Byton, the new China-based company that unveiled a tech-centric all-electric SUV concept at the big tech trade show CES in January, is now tapping some outside experts to bring self-driving car technology into their future vehicles. Byton announced Monday that it has partnered with self-driving vehicle technology startup Aurora. The buzzy startup, led some of the best minds in self-driving cars, will work on bringing Level 4 autonomous vehicle capabilities into Byton vehicles. The two companies will conduct a pilot deployment of Aurora's L4 autonomous driving systems on Byton vehicles in the "next two years." The pilot will be in California, Aurora CEO Chris Urmson said.

One year between smartphones is very normal. Even six months is something we have seen before, but four months? That is how long Oppo took to announce the A71 (2018), the successor to last September's A71. The A71 (2018) is physically similar to its predecessor. This means we have the same 5.2-inch display with 720p resolution, main 13 MP camera, front 5 MP shooter, 3,000 mAh battery, and 16 GB of expandable storage.

Japan's elderly are being told to get used to being looked after by robots. With Japan's ageing society facing a predicted shortfall of 370,000 caregivers by 2025, the government wants to increase community acceptance of technology that could help fill the gap in the nursing workforce. Developers have focused their efforts on producing simple robotic devices that help frail residents get out of their bed and into a wheelchair, or that can ease senior citizens into bathtubs. But the government sees a wider range of potential applications and recently revised its list of priorities to include robots that can predict when patients might need to use the toilet. Dr Hirohisa Hirukawa, director of robot innovation research at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, said the aims included easing the burden on nursing staff and boosting the autonomy of people still living at home.

The office will serve as a regional hub for YITU to bring its AI and facial-recognition solutions to customers and partners in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Macau and Oceania markets, the company said. It will also serve as a platform for the company to work with private and public organisations in the region that are looking to deploy intelligent solutions for the digital age. Lin Chenxi, co-founder of YITU, said that it saw immense potential in Singapore as a market for AI development and innovation, and a springboard to introduce its solutions to the region. Ang Chin Tah, Director of Infocommunications and Media from the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), said that YITU's strong capabilities in AI and computer vision made it a valuable addition to Singapore's growing AI ecosystem. YITU would develop new solutions across different domains such as security, finance, healthcare, and transportation, in the process creating "exciting new" jobs in the AI sector, Ang said.

It appears Samsung is preparing to officially join the competition in the automotive system semiconductor market. The South Korean tech giant has apparently announced that it is launching its very own application processor for cars. Industry sources revealed Monday that Samsung is now gearing up to debut its first Exynos chip for cars, which is tentatively called Exynos Auto. The processor is going to be available first to Audi cars, which previously relied on Qualcomm for application processors, as per The Investor. According to the same industry sources, Samsung's Exynos Auto chip is exclusively designed to provide massive amount of computing power to in-car solutions like infotainment system, head-up display and digital dashboard.

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ARTIFICIAL Intelligence (AI) is disrupting many industries across the world. From robots being developed to diagnose disease, to harnessing the power of natural language processing and machine learning to mimic human speech patterns for customer service. There can be no doubt that AI applications will drastically improve many aspects of daily life. Google has estimated that robots will reach levels of human intelligence by 2029. But, with the advancement of AI technology comes the increasing fear that robots will soon take over our jobs.

Estimating the travel time of a path is of great importance to smart urban mobility. Existing approaches are either based on estimating the time cost of each road segment which are not able to capture many cross-segment complex factors, or designed heuristically in a non-learning-based way which fail to utilize the existing abundant temporal labels of the data, i.e., the time stamp of each trajectory point. In this paper, we leverage on new development of deep neural networks and propose a novel auxiliary supervision model, namely DeepTravel, that can automatically and effectively extract different features, as well as make full use of the temporal labels of the trajectory data. We have conducted comprehensive experiments on real datasets to demonstrate the out-performance of DeepTravel over existing approaches.

Over the past decade or so, "The Low-Fertility Trap," a hypothesis put forth by Wolfgang Lutz, Vegard Skirbekk and Maria Rita Testa, respectively Austrian, Norwegian and Italian scholars, has worried many countries facing the risks of an aging population. The theory suggests that when a country's birth rate is lower than 1.5, three self-reinforcing mechanisms -- demographic, sociological and economic -- can work, if unchecked, towards a downward spiral in its future fertility. Yet, while people are still debating whether China is up against doomed demographics, a few have noticed that artificial intelligence (AI) is creating an ever faster, more disruptive and stronger force than that of the industrial revolution -- and could completely overturn China's demographic outlook. Industrialization and low birth rates are two sides of the same coin. For a long time, people have thought that modernization is what alters people's concept of birth, rather than more specifically, industrialization.

But before autonomous cars can transform modern life, cities will have to transform themselves. Smart cities will be the linchpins of the autonomous age -- deploying the digital infrastructure necessary to connect cars to vital information, reduce traffic congestion and make roads safer. "The cities of the future are going to require intricate and complicated management systems," said Eran Shir, CEO and cofounder of Tel Aviv based Nexar, which announced today on closing $30 million in series B funding. The company is building a vehicle-to-vehicle network and collect real-time information about road conditions, traffic, infrastructure problems, crashes and road hazards. "Real-time information is crucial for cities that want to take control of their smart city initiatives, and Nexar has crowdsourced a database of over 100 million driven miles," Shir said.