The future is coming at Croydon fast. It might not look like Britain's cutting edge but North End, a pedestrianised high street lined with the usual mix of pawn shops, fast-food outlets and branded clothing stores, is expected to be one of two roads to host the UK's first fixed facial recognition cameras. Digital photographs of passersby will be silently taken and processed to extract the measurements of facial features, known as biometric data. They will be immediately compared by artificial intelligence to images on a watchlist. Alerts can lead to arrests.

Police believe live facial recognition cameras may become "commonplace" in England and Wales, according to internal documents, with the number of faces scanned having doubled to nearly 5m in the last year. A joint investigation by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates highlights the speed at which the technology is becoming a staple of British policing. Major funding is being allocated and hardware bought, while the British state is also looking to enable police forces to more easily access the full spread of its image stores, including passport and immigration databases, for retrospective facial recognition searches. Live facial recognition involves the matching of faces caught on surveillance camera footage against a police watchlist in real time, in what campaigners liken to the continual finger printing of members of the public as they go about their daily lives. Retrospective facial recognition software is used by the police to match images on databases with those caught on CCTV and other systems.

Live facial recognition cameras are a form of mass surveillance, human rights campaigners have said, as the Met police said it would press ahead with its use of the "gamechanging" technology. Britain's largest force said the technology could be used to catch terrorists and find missing people after research published on Wednesday reported a "substantial improvement" in its accuracy. The research, carried out by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), found there were minimal discrepancies for race and sex when the technology was used at certain settings. It was commissioned by the Met and South Wales police in late 2021 after fierce public debate about police use of the technology. But the human rights groups Liberty, Big Brother Watch and Amnesty have said the technology is oppressive and "turns us into walking ID cards".

Building on recent research for prediction of hurricane trajectories using recurrent neural networks (RNNs), we have developed improved methods and generalized the approach to predict Bayesian intervals in addition to simple point estimates. Tropical storms are capable of causing severe damage, so accurately predicting their trajectories can bring significant benefits to cities and lives, especially as they grow more intense due to climate change effects. By implementing the Bayesian interval using dropout in an RNN, we improve the actionability of the predictions, for example by estimating the areas to evacuate in the landfall region. We used an RNN to predict the trajectory of the storms at 6-hour intervals. We used latitude, longitude, windspeed, and pressure features from a Statistical Hurricane Intensity Prediction Scheme (SHIPS) dataset of about 500 tropical storms in the Atlantic Ocean.