JERUSALEM/BERLIN (Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that a roughly one-billion-euro ($1.18 billion) drone deal with Germany would strengthen bilateral security relations and give a boost to Israel's defense industry.

Who says you can't get smart playing video games? Although the idea of spending hours playing video games isn't usually recommended for humans to increase their intelligence, the realistic 3-D graphics and environments of many video games just might make video games the perfect learning tool for artificial intelligence. AI algorithms get smarter and learn to perform tasks by being fed enormous amounts of data. When you're on Facebook, this doesn't present a huge obstacle. Facebook creates huge data sets daily and also has the financial capability to close any gaps.

While Tesla has spent the past six months struggling to ramp up production of the Model 3 and fielding criticism over its Autopilot tech and safety protocols, one of its most intriguing wannabe rivals, Byton, has spent the first half of 2018 positioning itself to swipe Elon Musk's electric innovation crown. The coup d'EV started in January at CES, with the reveal of a screen-stuffed concept SUV. In February, Byton announced a partnership with star-studded Aurora to bring self-driving smarts to its vehicles. And today, at CES Asia in Shanghai, it unveiled a second concept car, a small sedan that can't help but make you think of a certain car rolling off the assembly line in Silicon Valley. Byton's new ride is the K-Byte, a three-box sedan with the front wheels pushed as far forward as possible.

The random-forest technique has emerged in recent years as a powerful way to analyze large data sets while avoiding some of the pitfalls of other data-mining methods. It is based on the idea that some future event can be determined by a decision tree in which an outcome is calculated at each branch by reference to a set of training data. However, decision trees suffer from a well-known problem. In the latter stages of the branching process, decisions can become severely distorted by training data that is sparse and prone to huge variation at this kind of resolution, a problem known as overfitting. The random-forest approach is different.

Tesla's cars will in August suddenly activate "full self-driving features," the company's chief executive Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday, three days after federal investigators said a Tesla SUV driving semi-autonomously had accelerated over 70 mph and smashed into a highway barrier. Musk's promotion to his millions of followers -- that the fantastic future of self-driving cars might only be a few months away -- appeared to give the company a leg-up in the auto industry's most competitive technological race. Tesla's stock price jumped Monday by more than 4.5 percent. A Tesla spokesperson on Monday said the cars would only start offering a limited number of as-yet-undisclosed features, not full autonomy itself. But safety experts worried the grand promises of full self-driving capabilities could lull drivers into a false sense of security for technologies that are still largely unproven on the road.

The 9th annual Augmented World Expo at the Santa Clara Convention Center, May 29th to June 1st, 2018, was a celebration of AR's progress. Watershed events, like the introduction of ARKit from Apple in September 2017, have spurred innovation. Mobile AR is very hot. Most of the glasses look dorky, though some are slimming down. The dorky ones were by far the most popular. The bigger story, however, is how fast the enterprise segment is growing as applications as straightforward as schematics on a head-mounted monocular microdisplay are transforming manufacturing, assembly, and warehousing. Tom Emrich, Programmer of AWE and a partner in Super Ventures, delivered his dramatic keynote AWE using motion capture technology. For AWE's co-founder and Executive Producer, Ori Inbar, the Conference was nothing less than a victory lap. With Microsoft and Qualcomm among the Gold Sponsors, there was a palpable smell of vindication in the air.

Google is planning to bring support for more languages to its Google Assistant AI, so that its Google Home speaker could appeal to more consumers. Digitimes Research reported late last week that Google is planning to push sales of its Google Home speakers to more markets this 2018. With this in mind, the search engine giant is aiming to bring support for up to 30 languages to its voice assistant. Amazon's Alexa only supports three languages at present. To take advantage of the situation, Google wants to enable Google Assistant to support up to 30 languages with the use of its deep research in multi-language and semantics.

The football World Cup is almost upon us. Many millions will watch the tournament unfold on TV screens around the globe. But what if you could enjoy a mini virtual reconstruction of each match on your dining table instead? To create such an experience, Konstantinos Rematas and colleagues at the University of Washington trained a machine learning algorithm to convert 2D YouTube clips into 3D reconstructions. They began by gathering footage from the football videogame FIFA. "I had to play FIFA 2017 for, I don't know, … To continue reading this premium article, subscribe for unlimited access.

A NASA robot has found more building blocks for life on Mars, the most complex organic matter yet from 3.5 billion-year-old rocks on the surface of the red planet, the US space agency said on Thursday. The unmanned Curiosity rover has also found increasing evidence for seasonal variations of methane on Mars, indicating the source of the gas is likely the planet itself, or possibly its subsurface water. The data, collected through drilling into the lowest point of the red planet's Gale crater, is part of the US space agency's newly widened search for organic molecules that could indicate past life on the surface of Mars. Additional data from the robotic probe confirms the detection of "seasonal patterns" in methane levels, NASA geophysicist Ashwin Vasvada said in the live-streamed announcement. NASA scientist Chris Webster confirmed that water has been found on the martian surface and has been present for "a very long time," which points strongly toward a "habitable environment".

The National Transportation Safety Board also says crash data shows the SUV did not brake or steer away from the barrier in the three seconds before the crash. The agency says it now will examine whether the Tesla Autopilot system performed as designed.