent years--could foreshadow how a potentially huge market for facial recognition technology is regulated by other states. The bill calls for companies and agencies that use facial recognition tools in areas accessible to the public to "provide a conspicuous and contextually appropriate notice" that faces may get scanned.

The identification of light sources is very important for the development of photonic technologies such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and microscopy. Typically, a large number of measurements are needed to classify light sources such as sunlight, laser radiation, and molecule fluorescence. The identification has required collection of photon statistics or quantum state tomography. In recently published work, researchers have used a neural network to dramatically reduce the number of measurements required to discriminate thermal light from coherent light at the single-photon level. In their paper, authors from Louisiana State University, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and Max-Born-Institut describe their experimental and theoretical techniques.

This working from home routine is growing on people. The Pioneer Institute surveyed 700 people -- most in Greater Boston -- during the coronavirus pandemic and nearly 63% said they want to stick at home at least one day a week permanently. That, says the think tank, will be a major factor on how companies invest in commercial real estate and how the state should deliver public transportation where -- and when -- it's needed. "The survey results suggest that the pandemic may lead to significant shifts in attitudes toward commuting, with potentially large impacts on the demand for commercial real estate in major job centers, internet connectivity, and transit and transportation planning and budgeting," said Andrew Mikula, who authored the analysis. The survey hits just weeks after the MBTA announced it will likely need to use about a quarter of the $827 million emergency federal funding it received to close a major pandemic-caused revenue gap in this year's budget.

Like teenagers around the world, Maksat hasn't been to school in weeks. As Kyrgyzstan imposed quarantine restrictions, the 15-year-old feels isolated like never before. He has been trapped at home with a sister he doesn't get on with, a father he struggles to communicate with and a mother working abroad. He is comfortable talking only to an internet chat bot. Maksat (not his real name) feels alone and misunderstood.

There are a number of young technologies that are getting a lot of buzz. But how mature are these technologies? Which of these technologies offer solid ROI, which are worth piloting, and which should be ignored? There are technologies that are proven and widely adopted. In supply chain management, examples would be transportation management, warehouse management, and other well-known supply chain applications.

Headbands developed by BrainCo measure electric signals from neurons in the brain and translate that into an attention score using an algorithm. These days, many students at Jinhua Xiaoshun Primary School in eastern China begin their lessons not by opening textbooks, but by putting on headbands. The headbands, developed by startup BrainCo Inc. of Somerville, Mass., use three electrodes -- one on the forehead and two behind the ears -- to detect electrical activity in the brain, sending the data to a teacher's computer. Software generates real-time alerts about students' attention levels and gives an analysis at the end of each class. The pilot project, designed to help teachers keep tabs on and improve students' attentiveness, offers a glimpse into an artificial-intelligence boom in classrooms across China.

This report is part of "The global AI agenda," a thought leadership program by MIT Technology Review Insights examining how organizations are using AI today and planning to do so in the future. Featuring a global survey of 1,004 AI experts conducted in January and February 2020, it explores AI adoption, leading use cases, benefits, and challenges, and seeks to understand how organizations might share data with each other to develop new business models, products, and services in the years ahead. How are executives in Europe grappling with the opportunities and challenges of AI in their own businesses? What is their AI roadmap and where are they reaping benefits?

At the present scenario, video games portray a crucial role when it comes to AI and ML model development and evaluation. This methodology has been around the corner for a few decades now. The custom-built Nimrod digital computer by Ferranti introduced in 1951 is the first known example of AI in gaming that used the game nim and was used to demonstrate its mathematical capabilities. Currently, the gaming environments have been actively utilised for benchmarking AI agents due to their efficiency in the results. In one of our articles, we discussed how Japanese researchers used Mega Man 2 game to assess AI agents.