Intel has a disastrous history with smartphones. It fumbled a chance to be in Apple's first iPhone, and then quit making its Atom smartphone chip to focus on modems. But the company is now set to ship a groundbreaking modem that will deliver data transfer rates many times faster than most wired internet connections. The chipmaker will start shipping its first 5G modem for testing in the second half this year. Beyond mobile devices, the modem could also be used in autonomous cars, servers, base stations, networking equipment, drones, robots, and other internet-of-things devices.

CES kicks off this week from Las Vegas, and PCMag will be there, wandering the floor, throwing some elbows for prime seats at press conferences, and getting you a hands-on look at all the tech that will be making waves in 2017. Here's what we expect to see. AT&T and T-Mobile both have major press conferences at CES. AT&T's presser is usually about connected devices and the Internet of Things rather than phones, but expect some details on 5G, as well. T-Mobile says it's having an UnCarrier announcement, which usually means some big service plan improvement. On the chipset side, the big news will undoubtably be Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835, the mysterious 10-nanometer processor that will be in many flagship phones next year.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant behind Apple's iPhone and numerous other major electronics devices, aims to automate away a vast majority of its human employees, according to a report from DigiTimes. Dai Jia-peng, the general manager of Foxconn's automation committee, says the company has a three-phase plan in place to automate its Chinese factories using software and in-house robotics units, known as Foxbots. The first phase of Foxconn's automation plans involve replacing the work that is either dangerous or involves repetitious labor humans are unwilling to do. The second phase involves improving efficiency by streamlining production lines to reduce the number of excess robots in use. The third and final phase involves automating entire factories, "with only a minimal number of workers assigned for production, logistics, testing, and inspection processes," according to Jia-peng.

Taking a look back at seven days of news and headlines across the world of Android, this week's Android Circuit includes a new voice for the Galaxy S8, the return of the S-Pen, Pixel power problems, Android's battery win, the shutdown of Cyanogen, WileyFox's quick change to Nougat, a North Korean Android tablet's spyware, and Super Mario Run prepares for its Android arrival. Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week (and you can find the weekly Apple news digest here). The Samsung Galaxy S8 could be picking up a new tool named Bixby, a voice-powered digital assistant along the lines of Siri and Google Assistant. Viv Labs is the company behind the technology, and Samsung recently acquired it, so it makes sense for the South Koreans to stake its claim in this space. But will that upset Google?

Statistical methods for network data often parameterize the edge-probability by attributing latent traits such as block structure to the vertices and assume exchangeability in the sense of the Aldous-Hoover representation theorem. These assumptions are however incompatible with traits found in real-world networks such as a power-law degree-distribution. Recently, Caron & Fox (2014) proposed the use of a different notion of exchangeability after Kallenberg (2005) and obtained a network model which permits edge-inhomogeneity, such as a power-law degree-distribution whilst retaining desirable statistical properties. However, this model does not capture latent vertex traits such as block-structure. In this work we re-introduce the use of block-structure for network models obeying Kallenberg’s notion of exchangeability and thereby obtain a collapsed model which both admits the inference of block-structure and edge inhomogeneity. We derive a simple expression for the likelihood and an efficient sampling method. The obtained model is not significantly more difficult to implement than existing approaches to block-modelling and performs well on real network datasets.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant behind Apple's iPhone and numerous other major electronics devices, aims to automate away a vast majority of its human employees, according to a report from DigiTimes. Dai Jia-peng, the general manager of Foxconn's automation committee, says the company has a three-phase plan in place to automate its Chinese factories using software and in-house robotics units, known as Foxbots. The first phase of Foxconn's automation plans involve replacing the work that is either dangerous or involves repetitious labor humans are unwilling to do. The second phase involves improving efficiency by streamlining production lines to reduce the number of excess robots in use. The third and final phase involves automating entire factories, "with only a minimal number of workers assigned for production, logistics, testing, and inspection processes," according to Jia-peng.

Samsung is in need of a show-stopper phone after the fiasco of its Galaxy Note 7's exploding. Now, new rumours suggest that its upcoming Galaxy S8 will use its built-in AI assistant in all of the phone's pre-installed apps. The voice-guided assistant, reportedly named'Bixby', could be used for a wide variety of functions in a similar way to Apple's Siri. The Samsung Galaxy S8 will use its built-in AI assistant in all of the phone's included Samsung-made apps, reports suggest. For instance, the assistant could be used in the Gallery app to show photos of the beach.

Earlier this year, Samsung acquired Viv, an artificial intelligence assistant from the creators of Siri. Now it's been discovered that Samsung's Bixby will be powered by Viv's tech and will be supported in almost all of the Galaxy S8's native apps. Bixby is said to work system wide on the Galaxy S8. This means that most of the apps that are already preinstalled on Samsung's smartphone will support the AI assistant, according to SamMobile. For example, a user will be able to ask Bixby to show photos taken at a particular date in the Gallery app.

Samsung's Galaxy S8 is expected to include the debut of its new voice-based digital assistant. Following on from the South Korean company's acquisition of Viv Labs, the technology from this artificial intelligence platform will be baked into Samsung's software on the upcoming flagship. Previous Galaxy handsets have supported voice interaction using its S Voice application, but the inclusion of a new voice-powered digital assistant (that many are calling'Bixby') should give Samsung an AI presence in all of the Galaxy S8's own applications (reports SamMobile). It also gives Samsung a stronger foothold into the world of digital AI alongside the likes of Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri, and Google's imaginatively named Google Assistant. And it is the latter which could raise some eyebrows in Mountain View.

Samsung's Galaxy S8 is expected to include the debut of a new voice-based digital assistant. Following on from the South Korean company's acquisition of Viv Labs, the technology from this artificial intelligence platform will be baked into Samsung's software on the upcoming flagship. Previous Galaxy handsets have supported voice interaction using its S Voice application, but the inclusion of a new voice-powered digital assistant (that many are calling'Bixby') should give Samsung an AI presence in all of the Galaxy S8's own applications (reports SamMobile). It also gives Samsung a stronger foothold into the world of digital AI alongside the likes of Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri, and Google's imaginatively named Google Assistant. And it is the latter which could raise some eyebrows in Mountain View.