A black-and-white drone about the size of a sofa cushion took off with a gentle whir at the Hawthorne Police Department earlier this month, hovering and darting back and forth a few times before landing on a podium to a round of applause. A small audience and local TV news crews had gathered to see the unveiling of "Responder," marketed as the first drone built specifically to respond to 911 calls by quickly arriving at scenes, beaming a live video feed and, if necessary, dropping off medical supplies. The company behind the new drone, Seattle-based Brinc -- a tech startup with a 24-year-old chief executive -- has boasted it will "revolutionize the public safety landscape." But law enforcement agencies across Southern California and the country already employ drones for a variety of purposes, including 911 response, and skeptics warn about the risk of "mission creep" when the technology is weaponized or used for surveillance. Some Los Angeles activists have fought to limit police drone use, but Hawthorne's adoption of Brinc's Responder is a sign some local authorities are continuing to embrace unmanned aerial vehicles despite the pushback and price tag.

In 2013, Jeff Bezos announced Amazon was developing a drone delivery service. He estimated at the time that air-dropped packages were "four, five years" away. Nearly a decade later, the service is promised to begin by the end of this year – albeit in only two locations in the US. According to David Carbon, an Australian expat and vice-president of the firm's drone delivery division, Amazon wants to deliver 500m packages annually by drone from 2030. Carbon told AAP earlier this month that the firm was planning a wider rollout for air deliveries in the US and potentially Australia.

Artificial intelligence has been built on the back of vector arithmetic. Recent advances show for certain AI applications this can actually be drastically outperformed (memory, speed, etc) by other binary representations (such as neural hashes) without significant accuracy trade off. Once you work with things like neural hashes, it becomes apparent many areas of AI can move away from vectors to hash based structures and trigger an enormous speed up in AI advancement. This article is a brief introduction in to the thinking behind this and why this may well end up being an enormous shift. A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values.

You might not have to venture downtown (or to a grocery chain) to visit an Amazon Go store. USA Today reports Amazon plans to open a new version of the cashierless store designed for suburban areas. The locations will still focus on essentials, ready-to-eat food, drinks and snacks, just with layouts more suited to these outlying regions. The shops will still rely on computer vision to detect what you buy. Once you've scanned your phone at the entrance, camera systems detect what you grab from the shelves.

A new research tool launched by buyer's agency network BuyersBuyers promises to take the guesswork out of suburb selection by using artificial intelligence to match a purchaser's budget with their best prospects for capital growth. BuyersBuyers co-founder Pete Wargent said the unique Where to Buy tool provided answers on which location and what sort of property would be the best choice for investors or owner-occupiers under a specific budget. "We've created a simple online process that improves the customer journey, and can help buyers to reduce time, cost and stress in their search," Mr Wargent said. The tool, which was developed in collaboration with RiskWise Property Research, assesses metrics including housing supply, median values, 12-month price growth and vacancy rates to determine whether the locations would provide risky or rewarding prospects for investment. RiskWise Property Research chief executive Doron Peleg said the new offering would complement a suite of research tools developed in conjunction with BuyersBuyers that were free for subscribers. "For example, for 2022, we ran a list of thirty suburbs which are expected to perform well for investors with a budget of up to around $1 million," Mr Peleg said.

Artificial intelligence has been built on the back of vector arithmetic. Recent advances show for certain AI applications this can actually be drastically outperformed (memory, speed, etc) by other binary representations (such as neural hashes) without significant performance trade off. Once you work with things like neural hashes, it becomes apparent many areas of AI can move away from vectors to hash based structures and trigger an enormous speed up in AI advancement. This article is a brief introduction in to the thinking behind this and why this may well end up being an enormous shift. A hash function is any function that can be used to map data of arbitrary size to fixed-size values.

A few curious cockatoos learned how to open residential waste bins in Australia, and now other birds have started copying them, with incidences of bin-looting spreading across eastern Australia in easily traceable waves. "If they had learned it individually, we would have seen this popping up randomly, but their method is really spreading from one suburb to the next," says Barbara Klump at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour in Germany. A few years ago, Richard Major at the Australian Museum Research Institute in Sydney filmed one of several sulphur-crested cockatoos (Cacatua galerita) lifting a bin lid, and he shared the video with Klump's colleague. Intrigued, the researchers asked suburbanites around Sydney and Wollongong to help them trace the phenomenon by reporting whether they saw, or didn't see, incidences of bin-looting in their neighbourhoods. When the team started the project in 2018, scientists had documented bin-opening by cockatoos in three suburbs.

Signs of very early-stage commercialization are emerging from the corporate science projects that want to remove human drivers from vehicles. Alphabet's Waymo seems furthest ahead with its "robotaxi" project in the suburbs of Phoenix Customers used to have to sign a nondisclosure agreement to hail a ride with no backup driver, but Waymo opened the service up in October. Motional, a $4 billion joint venture between South Korean car giant Hyundai and automotive supplier Aptiv, said last month that it will take safety drivers out of its taxis that operate on the Lyft LYFT 3.77% platform around Las Vegas "in the coming months." Cruise Automation, the driverless-car business controlled by General Motors, GM 1.92% has said it would remove backup drivers from its cars by the year-end. Cruise runs vehicles around busy San Francisco, but without passengers or cargo.

Australian water infrastructure is more than a hundred years old, thus has begun to show its age through water main failures. Our work concerns approximately half a million pipelines across major Australian cities that deliver water to houses and businesses, serving over five million customers. Failures on these buried assets cause damage to properties and water supply disruptions. We applied Machine Learning techniques to find a cost-effective solution to the pipe failure problem in these Australian cities, where on average 1500 of water main failures occur each year. To achieve this objective, we construct a detailed picture and understanding of the behaviour of the water pipe network by developing a Machine Learning model to assess and predict the failure likelihood of water main breaking using historical failure records, descriptors of pipes and other environmental factors. Our results indicate that our system incorporating a nonparametric survival analysis technique called "Random Survival Forest" outperforms several popular algorithms and expert heuristics in long-term prediction. In addition, we construct a statistical inference technique to quantify the uncertainty associated with the long-term predictions.

Hollywood movies usually depict the suburbs as a place of conformity and dark secrets. Horror author Grady Hendrix says this is particularly true of 1980s films like Poltergeist and A Nightmare on Elm Street, which critique the idea of the suburbs as being clean and new. "I think Poltergeist and Nightmare on Elm Street are both movies that say, 'No, history doesn't begin where you say it begins. There are crimes in the past that have been buried,'" Hendrix says in Episode 428 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Science fiction professor Lisa Yaszek says that suburban life has always been a particular source of anxiety for women. "I know from my own research that in the 1950s, women who were writing science fiction, absolutely one of their favorite topics was the horror of suburban life for women," she says.