Data are often sparse in time, non-stationary, carry seasonality pattern and trends. A frequent requirement for time series techniques is that the data be stationary. This argument holds for the time series models supported here as well. This includes aggregation, resampling, interpolation to fill missing values and more. Time series data often carry seasonality pattern and trends and are non-stationary.

A team of materials scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) – scientists who normally spend their time researching things like high-performance materials for thermoelectrics or battery cathodes – have built a text-mining tool in record time to help the global scientific community synthesize the mountain of scientific literature on COVID-19 being generated every day. The tool, live at covidscholar.org, The hope is that the tool could eventually enable "automated science." "On Google and other search engines people search for what they think is relevant," said Berkeley Lab scientist Gerbrand Ceder, one of the project leads. "Our objective is to do information extraction so that people can find nonobvious information and relationships. That's the whole idea of machine learning and natural language processing that will be applied on these datasets."

Lead author Dr Tracy Xu, Lecturer in Hospitality at The University of Surrey's world-renowned School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, has had her paper published in the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. The research behind the paper involved speaking to 19 hotel HR experts to identify the key trends and major challenges that will emerge in the next ten years and how leaders should deal with the challenges brought about by service robot technologies. Results showed that while service robots are anticipated to increase efficiency and productivity of hotel activities, they may also pose challenges such as high costs, skill deficits and significant changes to the organizational structure and culture of hotels. Therefore, the anticipated applications and integration of robotic technology will require leaders of the future to carefully consider the balance between the roles of service robots and human employees in the guest experience and to nurture a work environment that embraces open-mindedness and change. The project finished in March 2020 just as COVID-19 broke out and as the virus rendered non-essential travel impossible, most hotels around the globe are feeling a catastrophic economic impact.

Smartphone giant LG has announced its upcoming mid-range flagship, the Velvet, as it launches in South Korea. The phone will feature a "raindrop" triple-camera array, where the lenses are ordered in descending size on the back of the phone, and has a 6.8-inch OLED display with a notch in the centre. As documented in older posts from the technology giant, that main camera will be comprised of 48MP, 8MP, and 5MP cameras and the front-camera is rumoured to have a 16MP resolution. Powering the phone will be the 5G-compatible Qualcomm's 765 processor, found in competing devices from Oppo and Motorola, and Google's Pixel 5. Only one variety of the phone has been announced, with 8GB of processing power and 128GB of storage.

A number of projects are aimed at minimizing direct contact between health workers and patients. Temi had already identified a market for personal robotic assistants, costing about $2,000, that resemble an iPad on a parking-meter-high wheeled pedestal. Rafael and Elbit have now adapted them to operate in fleets, and to allow doctors to monitor patients or deliver them medicine without ever entering their rooms, said Yossi Wolf, who previously developed robots to help Israeli soldiers deal with Hamas tunnels or chemical weapons.

The last German military communications decoded at Bletchley Park in World War Two have been revealed to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day. They were broadcast on 7 May 1945 by a military radio network making its final stand in Cuxhaven on Germany's North Sea coast. The message reports the arrival of British troops and ends: "Closing down for ever - all the best - goodbye." After Germany surrendered, VE Day was declared the next day. In 1944, this German military radio network, codenamed BROWN, had extended across Europe sending reports about the development of experimental weapons.

Waymo's cars will be back on the road in Metro Phoenix as soon as May 11th. The Alphabet-owned autonomous driving company suspended its operations in March, save for some full-driverless rides, in order to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Now, after "careful consideration and active conversations" with its teams and authorities, Waymo has decided to implement a tiered approach in restarting its activities. The company has listed the steps it's taking to move forward safely, including practicing social distancing guidelines in its facilities and cleaning its vehicles multiple times a day. "We're taking a thoughtful and measured approach towards bringing our driving operations back on the road," Waymo said.

Startup Clearview AI has built a facial recognition system that claims to be able to ID people in real-time, matching them with billions of images pulled from databases and scraped from social media. Earlier this year, a list containing the names of private companies using or possibly interested in using the technology leaked out as regulators began to scrutinize the outfit, and people filed lawsuits. According to Buzzfeed News, Clearview AI said in a filing that "Clearview is cancelling the accounts of every customer who was not either associated with law enforcement or some other federal, state, or local government department, office, or agency," and cancelling the accounts of all entities in Illinois. It's being sued for allegedly breaking a state law concerning the use of biometric information by scraping images from the plaintiff's social media accounts to train its algorithm. The leak listed companies like Best Buy and Macy's as clients, showing how far-reaching the surveillance tech could become.

Again and again, the mistakes that the Trump Administration makes in handling the coronavirus crisis seem to break in the worst possible direction. The latest example concerns antibody tests, which are meant to show whether someone has had COVID-19, but, in practice, often do not. There are more than two hundred tests out there now, produced by a wide range of companies and labs, with little control over how they are marketed; only a dozen have even gone through the process of getting what's known as an Emergency Use Authorization, or E.U.A., from the Food and Drug Administration, which is less rigorous than a normal approval. The F.D.A. has told other companies that they can go ahead and peddle their tests based on self-reported measures of accuracy to clinics, doctors' offices, businesses, or state and local governments. Some tests are not just imperfect but shoddy; "terrible" is the word one researcher used in describing certain tests to CNN.

There is a combination of wonder and amusement in seeing robots performing human activities. Even a simple greeting or serving a dish by a robot looks entertaining. Tech entrepreneur Supriya Rathi Bagri is expanding the horizons of robotic entertainment by combining her two loves, robotics and sports, through RoboVR, the startup she founded in 2016. Supriya, who holds a master's in intelligent robotics from Sheffield Hallam University in the UK, was introduced to the world and science of robotics during her second year of undergraduate studies at Shri Ramdeobaba Kamla Nehru College in Nagpur, Maharashtra. Supriya says she knew in 2008 that she wanted to pursue a career in the field of robotics.