BEIJING (Reuters) - China's capital city has given the green light to German auto maker Daimler AG to test self-driving cars on real roads, making it the first international car maker to be granted such a license in Beijing, the company said on Friday.

At the end of 2017 and into 2018, the media became aware of a disturbing trend taking hold in certain online communities: deepfake pornography. A master manipulator can create a convincing video in mere hours. The usual targets for deepfake pornography are celebrities, but some fear this could become a common weapon in the existing practice of revenge porn and researchers are trying to find ways to fight back. So how do we legislate against a technology that is developing more quickly than lawmakers' understanding? And considering how long the legislative process can take, is there a technological solution to combat deepfake porn?

The researchers created a dataset of 100 people from those countries and had them write in English, with 500 lines done in total. With those handwritten lines, a tool called Cloud of Line Distribution, or COLD, breaks down individual letters, measuring the straightness or curviness of the text. The algorithm performed better at determining the nationality of the writer than the current existing method put to the same task, more than doubling the correct predictions for some countries. The algorithm is doing what machine learning does best--picking up on patterns. For example, when native Chinese writers use the Roman alphabet, they end up writing letters with straighter lines since Chinese characters are usually formed with the combination of straight strokes.

What humans do to earn a living has always evolved to suit the needs of society, and the capabilities of the technology at our disposal. But thanks to the rapid development of artificial intelligence and automation we are on the cusp of a whole new Industrial Revolution. Manual and low skilled labour are already feeling the impact of automation – Amazon is experimenting with delivery drones, the fast food industry may soon be staffed with burger-flipping bots, and driverless vehicles are already taking to the road. But those with high skill jobs should not rest on their laurels – legal services, medical care, and academia are all set to change as computers take over all the data crunching. People are either going to have to find new things to do, or risk being left behind as the world of work changes.

We are a small team based in Sweden who are passionate about music, entertainment and large sound experiences. When we realised that the majority of our friends and family wanted to have a sound system, home cinema rig and a portable speaker in their lives, yet felt off-put by the complicated, stationary and often expensive sound systems on the market - we decided to do something about it. Our journey began in 2014. With the help from backers just like yourself, we crowdfunded and developed a successful stackable and reshapeable artificial intelligence speaker called AiFi. Today, after further development of the unexplored potential in our first product, we have a new one.

When Google introduced Google Duplex, its AI assistant designed to speak like a human, the company showed off how the average person could use the tech to save time making reservations and whatnot. What wasn't touched on was the possibility that Duplex may have a use on the other side of the line, taking over for call center employees and telemarketers. A report from The Information suggests Google may be making a play to find other applications for its human-sounding assistant and has already started experimenting with ways to use Duplex to do with away roles currently filled by humans--a move that could have ramifications for millions of people. Citing a person familiar with Google's plans, The Information reported the company is already in conversation with at least one potential customer that would like to integrate Duplex into its operations. That firm, an unnamed large insurance company, is reportedly interested in using the voice assistant to handle simple, straightforward customer service calls.

Hey, did my congressman really say that? Is that really President Donald Trump on that video, or am I being duped? New technology on the internet lets anyone make videos of real people appearing to say things they've never said. Republicans and Democrats predict this high-tech way of putting words in someone's mouth will become the latest weapon in disinformation wars against the United States and other Western democracies. This technology uses facial mapping and artificial intelligence to produce videos that appear so genuine it's hard to spot the phonies.

At the beginning of 2017, Chinese tech company Baidu, the largest provider of Chinese language internet search as well as other digital products and services, committed to emerging business sectors such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Since China has 731 million internet users, almost twice the U.S. population, Baidu's data set is capable of fueling AI algorithms to make them even better. With this focus on artificial intelligence, Baidu is exploring some very intriguing applications for artificial intelligence and machine learning including in their offices where facial recognition technology makes standard ID cards unnecessary and allows you to order tea from a vending machine. They have also recruited top AI talent including one of the world's most notable AI pioneers Lu Qi, who was previously a Microsoft executive before he became Baidu's COO in January 2017. Qi will step down in July 2018 for personal reasons.

India is witnessing a surge in deep technology investments, as specialist VCs are seeking out high-quality product and enterprise tech startups to bankroll and mentor. The startup story in India has, in the past, been defined by consumer-driven ventures like Flipkart and Snapdeal, which eventually became e-commerce giants, drawing billions in funding. Lately, however, there has been a gradual shift in that ecosystem as India's startups begin to focus on technology and product innovation, moving away from the consumer. This has led to the creation of specialist early stage funds, focused on grooming product innovation startups and headed by venture capitalists with domain expertise as well as entrepreneurial and operational experience. These specialist funds are playing a key role in co-creating scalable businesses, while bridging the funding gap between angel and series A investments in the venture capital spectrum of India.

As the use of big data grows, data protection and AI's role in smart management of data are becoming increasing concerns. In the near future, a trend in the data tech field is more than reactions or legislation that will establish and consolidate proper rights regarding data use cases. Rather, data scientists and startups are taking a greater leap – enabling machine learning to detect any potential data fraud before it takes place and building fast data storage engine. Yu Fang, co-founder and CTO at data fraud and abuse detection startup DataVisor, and Guo Kuan, CEO of Terark, a leading Chinese data storage startup, discussed Big Data, AI, and Data Protection on July 3 at TechCrunch Hangzhou. "People are more familiar with supervised machine learning," Yu, a former member of Microsoft's research team, said when explaining the initiative of her team's Unsupervised Machine Learning (UML) technology.