The European Union needs to brace itself for the prospect of a new wave of technology and productivity resurgence in ten to fifteen years' time, spearheaded by the implementation of AI and robotics innovations. This was the message introduced by Stefan Crets, Executive Director of CSR Europe, who, opening the high-level event, said that digitisation required a new agility in the workplace and a new way of collaborating. "The future of work is determined by the actions we take today and the choices we make. What we want to do is exchange experience, pull the expertise together and find the best practices." Economist Mirko Draca, co-author of a London School of Economics (LSE) report commissioned by Huawei, entitled'The evolving role of ICT in the economy,' said that a new wave of automation had started.

AI is the name of the game as new Android-powered machines push the innovation envelope. Last week's launch by Google of its Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL smartphones and last night's (16 October) launch by Huawei of its new flagship Mate 20 Pro indicate a rising sophistication among Android phone manufacturers. The style isn't just in the materials used to make attractive-looking devices, but also under the hood in terms of powerful new electronics and new dimensions of artificial intelligence (AI). 'Consumers are holding on to their handsets longer and longer, so making sure they're able to run effectively for their entire lifespan should be a key concern for manufacturers' – DOMINIC SUNNEBO For example, Google's Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL came with such refinements as the Snapdragon 845 processor, an amazing camera, 4GB of RAM front-facing stereo speakers and a new Titan M security chip. The Huawei smartphones feature a powerful new Kirin 980 processor – claimed to be Huawei's first 7nm devices – which will considerably step up the game against Apple's new A12 chip in the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR devices.

Huawei is not afraid to address the elephant in the room. When US mobile carrier AT&T pulled out of a deal to sell the Mate 10 Pro in January, the CEO of Huawei's consumer business unit, Yu Chengdong (Richard Yu), went off-script at the end of his CES 2018 keynote and tackled the topic head-on. Similarly, when Huawei made artificial intelligence the central theme of its annual Huawei Connect conference in Shanghai, rotating chairman Xu Zhijun (Eric Xu) was quick to bring up the topic of jobs in his opening speech. Concern that robots would replace human workers was a recurring topic throughout Huawei Connect 2018. Speakers addressed the issue during product launches, technical presentations, and panel discussions, offering varying perspectives around the fundamental impact AI will have on the nature of (human) work.

New communication standards need to deal with machine-to-machine communications, in which users may start or stop transmitting at any time in an asynchronous manner. Thus, the number of users is an unknown and time-varying parameter that needs to be accurately estimated in order to properly recover the symbols transmitted by all users in the system. In this paper, we address the problem of joint channel parameter and data estimation in a multiuser communication channel in which the number of transmitters is not known. For that purpose, we develop the infinite factorial finite state machine model, a Bayesian nonparametric model based on the Markov Indian buffet that allows for an unbounded number of transmitters with arbitrary channel length. We propose an inference algorithm that makes use of slice sampling and particle Gibbs with ancestor sampling. Our approach is fully blind as it does not require a prior channel estimation step, prior knowledge of the number of transmitters, or any signaling information. Our experimental results, loosely based on the LTE random access channel, show that the proposed approach can effectively recover the data-generating process for a wide range of scenarios, with varying number of transmitters, number of receivers, constellation order, channel length, and signal-to-noise ratio.

Chinese technology giant Huawei on Tuesday unveiled its flagship Mate 20, Mate 20 Pro, Mate 20X and Porsche Design Mate 20RS smartphones at an event at ExCel -- the largest conference venue in London. These are the first devices from Huawei's stable to be powered by the world's first 5G-ready 7nm (nanometre) chipset Kirin 980, equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. No Mate series device has, however, made it to India before and the company has not made it clear yet if the new line-up will be launched in India. HUAWEI Mate 20 with 4GB RAM 128GB ROM configuration would be available for 799 euros (roughly Rs 67,800) and HUAWEI Mate 20 with 6GB RAM 128GB storage configuration would cost 849 euros (Rs 72,000, approximately). Both devices went on sale on Tuesday.

LONDON – SoftBank Group Corp.'s Pepper humanoid robot testified on Tuesday at the Education Committee of Britain's House of Commons. It was the first time in the long history of the British Parliament, which has served as the world's standard-setter of the parliamentary system, for a nonhuman to present an opinion, people familiar with the matter said. Pepper answered questions during a committee session to discuss the fourth industrial revolution, which uses robots and other new technologies, and the development of education brought on by artificial intelligence. "Good morning, chair," Pepper started off by saying. "Thank you for inviting me to give evidence today," it proceeded.

The complete part of the earthquake frequency-magnitude distribution (FMD), above completeness magnitude mc, is well described by the Gutenberg-Richter law. The parameter mc however varies in space due to the seismic network configuration, yielding a convoluted FMD shape below max(mc). This paper investigates the shape of the generalized FMD (GFMD), which may be described as a mixture of elemental FMDs (eFMDs) defined as asymmetric Laplace distributions of mode mc [Mignan, 2012, https://doi.org/10.1029/2012JB009347]. An asymmetric Laplace mixture model (GFMD- ALMM) is thus proposed with its parameters (detection parameter kappa, Gutenberg-Richter beta-value, mc distribution, as well as number K and weight w of eFMD components) estimated using a semi-supervised hard expectation maximization approach including BIC penalties for model complexity. The performance of the proposed method is analysed, with encouraging results obtained: kappa, beta, and the mc distribution range are retrieved for different GFMD shapes in simulations, as well as in regional catalogues (southern and northern California, Nevada, Taiwan, France), in a global catalogue, and in an aftershock sequence (Christchurch, New Zealand). We find max(mc) to be conservative compared to other methods, kappa = k/log(10) = 3 in most catalogues (compared to beta = b/log(10) = 1), but also that biases in kappa and beta may occur when rounding errors are present below completeness. The GFMD-ALMM, by modelling different FMD shapes in an autonomous manner, opens the door to new statistical analyses in the realm of incomplete seismicity data, which could in theory improve earthquake forecasting by considering c. ten times more events.

Chinese manufacturer Huawei has been on the brink of the big time for some years now, gently edging up the list of most popular phone manufacturers and, earlier this year, overtook Apple to the number two position, with only Samsung ranking above it. Much of that was down to the Huawei P20 Pro, released in the Spring and chiefly noticeable for an astonishing photographic capability thanks to three rear cameras, all made in conjunction with Leica. Today, the company revealed its latest phone, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro. Huawei's timetable sees two main releases a year, with the bigger-screen Mate Series taking the autumn slot. Quite a lot actually, and while some manufacturers seem to offer incremental upgrades every six or 12 months, the Mate 20 Pro is stuffed to the gills with innovation, including a super-cool reverse wireless charging feature.

Huawei's new Mate 20 Pro has a massive screen, three cameras on the back and a fingerprint scanner embedded in the display. The new top-end phone from the Chinese firm aims to secure its place at the top of the market alongside Samsung, having recently beaten Apple to become the second-largest smartphone manufacturer in August. The Mate 20 Pro follows Huawei's tried and trusted format for its Mate series: a huge 6.39in QHD OLED screen, big 4,200mAh battery and powerful new Huawei Kirin 980 processor – Huawei's first to be produced at 7 nanometres, matching Apple's latest A12 chip in the 2018 iPhones. New for this year is an infrared 3D facial recognition system, similar to that used by Apple for its Face ID in the iPhone XS, and one of the first fingerprint scanners embedded in the screen that is widely available in the UK, removing the need for a fingerprint scanner on the back or a notch on the front. The Mate 20 Pro is water resistant to IP68 standards and has a sleek new design reminiscent of Samsung's S-series phones, with curved glass on the front and back.

Huawei has released its Atlas computing platform, which is powered by its new Ascend series of artificial intelligence chips. It announced the new devices during Huawei Connect 2018, its annual conference in Shanghai. "The Atlas intelligent computing platform integrates various forms of products, such as modules, cards, boards, edge stations, and appliances, to build an all-scenario AI infrastructure covering the end, edge, and cloud," Huawei said. Huawei also said that the new Atlas platform is an evolution of the cloud hardware platform it released last year, and consists of several devices. These include the Atlas 200 AI accelerator module aimed at terminals, the Atlas 300 AI accelerator card designed for data centre use, the Atlas 500 AI edge station, and the Atlas 800 AI appliance, positioned for enterprises. The key features of Huawei's new Atlas product line are summarised below: