The Spotify banner hangs from the New York Stock Exchange on the morning that the music streaming service begins trading shares, on April 3, 2018 in New York City. The question now is: Where to? The Spotify banner hangs from the New York Stock Exchange on the morning that the music streaming service begins trading shares, on April 3, 2018 in New York City. The question now is: Where to? Following its successful public listing yesterday, the music streaming service Spotify is now worth around $25 billion, making it the largest music company in the world -- but when Spotify first débuted, back in 2008, it was reasonable to think it would fail. Headquartered in Sweden, a country whose recording industry had shrunk to a third of its previous size due to piracy, the company was located far from the Silicon Valley sphere of influence.

China has retaliated quickly against proposed United States penalties on Chinese goods and announced 25 percent tariffs on critical American exports, including soya beans, aeroplanes and cars. On Tuesday, the administration of President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on $50bn in Chinese imports across 1,300 categories of products, ranging from industrial robots to locomotives. Beijing's response came hours after the US revealed its plans, with China's foreign ministry saying in a statement that "America's measures to impose tariffs have violated the rules of the World Trade Organisation, and have seriously violated China's legal rights". Soya beans are the top US agricultural export to China and were among the 106 products on which China intends to impose the additional tariffs. The US is the second-biggest soya bean supplier to China, after Brazil.

Google's former head of artificial intelligence John Giannandrea is joining Apple in an effort to improve the firm's voice assistant. Mr Giannandrea, a machine learning expert who joined Google in 2010, will report directly to CEO Tim Cook, it has emerged. The Scottish born specialist announced that he would be stepping down from his role at the search engine earlier this week. It is hoped his expertise can be used to make Siri smarter, as the pioneering software continues to lag behind newcomers from rivals Google and Amazon. Google's former head of artificial intelligence John Giannandrea (pictured) is joining Apple in an effort to improve the firm's voice assistant.

A SpaceX capsule carrying food, experiments and other goods for NASA has arrived at the International Space Station after a two-day journey. The Dragon capsule and its 6,000-pound shipment was captured by the space station's robot arm Wednesday. It's the second trip to the 250-mile-high orbiting outpost for this capsule, refurbished following a visit two years ago. It will remain attached to the space station for about a month, returning to Earth in May. A SpaceX capsule carrying food, experiments and other goods for NASA has arrived at the International Space Station after a two-day journey.

Researchers have long thought that being able to recognize faces is innate in humans and other primates, and that something in our brains just knows how to do this from birth. But a new brain imaging study suggests otherwise - macaques need to have been exposed to faces from a young age to be able to recognize faces. To better understand the basis for facial recognition, Harvard Medical School researchers raised two groups of macaques. The first one, the control group, had a typical upbringing, spending time in early infancy with their mothers and then with other juvenile macaques and human handlers. The other groups of macaques grew up raised by humans who bottle-fed them, played with and cuddles them - while the humans worse welding masks.

Microsoft today said it has developed a new way for its most popular AI-powered bots to speak and analyze human voices at the same time, a skill engineers believe leads to more naturalistic conversations. The bots are empowered to predict what a person will say next, when to pause, and when it's appropriate to interrupt someone. Major virtual assistants have gained more expressive, human-like voices and are being trained to understand human emotion through voice analysis. But despite heavy investment by tech giants, exchanges between virtual assistants and people today can still be rather rudimentary, requiring the use of a wake word to carry out each command and falling short of the casual speech patterns that define human interaction. The new way to talk debuts with Microsoft's Xiaoice in China and Rinna in Japan.

Reducing the risk of accidents, predicting the behavior of users, detecting the disease and helping the farms to increase the crop fields are some of the advantages of AI-based innovations. Is it something that would be harnessed by some of the biggest companies in the world? Who is AI for?" said Anant Maheshwari, president, Microsoft India, in his keynote address at the company's'AI for All' conference here. "And one of the core perspectives we have had as a company is to democratize AI and bring it for everyone," he said.

With 41 locations around Tokyo, Ramen Jiro is one of the most popular restaurant franchises in Japan, because of its generous portions of toppings, noodles and soup served at low prices. They serve the same basic menu at each shop, and as you can see above, it's almost impossible for a human (especially if you're new to Ramen Jiro) to tell what shop each bowl is made at. But Kenji thought deep learning could discern the minute details that make one shop's bowl of ramen different from the next. He had already built a machine learning model to classify ramen, but wanted to see if AutoML Vision could do it more efficiently. AutoML Vision creates customized ML models automatically--to identify animals in the wild, or recognize types of products to improve an online store, or in this case classify ramen.

A classical approach to determining that an earthquake may be looming is based on the interevent time (recurrence interval) for characteristic earthquakes, earthquakes that repeat periodically (Schwartz & Coppersmith, 1984). For instance, analysis of turbidite stratigraphy deposited during successive earthquakes dating back 10,000 years suggests that the Cascadia subduction zone is ripe for a megaquake (Goldfinger et al., 2017). The idea behind characteristic, repeating earthquakes was the basis of the well‐known Parkfield prediction based strictly on seismic data. Similar earthquakes occurring between 1857 and 1966 suggested a recurrence interval of 21.9 3.1 years, and thus, an earthquake was expected between 1988 and 1993 (Bakun & Lindh, 1985), but ultimately took place in 2004. With this approach, as earthquake recurrence is not constant for a given fault, event occurrence can only be inferred within large error bounds.

Super rich investors in mainland China are skittish towards robo investment advisers taking control of their investments, reflecting a major shift from the US where the asset management tool has enjoyed growing popularity, according to global consultancy McKinsey. Only about 11 per cent of mainland securities investors with investible asset of more than 3 million yuan (US$477,000) endorse the technology to make investments, according the survey released on Tuesday. About 32 per cent of all respondents said they would endorse robo-advisers for full investment dealings. The findings show that the majority of mainland securities investors look to robo advisers as an additional source of investment information and financial product recommendations. However, few are ready to trust artificial intelligence for making calls on investments, in contrast to the faith investors place in robo-advisers in the US and other developed markets, McKinsey said.