Ford Motor (China) Ltd. and Baidu have signed a letter of intent to explore ways the two companies could collaborate in the Chinese market, including on technology and digital services for connected cars and digital marketing, Ford said in a statement Wednesday. The alliance, if completed, would be a big win for Ford, which is lagging behind rivals in the Chinese market when it comes to in-car technology and connectivity. The partnership could help boost Ford's brand image in the country, where the auto maker's joint-venture sales continue to slide amid stiff competition from both local and foreign brands. Once a highly profitable business for Ford, its Chinese operations posted a loss in the first quarter, in part because of the company's failure to appeal to the technology-loving Chinese consumer. Ford Chief Executive Jim Hackett is working to expand the auto maker's expertise in new digital and connected-car services by forging partnerships across the globe.

Roboticists from the University of Tokyo's JSK Lab have created a flying robot they call DRAGON, an acronym for Dual-rotor embedded multilink Robot with the Ability of multi-deGree-of-freedom aerial transformatiON. A recent report by IEEE Spectrum includes a video highlighting the bot's ability to change its shape mid-flight in order to navigate through tight spaces. DRAGON comprises four modules, each boasting a pair of maneuverable fan thrusters. Battery-powered hinged joints link these modules. An Intel Euclid serves as both the eyes and the brain of DRAGON, letting the flying robot "see" the world around it and autonomously decide what shape it needs to assume to fit through a given area.

I had my first taste of this delicate hobby at last year's Computex, in which, with a lot of back and forth between pouring liquid nitrogen and torching, I managed to push Intel's 4.2GHz Core i7-7700K processor to an epic 7GHz. Still, I had it easy. Professional overclockers from G.SKILL and HWBOT had set everything up in the first place. Even the pros can find this all a little mundane. EVGA's Vince "Kingpin" Lucido and Illya "Tin" Tsemenko are well-known for their GPU-overclocking records over the years, but they, too, grew tired of the tedious "monkey work," to the point where they decided to build a rig that could overclock itself. The result is the Roboclocker, a PC that can intelligently and efficiently pump liquid nitrogen to both its CPU and GPU.

Have a nagging feeling that someone -- or something -- is watching you? Chances are it's a camera. Cities around the world employ computer vision-enabled CCTV to monitor vehicle and pedestrian traffic. And in the near future, brick-and-mortar stores might use them to nab shoplifters. Japanese telecom company NTT East teamed up with tech startup Earth Eyes to create AI Guardsman, a machine learning system that attempts to catch crooks in the act.

Do you wonder what it takes to implement enterprise-grade AI solutions? How do AI professionals design, develop, debug, deploy, and deliver AI solutions that are mission-critical, industrial-strength, and production-ready in enterprise settings? Join us on Wednesday, June 27, 2018 at 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM to learn directly from industry practitioners because we have scheduled two amazing presentations about this subject. We will be joined by specialists from LoyaltyOne and OneLedger who will explain what it takes to build and implement AI solutions for internal stakeholders and external clients. Registration is free and snacks as well as refreshments will be offered to attendees.

If you were hoping PUBG Corp's lawsuit against Epic Games over Fortnite would be a knock-down drag-out fight to determine which battle royale game emerges triumphant... well, you'll be disappointed. The PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds developer has dropped the South Korean lawsuit, which alleged that Epic was imitating its interface and in-game items through Fortnite's Battle Royale mode. PUBG declined to explain the reason for the change of heart (we've asked Epic for comment), but there are a few potential candidates. For one, it probably wasn't going to accomplish much. Short of securing an outright ban on Fortnite, a successful lawsuit wasn't likely to slow Epic down --it might have obtained money and some cosmetic changes, but not much more.

With or without weight, it's widely regarded as the best exercise you can do. But one that's easy to get a little bit wrong and ruin all those benefits. So here's Kaia Health's Perfect Squat Challenge app, developed with input from both physiotherapists and sport scientists to help you nail the form. In the company's press release, Maximilian Strobel, Head of Kaia Health's AI Lab said: "Breakthroughs in AI-powered motion tracking and correction technology mean that everyone now has access to a virtual personal trainer and physiotherapist on their iPhone -- and can perfect exercises such as the squat." "Perfect" is a brave word choice -- debate over ideal squat form often reaches yanny-or-laurel levels -- but the app is, still, rather remarkable.

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.

The World Cup is well on its way in Russia, but in the meantime, students were taking part in the Robo World Cup in Montreal. The annual contest to build and program teams of soccer-playing robots and while the Dutch don't take part in Russia, they did win the RoboCup.

The world of automated surveillance is booming, with new machine learning techniques giving CCTV cameras the ability to spot troubling behavior without human supervision. And sooner or later, this tech will be coming to a store near you -- as illustrated by a new AI security cam built by Japanese telecom giant NTT East and startup Earth Eyes Corp. The security camera is called the "AI Guardman" and is designed to help shop owners in Japan spot potential shoplifters. It uses open source technology developed by Carnegie Mellon University to scan live video streams and estimate the poses of any bodies it can see. The system then tries to match this pose data to predefined'suspicious' behavior. If it sees something noteworthy, it alerts shopkeepers via a connected app.