Raphael Memmesheimer has been successfully competing in the RoboCup@Home league winning the RoboCup@Home competition five times. He and his colleagues won the best paper award at RoboCup 2026 for their work "Efficient Image Annotation via Semi-Supervised Object Segmentation with Label Propagation" . We caught up with Raphael to find out more about this research, his history with RoboCup, and the challenges of the @Home competition. Could you start by telling us how you got involved with RoboCup@Home? I've actually been involved in the @Home league since I was a student, and my first time going to a World Cup for @Home was in 2013.

Dog that hunts invasive'sea vomit' honoured as animal of the year A working dog from the Scottish Highlands has been named animal of the year by a charity for hunting down an invasive marine creature called the carpet sea squirt. This organism, also nicknamed sea vomit, is particularly harmful to coastal wildlife and economies. Working at low tide with her owner, Dr Texa Sim, black labrador Sgiath has found hundreds of colonies of the sea squirt, which - if left uncontrolled - can smother and kill native species. Sgiath is thought to be the UK's first sea squirt-hunting dog. She's a natural says Dr Sim proudly.

Simbarashe Kundizeza says the story is entirely his own work. Simbarashe Kundizeza says the story is entirely his own work. The Zimbabwean writer Simbarashe Kundizeza has denied using AI to write a prize-winning short story after an article in the Atlantic said software had flagged it as almost completely AI-generated. Kundizeza's story The Blue Fighter was announced as the winner of the prestigious Caine prize for African writers on 6 October. Five days later, The Atlantic published an article by the author and journalist Vauhini Vara titled: "Yet Another Literary prize winner Seems to Be AI." Vara said that she had run the story through the AI-detection software Pangram, which itself uses AI, and it had deemed the story to be almost completely artificially generated.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy says Russia attacked Ukraine's energy infrastructure despite Donald Trump's ceasefire announcement, accusing Vladimir Putin of rejecting peace efforts.

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva speaks during the IMF/World Bank 2026 Annual Meetings in Bangkok on Monday. The head of the International Monetary Fund has warned of the disruptive threat from artificial intelligence to the labor market and taxation, urging policymakers to rethink education and act now to help society adapt. "It is a slow-moving tsunami, but tsunami none the less," Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said Monday during her first appearance at the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Bangkok. Speaking at a session on AI's impact on employment, she said the technology is already hollowing out demand for many human workers by taking over routine, repetitive tasks. At the same time, it is increasing low-paying jobs in sectors like construction, which she said is "not a story to celebrate."

Waymo and two Japanese firms, Go and Nihon Kotsu, will jointly launch driverless taxi services in Tokyo in 2027. Metropolitan Police Department plans to set up next spring a section dedicated to the investigation and prevention of accidents involving autonomous driving, the force has said. High-level knowledge and skills are necessary to investigate the causes of such accidents and the Tokyo police hope to accumulate expertise and share it with police departments in other prefectures amid the spread of autonomous driving trials held across the country. The new section, to be created within the police department's traffic bureau, will be in charge of handling applications for Level 4 services -- under which a system handles all driving operations under specified conditions -- as well as investigating accidents and advocating accident prevention. Taxi-hailing app operator Go, U.S. self-driving technology firm Waymo and taxi operator Nihon Kotsu announced in September that they will jointly launch driverless taxi services in Tokyo in 2027, marking Japan's first such commercial service.

Hitachi and other electronics makers are receiving a flurry of inquiries about their cyberdefense services. With a growing number of Japanese firms falling prey to unauthorized computer system breaches, major electronics makers are facing a flurry of inquiries about their cyberdefense services. The demand is expected to continue growing as these companies expand their service offerings to counter increasingly sophisticated, AI-driven cyberattacks. "We are receiving more and more requests for consultations about how to ensure business continuity in the event of cyberattacks, from client companies responsible for critical infrastructure, such as power suppliers, transport service providers, manufacturers and financial service firms," Kanako Gushi, senior consultant at Hitachi, said. Last month, the company started providing a comprehensive service that supports operations such as monitoring and detecting cyberattack risks and restoring affected systems, leveraging state-of-the-art AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic in the United States.

Trump's AI liability push opens blame game for models gone rogue The Trump administration's embrace of legal liability to enforce artificial intelligence safety sets the stage for future conflicts over who foots the bill when AI models go rogue: the companies that design the systems or the people that deploy the technology. Holding AI developers financially responsible for the safety of their products has won support from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and former White House AI czar David Sacks, who argue that existing liability laws would be more effective than new rules. President Donald Trump, in spurning new AI safeguards, has taken it a step further, saying the Justice Department should intervene if models get out of hand. In a sign of the administration's increased willingness to invoke current law to address safety concerns, Trump's newly launched AI task force late Friday warned developers that they are required to report and resolve security incidents or face potential unspecified consequences. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

In a report outlining previously undisclosed incidents, Anthropic listed four types of unintended behaviors that the AI has demonstrated, including exploiting basic flaws in software to run commands, submitting forms it should not have, and bypassing restrictions to access certain public data. Anthropic said its Claude AI model carried out additional unintended actions on the digital systems of outside organizations, including some U.S. government agencies' websites, prompting a warning from U.S. President Donald Trump's administration for artificial intelligence companies to secure their systems. In a report outlining previously undisclosed incidents, Anthropic listed four types of unintended behaviors that the AI has demonstrated, including exploiting basic flaws in software to run commands, submitting forms it should not have and bypassing restrictions to access certain public data. The company said that some of the cases involved websites run by government agencies at the federal, state and local levels, without specifying the agencies. The report did not name the outside entities involved, which Anthropic said was at the request of some of the affected parties.

Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who is running for governor of New York, released campaign ads featuring Zohran Mamdani, New York City mayor, and Kathy Hochul, the state's governor, gardening together and collaborating to raise prices for residents. Another ad features Hochul talking about hiking tolls and fares so people cannot afford to drive or take the subway. A spate of AI-generated ads that are obviously fake but grab voter attention have been a feature of campaigns in the lead up to the pivotal United States midterm elections on November 3. While regulation has focused on labelling AI deepfakes that could mislead voters, it is "slopaganda" - or identifiably fake ads - that mark this campaign season, says Scott Babwah Brennen, director of New York University's Center on Technology Policy and co-author of a recent report, Political Slopaganda. Political candidates and their supporters have spent more than $80m to make more than 164 AI-based ads this election season, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, a non-partisan election advertising tracker.