air so ferocious they are being warned they risk frostbite if they stay outside for more than ten minutes. at least seven people have died in several states as a result of the polar vortex. many businesses and schools are closed. european union negotiators are insisting they won't reopen britain's brexit deal, despite the vote in the uk's parliament seeking changes to the so—called backstop‘ they want it in place to ensure there is no return to a hard irish border when the uk leaves the eu. there are more street protests in venezuela as president maduro continues to refuse new elections, but he says he is willing to sit down to talk to the opposition. president trump has offered his personal support to the opposition leader, juan guaido, in a phone call. now on bbc news, it's time for click. this week: the robots have gone shopping! little orange ones, big blue ones and thin white ones. also, eyes in the sky —

in store and on court. there it is! you know, that thing you ordered? it's been picked, it's going down there and making its way down to that part of the building where it's gonna be packed into one of those famous brown boxes. this 850,000 square foot space is amazon's seattle fulfilment centre, just down the road from its hq and one of more than 300 centres around the world. this is where goods come in and,

once they're bought online, they go out again. and it's one of 25 centres to have the latest robotics helping the world's most valuable retailer in its constant strive for efficiency. while humans handle the goods on the way in and on the way out of the storage area, these little orange robotic drive units take care of the stacks of yellow containers once in storage, where they stack them and the routes they choose to deliver them back to the human pickers are decided by software. until recently, if someone needed to walk amongst them, they'd have to tell the system to keep that area entirely clear of machines. but now, they have a vest! a kind of invincibility cloak that puts a magic protective bobble around the wearer — or it might be to do with sensors. here we go.

we going into — what is this area? this is our robotic storage unit. 0k, and these guys are gonna keep their distance from us? they — you can already notice that they have slowed down now for us, they're aware of our presence. 0k. and they can replan their path anywhere that they see fit in order to go their next destination. there's a big prohibit zone that's been established right now because of the vest. just to be clear — they're not aware of our presence, they're aware of your presence. that's right. so i'm staying with you! i can assure you that safety is paramount here, so we would not have you out on the floor unless we knew it was 100% safe. of course. i will assure that to you. all right. i'm sticking with this guy. not all the human employees think that amazon has their backs. the company has been accused of treating its staff, or associates, like robots, setting them performance targets that make it difficult to even take toilet breaks. during our visit, amazon was very keen to stress how important — even vital — humans were to the mix. over time, surely, this, like everything else,

will be able to do more without the human interaction? yeah, i — i see human—robotic collaboration as the key enabler, human robotics, so better machines are collaborative machines. we know the demand is for a lower—cost good with a large selection, a huge selection of availability, so that is what's driving this flywheel. so you want to cut costs. you'll switch the lights and the heating off here if you don't need any people here, so in the future... that will never happen. really? it will never happen. really? but you could make this place more efficient, in a hypothetical future, where you don't need to worry about making this human—friendly? no, that's actuallyjust 180 degrees the way i personally see this, right? no, you think about what humans are good at. we're really great at problem—solving and thinking more generally and using creativity and we have this amazing ability to think on our feet, so let's think about our stow operations. there we have the goods that come

in to our associates in these little yellow totes, and then the human will use their cognitive abilities to figure out "where is the best place to put this inside the tote?" so the human brain doing volume optimisation in order to put large things with small things with medium—sized things, it really turns out that that is great for having more goods in the same footprint. so humans doing the fiddly bits, robots doing the heavy lifting and the precision and, for the moment at least, you have what ty calls "a symphony of humans and machines". i have to say it's pretty impressive when you see this stuff up close. ok, now we're gonna go to lara, who has been visiting another massive company that's getting robots to do some of our dirty work. it's just an ordinary weekday morning in this nevada branch of walmart but you could say things don't look quite normal. if you'd ever thought

that robots were coming, this industrial floor cleaner probably wasn't quite what you had in mind. ok, so this doesn't look very cutting—edge but actually, that's the point, because in a future where artificial intelligence and robotics are all around us, they need to be able to be embedded in existing systems too, and that's just what's going on here. this is one of 360 bots being rolled out across stores this month following a successful trial. the thing about seeing it moving like this, because of the way it looks, itjust looks like it's run out of control. but apparently, it knows what it's doing. beeps. yes, thanks to lasers, cameras, sensors, it does map out its environment, making sure it doesn't crash into anything and it doesn't cover any area twice.

right, you can get on now. it looks kinda weird. it gives you that vibe that somebody should be driving it. but then i saw someone step in front of it and it automatically stopped, so that's a plus. it doesn't bother me a bit. i think it is really fun, actually. i want to get in and drive it! 1984 talks about big brother always watching ya... you can never please everyone. but the store's night manager is happy. it syncs with his phone and he receives notifications if there have been any obstacles, or confirmation when the job is done. how has having this changed things for you ? actually, it makes it a lot easier. we're able to get a lot more done throughout the night. while the person that's normally running the machine, they're able to dust mop other areas, so they'll sweep, they'll get that ready, and then they'll come back over

here and check on the machine. walmart hopes that this could just be the start with the bots using their machine—learning capabilities to improve store navigation, find wi—fi weak spots, and more, whilst also taking some of the routine manual tasks away from staff, leaving them available to actually help the customers. the company behind the technology are embedding their sensors in delivery and healthcare devices, too. robotics is an industry that's being led by engineering and by the ability to design something new and snazzy and we're missing the opportunity to design stuff that really has an impact. and so, yeah, integrating the ai technology and the robotics with existing systems, with existing machines, we believe that's the way forward. robot: resistance is futile! that was lara, and here's another robot that's making itself at home in retail. my name is pepper.

i'm a humanoid robot and i'm 1.20 metres tall! now, you may have seen pepper here before, answering customers' questions on specific topics and generally putting a cute, friendly front end on a voice assistant that tracks your face. i've notified the branch management of your request to speak to an associate. someone will be with you shortly. the problem is it's easy to create a false image of how far artificial intelligence has come. for instance, by getting pepper to talk to the british government about al. still, more than 10,000 peppers have already been deployed so its owner, softbank robotics, must have done something right. what would you say is the point of pepper? pepper was designed to be in a form factor that was inviting and friendly, so you'd want to come up to it, but it helps a little bit in that it can see you and call you over as well. form factor matters. a robot that can do parkour isn't probably designed to sit in, say, a retail outlet like pepper is. and vice—versa — pepper is not designed to do parkour.

oh, that, i would love to see. so can we get — would you like to do parkour? it would be less than satisfying for your viewers, i'd think. oh, it would be very satisfying, believe me. softbank robotics has been busy snapping up robotics companies around the world. most famously, that includes boston dynamics, whose bots probably won't be, shall we say, customer—facing. softbank‘s latest venture is tally here — a robot which patrols a shop, looking at how much stock there is on the shelves so it can be better controlled. it's slowly starting to roll out in shops across the us and in the future, this stock information could be used by our friend pepper in store, who can push products at you that the store wants to shift. while you wait, jolena, other users who bought this t—shirt also bought these items. according to softbank‘s chief strategy officer, that's something that we all want. where do you stand on the robots taking our jobs idea? i mean, what we're talking

about here is robots doing jobs that had previously been done by humans. well, i think that's not entirely accurate. so what you're seeing is robots doing tasks that people are forced to do because it's part and parcel of their day—to—day activity. you know, 25—26% of a typical retail worker's day is spent doing banal tasks. in retail, you've got a 66—67% turnover rate — at least in north america. that's a massive problem for retailers. they literally cannot keep people on the job long enough. and so, that means their workforce is in constant flux to the extent that we can — or simbi can — create some value by taking over some of the repetitive tasks — for example, inventory counting — that maybe staff were forced to do before but they struggled with because they literally could not get enough bodies into the store. now, the workforce they have can focus on interacting with you, because most people will say they'll

buy for sure and buy more if you get to interact with them — you the person. even if, you know, as you say, they might not have enjoyed it, it's still a job that paid someone's wages, so we are still talking about, you know, robots replacing that element of a human‘s job, and therefore reducing the number of humans that are needed. well, but your premise i disagree with. you're not actually reducing the number, you'rejust allowing the number that's already there to do a betterjob. yeah, but i mean if you have 100 members of staff and part of theirjob is stocktaking... yeah, but what i'm saying is they needed 150 and they can't get 150 — that's what i am telling you. i guess i would argue the premise isn't quite right. in fact, the world bank backs me up and says there's actually more jobs gonna be created from this type of activity than less. hello and welcome to the week in tech. it was the week that we saw a prototype of a new dual folding smartphone/tablet from chinese company xiaomi.

an autonomous fleet of two dozen robots was released onto an american university campus. and london's gatwick airport announced a trial involving valet parking robots will go live this summer. the robots side a forklift—type ramp under the car and use so—called military—grade gps to park the car in a secure bay. what could possibly go wrong? it was also the week that we learned how facial recognition is being used online to help identify stolen chimpanzees. the same type of algorithm used to identify your friends in social media posts is studying the faces of chimps. if a trafficked animal is recognised, authorities could be alerted to target the suspect accounts. music streaming app spotify appeared to release an update which allows users to block artists they don't want to hear. the move follows social media protests against r kelly, under the hashtag #muterkelly. he is facing multiple allegations of sexual assault, which he denies. finally, after uniting over the instagram egg last week,

the internet is once again divided — not by a dress this time, but on how we draw the letter x. the coloured line indicates where the x starts. the original illustrator concluded americans draw xs like numbers seven and eight, and people living in the uk use a five and six technique. the amazon go grocery store in seattle is one of nine which now famously features no checkout. a qr code gets you in, after which you're free to wander around, take stuff, put stuff into bags, put stuff back on the shelves if you change your mind, and simply walk out without having your goods checked. 2016 — good year. the items aren't specially labelled or tagged — this is done with sensors on the shelves and a computer vision system which watches absolutely everything.

there are so many cameras in the ceiling. more cameras than there are in a casino ceiling. it tells us it doesn't use facial recognition but i think it's fairly obvious that customers' movements are tracked around the store. it has previously admitted it has human staff on call if the software can't decide what happened. it won't tell us how tolerant the system is if goods being placed untidily or on the wrong shelf. for us at least, the experience was absolutely as expected. here comes the really strange bit. just walk out. and within an hour or two, a completely correct receipt arrives

on the app. amazon may be secretive about its technology but it's not the only company working on this kind of shopping experience. nick kwek has been to israel to see a similar operation in action. at trigo vision's hq in tel aviv, i'm going behind the scenes of its new concept store. like amazon go, it too offers customers a checkout—free solution but also, interestingly, a quick point of sale station which i will check out. basket‘s getting a bit full. hope i've got enough money for this... similarly to spen, i'm being watched from above but there are no sensors in the shelves, no app to download, and no gates to walk through. the secret sauce here is how the 15 eyes in the sky monitor each and every product. cameras in the ceiling are watching them, me and my basket,

so if i do this... ..they automatically add it to my bill. and if i take them out of my basket, my virtual balance is updated accordingly. the standard video cameras live—stream footage to an in—store computer server, where trigo vision's autonomous algorithm deciphers what is going on. it builds up a 3—d scan of the shop and all of its contents, including customers. we take quite a few pictures in a different situation, in the retail space. then we feed that into the system and tell the system this is peanut butter or this is a crisp. from that point on, the system trains itself. it repeatedly creates the algorithm for itself to learn in the future, to identify when you pick whether it is crisps or a different product. because there's so much unnecessary video to go through, 99% of the material is chucked

in the bin, with only the odd moments of selection being prioritised. a little bit of that for dinner. then when i'm done, i walk up to a tv turned sideways and voila — all of my items are already scanned and ready to be paid for, speeding up the checkout process. consumers might not be ready for this technology just yet and we want to enable them the opportunity to confirm what they've purchased and not have them identify themselves on the entrance at the store. it's not exactly a seamless shopping experience but it is a prototype and with every sale, the system gets smarter. other stores are going down a different aisle and rfid tagging up their stock. pa nasonic‘s concept involves customers dangling their bags as they stroll through a censored gate, whilst fujitsu's system sucks in your whole trolley and this monster of a contraption weighs your stuff, reads your palm for identification, and spits out the bill. but are all of these technologies

just a thing of science fiction, or are they closer than we might think? i think it's almost certain that this will be in the uk high street within the next two years. it appeals to consumers. consumer satisfaction on this has been very high because it solves pain points in the store. you don't want to spend time actually buying items, going through a checkout, and you also want it to be easy to find items in the store. consumers in the uk have already been one of the big adopters of e—commerce and i don't see any reason why they won't be interested in this as well. 0nce they've had the experience, word—of—mouth will mean that the fact that it's a cool idea rather than a creepy one, i think it will be widely adopted across the uk. we will soon see how that pans out. the startup has signed a partnership deal with supersol, israel's largest supermarket chain, to incorporate its tech in over 270 stores nationwide.

now back home to rustle up my dinner of chocolate rice crispies... that was nick, clearly off his trolley! and now from smart shopping to smart sport streaming. paul carter has been looking at how ai could shape the future of sports broadcasting. see, we're not done with baskets yet. basketball. it's one of the most fast—paced, high—energy sports around, i've come to look at a new piece w m this new technology removes the need to have camera operators shooting the players shooting hoops. the footage you are watching may look like any normal broadcast coverage, but it's very different.

there are very few people involved in the production of this footage. the camerawork and direction is all being done completely autonomously. it is a system developed by an israeli company called playsight. we went along to watch—test the software in a british basketball game between sheffield sharks and newcastle eagles — the first time it was used to stream a live professional basketball game in the uk. part of the automatic production, we have highly and advanced analytic tools, all based on artificial intelligence and deep learning. it means that not only can we track the players and the ball, we can identify events automatically. so the system can track two points, three points, passes, it can generate information from a variety of sources like the scoreboard or manual tagging, and create events. although it appears that the camera is moving, it is actually a fixed

camera covering the whole court in high resolution. the software can identify on which area of the court the action is happening and zooms in to track it. the on—screen score and time graphics are generated automatically from a camera feed of the physical scoreboard inside the arena — something that's traditionally done manually. you can actually become your own tv director because by looking at your app, you can be in this game tonight and you see a great dunk or a great move, you can swipe back on your smartphone and see it again, tag it and send it to your social media friends. it will push out our social media experience more than we can do at the moment. it's needed partly because it grows the sport and it makes the sport accessible for lots of people. you have the opportunity to see what the coaches and officials are talking about as a fan. playsight claim the system

is advanced enough to keep up with the often frantic pace — though, as you can see, it wasn't always accurate. but broadcasters who watched the test were impressed by the potential. it's an incredible piece of technology. it's fascinating. they're streets ahead of where they were two or three years ago. though they were looking at it a few years ago, but it wasn't quite up to it, and now it is. it's fascinating. the technology has implications for the sport beyond live broadcasting. there are also plans to use it for the introduction of video refereeing into basketball, in a similar way to other sports such as rugby and football. something those involved in the game say is much needed. basketball is critical to the last second of the game and games are won and lost on the last second and a referee has to make a decision. did that shot take off from his hand before the clock went to zero? now we will have the facility

to look at that multi—angle, so we can look at it from four angles on the score table with a tablet and say "this is the situation. make a decision now." overall, it would be a game—changer. i think it'll be able to help officials and coaches get the play right in real time. the system will be rolled out to all bbl clubs this summer. there are similar platforms being developed, and it's easy to see how ai—based processes like this could soon remove the humble tv and direction. although hopefully, not too soon. brilliant stuff. that was paul and that's it for this week. don't forget that we live all across social media — on twitter, on instagram, youtube and facebook. i believe we're on the tv every so often too. thank you very much for watching and we will see you soon. hello there.

we've got a potentially disruptive snowy spell of weather on the way. we've got very cold air locked in place and an area of low pressure developing over the atlantic. and it's a perfect breeding ground for a snow event as this moisture moves in across the country, bumps into the cold air — some of us are likely to see some pretty heavy sleet and snow through thursday into friday. so of course some yellow warnings are in force for snow, ice, and also the risk of freezing fog overnight through thursday into friday, it's likely to cause some disruption so stay tuned to bbc local radio and keep tuned to subsequent weather forecasts. but we start this morning on a very cold note, largely clear skies. so many places will be dry. a few wintry showers continue across the north of scotland. we'll also see some freezing fog patches developing.

something else to watch out for. we could be looking at temperatures as low as —12 to —15 celsius in some of the scottish glens. so we could have ice and also risk of freezing fog to start this morning. but, on the plus side, plenty of crisp winter sunshine. now, things start to go downhill across the south—west of england across wales and that weather system arrives, initially bringing rain and turning increasingly to snow across this part of the country. further north and east it should be relatively dry. the sunshine continuing. but it will be a cold day with increasing easterly winds. now this sleet and snow will gather force and become more widespread, pushing northwards and eastwards all the while through thursday evening and overnight. some heavy snow likely across the downs of the south—east into the midlands and certainly across southern and eastern parts of wales. by early friday this is the lying snow, a map. we could be looking at significant accumulations across parts of wales, the south—west, and the south downs, 1—4 centimetres to lower levels. a lot more than that further north. so a significant risk of ice through friday night. rain, sleet, and snow will continue to fall, become lighter and patchier, but it'll still continue

to accumulate in places. we'll see wintry showers across the north—east of england and further wintry showers across the north of scotland. it's going to be a very cold night again, a significant risk of ice. now, our area of low pressure gives to migrate southwards, taking its weather fronts with it. so we'll start to see a slow improvement across the south of the country. but we could still see some rain, sleet, and snow continue for a while throughout friday. this easterly breeze will bring more wintry showers into eastern england and eastern scotland, further wintry showers across the north of scotland. but in between we should see plenty of sunshine around, but that really won't do much for the temperatures. it is going to be another cold day. but stay tuned to the weather forecast. welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe.

my name is mike embley. our top stories: the big freeze hits parts of the us. arctic conditions are sending temperatures down below —30 celsius. the european union insists it won't renegotiate britain's brexit deal, despite the vote in parliament seeking changes to the so—called irish border backstop. more street protests in venezuela, as president maduro refuses new elections but says he will talk to the opposition. and millions of migrants are making their way in record numbers from north america to mexico.