Didi Chuxing has announced another gargantuan equity funding round, as the Chinese ride-hailing giant reveals it has raised a further $4 billion. This latest round comes just eight months after the company raised $5.5 billion, which followed a year after it raised $7.3 billion from big-name backers including Apple. This new cash injection takes Didi's total inbound investments to $19.7 billion, though the company didn't reveal who the investors were beyond stating they were "Chinese and international institutions." With another $4 billion in the bank, Didi said that it plans double down on its artificial intelligence (AI) investments, support its global expansion, and support other initiatives such as "new energy vehicle service networks," according to a statement issued by the company. Similar to Uber, Didi Chuxing offers smartphone-based car services, such as carpooling, taxis, and premium cars with drivers, while it has previously revealed how it's lending its data to cities which are leveraging it in all manner of ways to fight road congestion.

After launching its data analytics-driven brand Billion, Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart will create an artificial intelligence unit called AIforIndia to strengthen its business offerings, according to a media report. "We are betting big on the use of AI and machine learning to solve problems at Flipkart. India's problems are unique and we need to apply AI in the ecosystem to solve them. Some of the focus areas for AI in developed countries cannot be applied in India. At Flipkart, we will solve problems differently because the underlying problems (in India) are different," chairman and co-founder Sachin Bansal told Mint.

ND-Series VMs are available in the West US 2, East US, West Europe, and Southeast Asia regions. NCv2-Series VMs are available the West US 2 and East US regions and will be available later in December 2017 in West Europe and South Central US. NCv3-Series VMs are available for early customer access. To sign up for the preview, please complete the Access to Azure Next Generation GPU VMs online form.

New technologies are redefining industries, blurring traditional boundaries and creating new opportunities on a scale never seen before. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has sparked a new level of industrial revolution. Designed to help humans work better, it can be classified into two phases, first, generating insight from data more quickly and accurately than is humanly possible and second, acting automatically on that insight. AI is essentially the creation of systems that use advance analytic strategy, especially machine learning and deep learning, to accomplish things that earlier only humans could do. If we look back a few years, AI was simply a concept discussed over a few hours by techies and sci-fi fans.

A team of Japanese researchers has built two humanoid robots that can do pushups, situps and stretches just like their human creators. One can even sweat, releasing heat generated by the physical activity. In the latest issue of the U.S. journal Science Robotics released this week, Yuki Asano and colleagues from the graduate school of information science and technology at the University of Tokyo explain how the two robots -- named Kenshiro and Kengoro -- were designed to mimic human systems, including muscle and bone movements. Kenshiro, developed between 2011 and 2014, and Kengoro, developed from 2015 onward, aim to mimic the body proportions, skeletal structure, muscle arrangement and joint performance of average humans. Kengoro, which is 167 cm tall and weighs 56.5 kg, is also equipped with five-fingered hands and feet that can naturally touch the ground, and can even artificially perspire -- a feature that allows it to release motor heat.

Bengaluru: India's largest online retailer Flipkart is making an ambitious push in the area of artificial intelligence by carving out an internal unit called AIforIndia, which will be overseen by its senior-most business and technology leaders, as it attempts to put machine learning and AI at the core of its business. In an interview, Flipkart co-founder and chairman Sachin Bansal said the e-commerce firm will invest "hundreds of millions of dollars" in the AI initiative over the next few years. Bansal said Flipkart has begun recruiting dozens of AI experts, building infrastructure, striking hardware partnerships and working with top educational institutions, including IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), to make its AI push successful. He also said Flipkart is looking for AI-related acquisitions in India and in the US. In 2015, Flipkart had acquired the F7 Labs in the Silicon Valley to focus on areas such as AI and machine learning.

During his report to the 19th CPC National Congress, President Xi Jinping disclosed his plans for the future of the People's Liberation Army (PLA): "We will make it our mission to see that by 2035, the modernisation of our national defence and our forces are basically complete; and that by the mid-21st century our people's armed forces have been fully transformed into world-class forces." The Chinese media announced: "As chairman of the Central Military Commission (CMC), Xi is tasked with ensuring the world's largest military take a "crucial leap" in the new era from being simply large to being strong." A few weeks earlier, The South China Morning Post wrote about "China building giant facial recognition database to identify any citizen:". The project is to achieve an accuracy rate of 90 per cent, though it faces formidable technological hurdles and there are serious concerns about privacy. The powerful facial recognition system should be able to identify 1.3 billion citizens within three seconds Chen Jiansheng, of the department of electrical engineering at Tsinghua University, told the Hong Kong newspaper that the government would use this system to track wanted suspects as well as for public administration.

The AWS Deep Learning AMIs are now available in four new AWS Regions: China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet, Europe (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai). The Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) provide provide machine learning practitioners with the infrastructure and tools to accelerate deep to quickly start experimenting with deep learning models. The AMIs come with pre-built packages of popular deep learning frameworks including Apache MXNet and Gluon, TensorFlow, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Caffe, Caffe2, Theano, Torch, PyTorch, and Keras. In addition, to expedite development and model training, the AMIs are pre-configured with NVIDIA CUDA and cuDNN drivers, and are optimized for GPU acceleration on Amazon EC2 P2 and P3 instances. Companies are turning to deep learning to tackle a broad range of challenges.

Every Christmas there's one toy that causes holiday mayhem - a must-have that seems almost impossible for desperate parents to get their hands on. But what goes into making a global best-seller? The stakes will be high for parents whose children have Fingerlings on their holiday wish-lists as they head into the final weekend before Christmas. The miniature chirping animatronic monkeys, inspired by the world's smallest primate - the pygmy marmoset - are one of this season's runaway hits and can be tough to find. WowWee, the Hong Kong-based Canadian company behind the robotic toy, says Fingerlings were the brainchild of brand manager Sydney Wiseman, who saw the tiny primates online on a viral social media post and recognised a toy in the making.