Small-business owners are always on the hunt for opportunities that can give their businesses a leg up. In the past, small business owners have eagerly adopted software-as-a-service products, transitioned to cloud infrastructure and embraced self-service digital advertising. Today, one of the most exciting opportunities is the potential to leverage machine learning (ML) to give your business a competitive advantage. ML solutions automate workflows, enhance data-driven decisions and facilitate interactions with customers. Two factors that are making ML accessible to small businesses are the commoditization of machine learning algorithms and the democratization of pre-trained ML models.

The Kepler space telescope, which launched in 2009, has produced more than 30,000 signals measuring light from stars to search for possible planets in distant parts of the galaxy. Sifting through that and other telescope data, astronomers have found more than 3,500 planets, up from 329 known before the Kepler mission. Now artificial intelligence is helping to find even more. On Thursday, researchers from Google and University of Texas at Austin announced that a machine-learning algorithm had discovered two new planets, Kepler 80g and Kepler 90i. Kepler 90i is a particularly special discovery--it's the eighth planet orbiting its star, marking the first system outside our own known to have eight planets.

BERLIN (Reuters) - German luxury automaker BMW said on Friday it will spend over 100 million euros ($118 million) on a test track for self-driving and electric cars in the Czech Republic, as it expands its foray into alternative driving technologies.

Smart homes are one of those technology ideas that never seem to catch on, despite the efforts of technology heavyweights like Amazon and Google parent Alphabet. Could Roomba, the popular robotic vacuum cleaner, be the missing link that finally makes home automation useful and convenient? The key technology isn't the device's dirt-sucking aptitude, but its ability to create navigational maps of people's homes through an onboard camera, sensors, and software. The company added the feature to its more expensive models in 2015 so the robots could clean more efficiently, and it has been refined since. Soon Roombas will be able to recognize which rooms they're in and identify large objects located in those rooms, says iRobot CEO Colin Angle.

More than 1,000 students from 25 countries with more than 130 team will participate in the four-day contest of the region's first robot competition. The event is held to encourage global robotics research and development.

You'd need your glasses on to play this version of Pac-Man. Tiny metal robots can plot their own route around a maze modelled on the iconic video game. Similar devices could one day be used to travel around the body, delivering drugs or performing surgery. Sarthak Misra from the University of Twente, the Netherlands, and colleagues created four different types of micro-gripper robots, with the smallest being just 100 micrometres long. The biggest was still less than one millimetre.

There are few electronic devices with which you cannot order a Domino's pizza. When the craving hits, you can place an order via Twitter, Slack, Facebook Messenger, SMS, your tablet, your smartwatch, your smart TV, and even your app-enabled Ford. This year, the pizza monger added another ordering tool: If your home is one of the 20 million with a voice assistant, you can place a regular order through Alexa or Google Home. Just ask for a large extra-cheese within earshot, and voila--your pizza is in the works. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Be sure to also wrap up some extra rotors, a spare battery or two, and get drone registration through the Federal Aviation Association (FAA), because the drone registration requirements that were declared dead earlier this year were just revived by the Trump administration. A relative footnote in the National Defense Authorization Act, which was signed into law today, the new regulation requires that drone owners register their unmanned aerial vehicles before taking to the skies. You can register you new drone on the FAA's drone Unmanned Aircraft System website. But for longtime drone pilots, this requirement is nothing new. In December 2015, regulators began requiring drone registration, and the program took off, with 300,000 drone owners signing up within the first month.

Google on Monday released DeepVariant, an artificial intelligence tool that uses gene sequencing data to build a more accurate genomic model. Google on Monday released DeepVariant, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses gene sequencing data to build a more accurate genomic model by automatically spotting small insertion and deletion mutations and single-base-pair mutations. The Google Brain team compiled millions of high-throughput reads and fully sequenced genomes from the Genome in a Bottle project, feeding the data to a deep-learning system and modifying the parameters of the model until it learned to interpret sequenced data with very high accuracy. "DeepVariant...demonstrates that in genomics, deep learning can be used to automatically train systems that perform better than complicated hand-engineered systems," says Deep Genomics CEO Brendan Frey. Frey predicts AI will ultimately transcend its ability to help sequence genomic data.