In general, the interest lies in obtaining informations about the central characteristics of the underlying lifetime distribution (mean lifetime or survival probabilities for instance), often with the objective of comparing results between different conditions under which the lifetime data are acquired. In this work, we will address the problem of inferring about the (upper) tail of the lifetime distribution, for data subject both to random (right) censoring and competing risks. Suppose indeed that we are interested in the lifetimes of n individuals or items, which are subject to K different causes of death or failure, and to random censorship (from the right) as well. We are particularly interested in one of these causes (this main cause will be considered as cause number k thereafter, where k P t1,..., Ku), and we suppose that all causes are exclusive and are likely to be dependent on the others. The censoring time is assumed to be independent of the different causes of death or failure and of the observed lifetime itself.

Folks, I've been a partner in Women Who Tech's Women Startup Challenge since they first launched this great initiative 18 months ago. They've been really serious and effective, helping to showcase and fund the best early stage women-led startups. This time around, I'm co-sponsoring with investors Fred and Joanne Wilson to award $50K as a cash grant to the winner of the 4th Women Startup Challenge focused on virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). Global law firm Paul Hastings, LLP is also offering $35K in pro bono legal services. Great tech deserves to be recognized, regardless of gender.

Julian Assange will not hand himself in despite a promise to do so if Chelsea Manning was granted clemency, according to one of his lawyers. WikiLeaks had pledged in a tweet that its founder would agree to be extradited to the US if Barack Obama granted clemency to Ms Manning, which he did in the final hours of his presidency. Mr Assange's lawyers initially seemed to suggest that promise would be carried through – telling reporters that he stood by his earlier comments – but it appears now that Mr Assange will stay inside the embassy. The commitment to accept extradition to the US was based on Ms Manning being released immediately, Mr Assange's lawyer told The Hill. Ms Manning won't actually be released until May – to allow for a standard 120-day transition period, which gives people time to prepare and find somewhere to live, an official told The New York Times for its original report about Ms Manning's clemency.

At the Detroit Auto Show last week, Volkswagen hoped to escape the present with a nod to the past, introducing a revamped version of its iconic flat-faced, boxy Microbus, the vehicle that shepherded the counterculture across the interstates some five decades ago. The bus's reincarnation is a battery-propelled, self-driving vehicle called ID Buzz. But nostalgic wing-vent windows and chrome trim could not distract from the company's current predicament. Barely had the auto show kicked off when the Justice Department announced that VW had pleaded guilty to criminal and civil charges related to its efforts to cheat on U.S. emissions standards. The company agreed to pay $4.3 billion in penalties, the largest fine ever levied by the U.S. government on an auto company, dwarfing both Toyota's $1.2-billion settlement for vehicle-safety problems involving unintended acceleration and GM's nine-hundred-million-dollar settlement for ignition-switch defects.

Although few details about Fanny's activism have survived, her advocacy was part of a larger, well-documented animal protection movement, which emerged in England at the tail end of the 18th century. By the second half of the 19th century, activists had set their sights on vivisection, speaking out about what they saw as barbaric laboratory practices. These activists, who were primarily women, formed anti-vivisection societies, made their case in articles and public lectures, disrupted demonstrations by prominent vivisectors, and lobbied for legislation to restrict or ban the practice.

Married couples will only have sex on special occasions, turning to robots to satisfy their day-to-day needs, experts have predicted. Speaking at an international robotics conference, those working in the field predicted that the use of artificial intelligence (AI) devices in the bedroom will be the norm within 25 years. Dr Trudy Barber, an expert in the relationship between technology and sexual intercourse, compared the rise of sex robots to that of the e-book and said the machine would would allow people to appreciate'the real thing' more. Douglas Hines, Engineer-inventor poses with his company's'True Companion' sex robot, Roxxxy, which is one of the options that is already on the market At the International Congress of Love and Sex with Robotics, Dr Barber yesterday said that society's readiness to embrace technology means it was only a matter of time before it also plays a significant role in people's sex lives. She said: 'It could be that we are so busy with our lives, we are so embedded in our technological narrative that the idea of engaging in long-distance sex and robot sex is actually a natural process in our evolutionary cycle.

The race is on to develop self-driving cars that are able to navigate busy roads safely. Now, Amazon has been awarded a patent for a road network that controls how autonomous vehicles could one day navigate a busy motorway. The patent hints at Amazon's ambitions to control fleets of vehicles and roads as well as its dream of'reversible lanes' to help ease congestion. Reversible lanes could essentially change the direction of a flow of traffic, with the traffic management system communicating with cars to allow them to travel safely in the direction they want without slowing other vehicles down. The patent, awarded by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in Alexandria, Virginia, reads: 'A roadway management system can generate lane configurations for a roadway or a portion of the roadway.

Despite advances in forensic techniques, criminal investigations still rely on age-old tools such as eyewitness testimony, which can be biased and unreliable. But what if we could take advantage of other human abilities, such as sense of smell or a talent for facial recognition? Researchers are exploring that possibility and other crime-fighting techniques that rely less on human judgment and more on big data crunching such as an algorithm that predicts an offender's risk of committing another crime. These approaches need to be validated before we put them to use, but research suggests they could be a boon to the criminal justice system. Imagine witnessing a crime and being called into a police station where a detective presents you with an array of human scents.

A legal knowledge based system called JUSTICE is presented which can identify heterogeneous representations of concepts across all major Australian jurisdictions, and some concepts within US and UK cases. The knowledge representation scheme used for legal and common sense concepts is inspired by human processes for the identification of concepts and the expected order and location of concepts. These are supported by flexible search functions and various string utilities. JUSTICE is a client-based legal software agent which works with both plaintext and HTML representations of legal cases over file systems, and the World Wide Web. In creating JUSTICE an ontology for legal cases was developed, and this is implicit within JUSTICE.

The effective use of argument is, of course, central to the practice of Law, and it is important that students of Law learn this skill. We describe here the architecture of a computer-based system to enable students to practice argumentation in a regulated environment. The system makes use of the concept of a dialogue game as a means of providing the necessary rule-governed structure for the conduct of an argument between two students, or a student and a teacher. The architecture described is generic in that it can be instantiated with different forms of dialogue game. This instantiation is achieved by the use of performatives to specify the rules of the game and the semantics of operations within the Dialogue Abstract Machine that is used to implement it.