4+ mon, 1+ week ago (902+ words) Artificial intelligence technology will be trialled to assess disputed ages of asylum seekers who say they are children, the Home Office has said. Ministers hope to roll out facial age estimation for migrants arriving by small boats and lorries over 2026, subject to further testing of the technology to go ahead this year. The technology, trained on millions of images of people with confirmed ages, has been decided as the "most cost-effective option" to assess ages in such cases where it is unknown or disputed, according to border security minister Dame Angela Eagle. The announcement on Tuesday comes as the borders watchdog report into Home Office age assessments said it is "inevitable" that some decisions will be wrong without a "foolproof test" of chronological age. The watchdog added this is "clearly a cause for concern, especially where a child is denied…...

5+ day, 10+ hour ago (375+ words) Earthquake forecasting tools powered by AI can forecast the risk of aftershocks seconds after the initial tremor, a new study from Edinburgh University suggests. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, British Geological Survey and University of Padua created the AI-driven forecasting tools which were developed by training machine learning models on earthquake data. The data came from parts of the world that regularly experience earthquakes such as California, New Zealand, Italy, Japan and Greece. The team analysed the AI models" ability to produce forecasts of how many aftershocks will take place within the 24 hours following earthquakes of magnitude 4 or higher. They compared the performance of their AI models with the most widely used forecasting system, known as the Epidemic-Type Aftershock Sequence (ETAS) model, which is used in Italy, New Zealand and the US. While both model types show similar performance…...