With the push of a button, months of hard work were about to be put to the test. Sixteen teams of engineers convened in a cavernous exhibit hall in Nagoya, Japan, for the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge. The robotic systems they built were tasked with removing items from bins and placing them into boxes. For graduate student Maria Bauza, who served as task-planning lead for the MIT-Princeton Team, the moment was particularly nerve-wracking. "It was super stressful when the competition started," recalls Bauza.

China's bid to take the lead in the electric vehicle market moved up a notch with the recent office opening of Xpeng Motors in Silicon Valley. Xpeng is one of several Chinese electric vehicle producers that is vying for this expanding market, along with several potential Tesla killers, among them startup unicorn NIO. China already accounts for about half of global EV sales, boosted by the Chinese government's handouts such as a $15,000 subsidy, a free driver's license and access to many charging stations. Xpeng has a head start among dozens of Chinese EV startups given its connection to Alibaba. Co-founder He Xiaopeng, one of China's Internet tycoons, sold his browser startup to Alibaba in 2014 for $5 billion, and Alibaba backed Xpeng at $350 million with Foxconn and IDG Capital in January 2018 -- along with a who's who of venture investing including Matrix Partners, Morningside Venture Capital and GGV Capital.

I'm not sure if you're aware, but the launch of Apple Maps went poorly. After a rough first impression, an apology from the CEO, several years of patching holes with data partnerships and some glimmers of light with long-awaited transit directions and improvements in business, parking and place data, Apple Maps is still not where it needs to be to be considered a world-class service. Apple, it turns out, is aware of this, so it's re-building the maps part of Maps. It's doing this by using first-party data gathered by iPhones with a privacy-first methodology and its own fleet of cars packed with sensors and cameras. The new product will launch in San Francisco and the Bay Area with the next iOS 12 beta and will cover Northern California by fall. Every version of iOS will get the updated maps eventually, and they will be more responsive to changes in roadways and construction, more visually rich depending on the specific context they're viewed in and feature more detailed ground cover, foliage, pools, pedestrian pathways and more. This is nothing less than a full re-set of Maps and it's been four years in the making, which is when Apple began to develop its new data-gathering systems. Eventually, Apple will no longer rely on third-party data to provide the basis for its maps, which has been one of its major pitfalls from the beginning.

Faster, more powerful computing has the potential to revolutionize fields from drug delivery to freight transportation. But some are also worried that the computers of the future could also upend what it means to be human. Quantum computing capitalizes on the quantum-physics principle that a particle may be in two states at once, as long as it does not leave a record of either state. Unlike traditional computers, which are made of bits restrained to values of zero or one, a quantum computer would allow bits to have both values simultaneously, which would lead to much faster, more powerful processing. According to Mordechai Segev, a professor of physics at Technion Israel Institute of Technology, a functional, accurate quantum computer would need to consist of about 2,000 quantum bits.

The government's recent investment into AI is a welcome step towards securing the UK's position as a leader in this field, but the road to success is littered with challenges. The best way around them is for the government, private sector and academia to work hand-in-glove to fulfil AI's promise, says Ed Stacey, a partner at IQ Capital, Harnessing artificial intelligence and big data is one of the great opportunities for the UK, as the government rightly recognised in its recently published AI Sector Deal policy paper. In it, the government outlined plans to raise total R&D investment to 2.4% of GDP by 2027. The cash injection into research is most welcome, but we should not consider leadership in an academic field as a triumph. An academic paper that gathers dust, no matter how brilliant and well-argued its case – is pretty obsolete.

WASHINGTON: Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that can tell how smart a person is just by looking at a scan of the individual's brain. Researchers from California Institute of Technology, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the University of Salerno in the US show that their new computing tool can predict a person's intelligence from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their resting state brain activity. Functional MRI develops a map of brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow to specific brain regions. In other words, an individual's intelligence can be gleaned from patterns of activity in their brain when they are not doing or thinking anything in particular. "We found if we just have people lie in the scanner and do nothing while we measure the pattern of activity in their brain, we can use the data to predict their intelligence," said Ralph Adolphs from Caltech.

I was recently invited to speak at the TiECON Florida conference in Tampa Bay. I came back amazed and fascinated by the entrepreneurial activity and enthusiasm of the community in Southern Florida. Unbeknownst to me, University of South Florida (USF) is amongst the nation's Top 30 for research expenditures among public universities, according to the National Science Foundation. It has a vast amount of intellectual capital, ranking 19th out of 200 U.S. universities in research commercialization with 125 patents granted for 2017. It is also the home of USF Connect, a technology incubator that unite technology and talent with businesses.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the White House is cooking up new export controls on China. The idea is to restrict exports to China of technologies that could assist in China's Made in China 2025 manufacturing upgrade initiative. That initiative focuses on 10 priority industries, which include new advanced information technology; automated machine tools and robotics; aerospace and aeronautical equipment; maritime equipment and high-tech shipping; modern rail transport equipment; new-energy vehicles and equipment; power equipment; agricultural equipment; new materials; and biopharma and advanced medical products. Some of these items and technology might on the Commerce Control List and may already be controlled for export to China. Politico reports that the National Security Council is drawing up a list of technologies to be controlled for export to China targeting the priority sectors for Made in China 2025.

While big companies have long started employing new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to optimise their business processes, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are still standing on the edge trying to decipher if the new technology holds any answers for them. SMEs have never been the one to get excited about buzzwords, but experts suggest that the time has come for these businesses to start asking specific questions, the answers to which can provide a fillip to SMEs. Efficiency driven by AI "One of the biggest benefits of AI is that it helps to optimise or make a process more efficient," says IBM India/South Asia, Cloud Leader, Amit Kumar. AI-based solutions can help companies vastly reduce operational inefficiencies and small and medium businesses can use these solutions to improve on their processes. "There are several processes which are time-consuming, several pain points like cash flow, which needs to be sorted out, errors that can be reduced. The question is whether AI engines can help in addressing these and the answer is'Yes'," asserts Kumar.

Google made headlines earlier this month when it pulled out of the U.S. Defense Department's flagship artificial intelligence program known as Project Maven, which leverages sophisticated algorithms to analyze drone footage. Until then, the project had been so secretive that few people knew Google was involved -- not even the former executive chairman of Google's parent company, Alphabet, who now sits on the Defense Department's Innovation Advisory Board -- let alone what it actually is. But Google's decision not to seek another contract for the AI project has thrust it into the spotlight as tech companies face a wave of protests over government contracts. "We believe that Google should not be in the business of war," more than 3,000 Google employees wrote in an April letter to company CEO Sundar Pichai that prompted the move. The growing resistance from Silicon Valley to working with the government, particularly the Pentagon, raises questions about the viability of Defense Secretary James Mattis's ambitious plans to leverage cutting-edge commercial technology for military purposes.