Texas A&M’s Robin Murphy has deployed robots at 29 disasters, including three building collapses, two mine disasters, and an earthquake as director of theCenter for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. She has also served as a technical search specialist with the Hillsboro County (Florida) Fire and Rescue Department. The Conversation talked to Murphy to provide readers an understanding of the types of technologies that search and rescue crews at the Champlain Towers South disaster site in Surfside, Florida, have at their disposal, as well as some they don’t....

Apple has honed on enhancing privacy across its devices aggressively for the last couple of years. So it wasn’t entirely surprising to see a dedicated privacy section at the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) event last night. While there haven’t been anycontroversial features like anti-tracking, Apple made some notable announcements. Here’s a summary of it: iCloud+ This was probably the most eye-catching announcement in the privacy section. Apple’s debuting a new free service for iCloud users that provides an extra layer of security to existing users....

You decide to call a store that sells some hiking boots you’re thinking of buying. As you dial in, the computer of an artificial intelligence company hired by the store is activated. It retrieves its analysis of the speaking style you used when you phoned other companies the software firm services. The computer has concluded you are “friendly and talkative.” Using predictive routing, it connects you to a customer service agent who company research has identified as being especially good at getting friendly and talkative customers to buy more expensive versions of the goods they’re considering....

If you’re a developer these days, you’ve probably used and enjoyed theGitHubcode repository and community, especially if you work on open source projects. GitHub is used by over a million people and stores over two million code repositories. The company says it’s the largest code host in the world. GitLabhas launched to let developers create their own GitHub shared code repositories on their own servers, rather than host with GitHub. For free....

According tonew data from IDC, not only do Windows servers control the most dollar share of the server market, but more servers running Windows were shipped in Q4 of 2010 than in any previous quarter. From the IDC report: Microsoft Windows server demand was positively impacted by the x86 server market refresh as hardware revenue increased 16.8% year over year. Quarterly revenue of $6.3 billion for Windows servers represented 42.1% of overall quarterly factory revenue....