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.

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U.K. politicians are testing their messages on AI-generated focus groups U.K. Artificial Intelligence Minister Kanishka Narayan leaves No. 10 Downing Street in London in July. U.K. politicians looking to gauge how British voters will react to their policies have a new cohort on which to test their ideas: AI-generated focus groups. Startups Electric Twin and Artificial Societies, and more established research firms GWI and Toluna are using data from real focus groups and surveys to build AI personas able to react to political messages within minutes. Another firm, London-based Synthetic Respondents, charges $16 (£12) a project, which it says is a thousandth of the cost of a traditional piece of focus group research. Critics warn that reliance on AI-generated focus groups could detach politicians from reality. But the technology also has the potential to transform their ability to sense-test their ideas, making it quicker and more affordable to gauge how real-life voters may react to policies, and giving backbenchers access to analysis that might previously have been outside their budget.

Meta's Ad Sales Are Suffering Now That Europeans Can Pick Less Personalization An earnings briefing on Wednesday revealed ad revenue has slowed since the European Union introduced the Less Personalized Ads models at the beginning of this year. Meta's advertising growth in Europe is slowing now that residents have the option for less of their personal data to influence what advertisements they see. Advertising revenue in Europe continued to decelerate in the three months through September, the company said on Wednesday, underperforming its global figures. In the region, advertising revenue grew 18 percent year-on-year, slowing from the previous two quarters and lagging the 33 percent growth seen in the US and Canada. Though Meta did not explicitly blame the introduction of the Less Personalized Ads model on Wednesday, chief financial officer Susan Li had previously warned "we're seeing the impact of less personalized ads offering in Europe now that it's fully rolled out, and that may be an additional headwind," in July's second quarter results follow-up call.

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