In November, the San Francisco Police Department proposed approving the use of remote-controlled robots with deadly force. This was after a law came into effect requiring California officials to define the authorized use of military-grade equipment. It would have allowed police to equip robots with explosives "to contact, incapacitate or disorient violent, armed or dangerous suspects." San Francisco's Board of Supervisors approved this proposal, initially, despite opposition by civil rights groups. However, during the second of two required votes, the board voted to ban the use of lethal force by police robots. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, this is unusual as the board's second votes typically echo the first results.

Put a microphone in front of Phil Spencer and the guy will always deliver. Spencer, who you may or may not know as the head of Microsoft Gaming (he's in charge of all things Xbox), sat down with the Wall Street Journal at its WSJ Tech Live event for a wide-ranging interview about everything from Microsoft's plans for mobile gaming to Spencer's personal feelings on the metaverse. Spencer is one of the few industry leaders who actually gives real answers to questions on occasion (and comes across as "one of the good guys" for it), so let's break down the highlights. Undoubtedly the funniest thing Spencer said at WSJ Tech Live came at the expense of Meta's Mark Zuckerberg-fueled metaverse efforts. As you can see at about the 1:15 mark in this clip from the WSJ YouTube channel, Spencer seemed to take a bit of a jab at Meta's work-focused metaverse, without naming names of course.

Xbox boss Phil Spencer is not impressed by the metaverse as it is currently. Spencer is at WSJ Live taking questions and was asked about his thoughts on the metaverse. As reported by The Verge's Tom Warren, Spencer was critical of the version of the metaverse that currently exists. "Today it's a poorly built video game. Building a metaverse that's like a living room is not how I want to spend my time." However, Spencer adds that it's early days and that "this will evolve."

The UK's competition regulator has raised concerns about Microsoft's $68.7bn deal to buy the Call of Duty publisher, Activision Blizzard, and given the two companies five days to offer solutions. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) warned that the Xbox owner's proposed takeover of the company behind popular titles including World of Warcraft and Candy Crush, which would be the biggest ever gaming industry merger, "could substantially lessen competition in gaming consoles, multi-game subscription services, and cloud gaming services". The CMA added: "Microsoft already has a leading gaming console (Xbox), a leading cloud platform (Azure), and the leading PC operating system (Windows OS), all of which could be important to its success in cloud gaming." The two companies now have five working days to submit proposals to address its concerns, and if suitable suggestions are not submitted, the deal will be referred for a phase 2 investigation, allowing an independent panel of experts to examine the risks in greater detail. "We are concerned that Microsoft could use its control over popular games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft post-merger to harm rivals, including recent and future rivals in multi-game subscription services and cloud gaming," said Sorcha O'Carroll, the CMA's senior director of mergers.

The United Kingdom's antitrust regulator is concerned that Microsoft's blockbuster purchase of Activision Blizzard could create a monopoly in the nascent cloud gaming space. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which began investigating the deal back in July, says that it's not yet reassured by the promises Microsoft has made to get the deal done. It feels that, once Activision is a part of Microsoft, the Xbox maker could use its "control over popular games like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft" to "harm rivals" by boxing them out of access to popular titles. Microsoft has already publicly committed not to hoard exclusives, (and said that Actiblizz's library isn't all that anyway) but sweet words haven't appeased the officials. In a statement, it said that it was giving Microsoft and Activision five days to submit proposals that would address its concerns.

Linear bandits have a wide variety of applications including recommendation systems yet they make one strong assumption: the algorithms must know an upper bound $S$ on the norm of the unknown parameter $\theta^*$ that governs the reward generation. Such an assumption forces the practitioner to guess $S$ involved in the confidence bound, leaving no choice but to wish that $\|\theta^*\|\le S$ is true to guarantee that the regret will be low. In this paper, we propose novel algorithms that do not require such knowledge for the first time. Specifically, we propose two algorithms and analyze their regret bounds: one for the changing arm set setting and the other for the fixed arm set setting. Our regret bound for the former shows that the price of not knowing $S$ does not affect the leading term in the regret bound and inflates only the lower order term. For the latter, we do not pay any price in the regret for now knowing $S$. Our numerical experiments show standard algorithms assuming knowledge of $S$ can fail catastrophically when $\|\theta^*\|\le S$ is not true whereas our algorithms enjoy low regret.

Microsoft's war chest is a dynamo. With revenues that rival the GDP of a small nation, it's got enough cash on hand to buy whatever it wants. When it does, it just acquires another money-making machine. Video game company Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft announced yesterday it was buying for a staggering $68.7 billion--more than the $26.2 billion it paid for LinkedIn in 2016, almost 10 times the $7.5 billion it paid for Bethesda's parent ZeniMax Media last year. Microsoft now owns Call of Duty and Halo; it owns The Elder Scrolls and World of Warcraft.

On Tuesday tech giant Microsoft announced its proposed purchase of gaming company Activision Blizzard for nearly $69 billion. The deal would grant Microsoft ownership over globally recognized franchises like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, and Candy Crush, to name a few. It also creates a new division in the company, Microsoft Gaming, to be led by the company's head of its Xbox division, Phil Spencer. For Activision Blizzard, this couldn't have come at a better time. The company, run by CEO Bobby Kotick since 1991, has been the subject of scrutiny and lawsuits based on numerous allegations of discrimination, sexual harassment, and a toxic workplace culture at the company.

In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft's developer Mojang for what seemed, at the time, an eye-popping figure: $2.5bn (£1.8bn). It was the first in a series of bullish video-game studio acquisitions by the tech giant, whose games division has been led by executive Phil Spencer, a long-time advocate for video games within Microsoft and the wider business world, for the past eight years. More studios followed, for undisclosed amounts: beloved Californian comedy-game artists Double Fine, UK studio Ninja Theory, RPG specialists Obsidian Entertainment. It seemed that under Spencer's leadership, Microsoft was cementing its commitment to the Xbox console and the video-games business by investing in what makes games great: the people who make them. Then came 2020's deal to acquire Zenimax (and with it Bethesda), for a properly astonishing $7.5bn.

SEATTLE – Microsoft plans to buy the powerhouse but troubled video game company Activision Blizzard for nearly $70 billion, its biggest deal ever and one that places a major bet that people will spend more and more time in the digital world. The blockbuster acquisition, announced Tuesday, would catapult the company into a leading spot in the $175 billion gaming industry. Games on virtually every kind of device, from bulky consoles to smartphones, have gained even greater popularity during the pandemic. Technology companies are swarming around the industry, looking for a bigger share of attention and money from the world's 3 billion gamers. In an industry driven by big franchises, Activision makes some of the most popular titles, including Call of Duty and Candy Crush.