Apple describes its mobile devices as designed in California and assembled in China. You could also say they were made by the App Store, launched a decade ago next month, a year after the first iPhone. Inviting outsiders to craft useful, entertaining, or even puerile extensions to the iPhone's capabilities transformed the device into the era-defining franchise that enabled Uber and Snapchat. Craig Federighi, Apple's head of software, is tasked with keeping that wellspring of new ideas flowing. One of his main strategies is to get more app developers to use artificial intelligence tools such as recognizing objects in front of an iPhone's camera. The hope is that will spawn a new generation of ideas from Apple's ecosystem of outsourced innovation.

Plenty of people around the world got new gadgets Friday, but one in Eastern Tennessee stands out. Summit, a new supercomputer unveiled at Oak Ridge National Lab is, unofficially for now, the most powerful calculating machine on the planet. It was designed in part to scale up the artificial intelligence techniques that power some of the recent tricks in your smartphone. America hasn't possessed the world's most powerful supercomputer since June 2013, when a Chinese machine first claimed the title. Summit is expected to end that run when the official ranking of supercomputers, from an organization called Top500, is updated later this month.

J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot Productions, the company behind blockbuster films and TV shows like Star Trek, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Lost and Westworld, is making a jump into gaming. It's joining forces with Chinese gaming giant Tencent, and minority partner Warner Bros. to launch Bad Robot Games. "I'm a massive games fan, and increasingly envious of the amazing tools developers get to work with, and the worlds they get to play in," said Abrams in a statement. The company will team with traditional game developers on both AAA and indie games for PC, mobile and console. Abrams said the company will take a "unique co-development approach," bringing its story-telling and visual chops to projects. It will make its in-house creative directors available during development, along with its network of freelance visual artists, sound designers, writers and musicians.

When people see machines that respond like humans, or computers that perform feats of strategy and cognition mimicking human ingenuity, they sometimes joke about a future in which humanity will need to accept robot overlords. But buried in the joke is a seed of unease. Science-fiction writing and popular movies, from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) to "Avengers: Age of Ultron" (2015), have speculated about artificial intelligence (AI) that exceeds the expectations of its creators and escapes their control, eventually outcompeting and enslaving humans or targeting them for extinction. Conflict between humans and AI is front and center in AMC's sci-fi series "Humans," which returned for its third season on Tuesday (June 5). In the new episodes, conscious synthetic humans face hostile people who treat them with suspicion, fear and hatred.

It's been a wild week at the world's largest PC show. From an extremely high-spec gaming phone to a touchscreen trackpad and a gorgeous dual-screen AI-powered laptop, ASUS pulled out all the stops to impress the world from its turf here in Taiwan. Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 850, its first built-for-Windows processor, while Intel and AMD launched chips with more cores and at higher clock speeds than before. Meanwhile, NVIDIA announced a new platform specifically for smarter robots and Microsoft introduced a new category of displays that are basically DIY Surface Hubs. As if that's not enough, we also caught a glimpse of the next generation of Lenovo's Yoga Book and a cute little dual-screen concept from Intel that uses E Ink on one of its displays.

The PlayStation Vita is hanging on by a thread. Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida said in 2015 there was no hope for a follow-up to the handheld console, and since then, the Vita machine has been quietly winding down. Sony is halting production of physical Vita games across Europe and North America on March 31st, 2019, though Sony Japan will continue to churn out carts in the domestic market -- for now. The Vita has garnered a cult following since its Japanese launch in 2011 (2012 for Western audiences). It entered the scene pitched as a powerful handheld with a digital marketplace, OLED display and a broad variety of touch- and movement-based input methods. Major franchises flooded the device, including Persona, Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed and LittleBigPlanet, and it became a welcome home for indie games like Hotline Miami, Murasaki Baby, OlliOlli and Fez.

A fashion show in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, that used drones to walk clothes down a runway has been ripped apart by Arab fashion elites and critics who compared the dresses to ghosts and dementors. Ali Nabil Akbar tells BBC Arabic he thought showing the dresses via drone during the Saturday show at Hilton Hotel was "suitable for Ramadan." "The idea is that we want to add things that are simple yet beautiful," Akbar tells the BBC. "Even the décor and set-up of the hall was organized beautifully, everything involved innovation." I'm dying at this fashion show in Saudi they weren't allowed female models pic.twitter.com/5xxpMBk4Nr

Car accidents can be the tragic byproducts of any number of factors, each more unpredictable than the next: a sudden thunderstorm, a busy intersection, or even perhaps, gravel on the road. These are just a few examples of the great deal of uncertainty government officials must deal with every day. Even the colours used in a heatmap can sway decisions, says Mansour Raad, a subject matter expert on Advanced Analytics, BigData and AI at Esri, the leading GIS company. However, policies must always be made on accurate facts rather than human subjectivity. We look at how sensors, artificial intelligence, and geospatial technologies can help officials dig out underlying causes, identify patterns, and ultimately, make informed decisions. Government officials are now able to gather an extensive amount of data from the environment and infrastructures using ubiquitous sensors.

Given its wide and growing range of capabilities and applications, Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be effectively used to improve the state of public healthcare in many parts of the world. And while AI is being increasingly used in clinics to treat individual patients, its application in public health systems has been far less in comparison. From my experience of studying the social impact of computing in developing worlds and multiple areas of public health, I strongly believe that AI can strengthen public health systems and transform medical logistics. AI can, for instance, supplement the ongoing worldwide efforts to improve immunization logistics and ensure adequate supply of vaccines for children at every local health centre. It can also address many other issues that surround the vaccine cold chain; for instance, the challenge of storing the vaccines at the right temperature in fully operational refrigerators.

Mumbai: The next time you visit your neighbourhood grocery store or call the corner shop for a home delivery, don't be surprised if your grocery shopkeeper remembers what you ordered the last time and reminds you to restock your Kissan Jam or your detergent and toiletries supply as they are running out and he has an offer. All this and more will soon be possible as the country's largest consumer packaged goods company, Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), is re-imagining the way we shop at neighbourhood stores. Spread across 600,000 villages and 10 million outlets, general trade will continue to remain big in the next 10 years, HUL said in a presentation on its website on 6 June where it outlined Project Maxima, which is focused on precision marketing at scale. The re-imagining of its supply chain and corner shop strategy is part of the company's bigger initiative undertaken over the last four years for its entire business with initiatives like Winning in Many Indias (WiMi), which divides the country into 14 zones. Also, management is decentralized with the formation of Cluster Category Business Teams, which are mini-boards for brand building and marketing.