His decision to step away threatens to amplify concerns over a leadership vacuum atop Samsung, which is already challenged by the absence of its de facto leader, Lee Jae-yong, who was convicted in August for bribing South Korea's former president. The appeal trial for Mr. Lee, who has denied wrongdoing, started this week. Mr. Kwon, who joined Samsung in 1985 long before it became a chips heavyweight, will also relinquish his vice chairman post by March, the company said. He had informed confidantes he felt he had accomplished all he had hoped to achieve in his career, according to people familiar with the matter. He had been a steadying force and served as Samsung's public face while Mr. Lee has been away.

In the video presentation below (courtesy of Yandex) – "Deep Learning: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications" – Naftali Tishby, a computer scientist and neuroscientist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, provides evidence in support of a new theory explaining how deep learning works. Tishby argues that deep neural networks learn according to a procedure called the "information bottleneck," which he and two collaborators first described in purely theoretical terms in 1999. The idea is that a network rids noisy input data of extraneous details as if by squeezing the information through a bottleneck, retaining only the features most relevant to general concepts. Striking new computer experiments by Tishby and his student Ravid Shwartz-Ziv reveal how this squeezing procedure happens during deep learning, at least in the cases they studied. The Berlin workshop aims at bringing together leading scientists in deep learning and related areas within machine learning, artificial intelligence, mathematics, statistics, and neuroscience.

Alibaba Group announced today that it's launching a new research organization aimed at tackling emerging technologies like machine learning, network security, the internet of things, and quantum computing. It's called the Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum and Outlook (or the DAMO Academy), and Alibaba plans to recruit 100 researchers to staff its labs around the globe. The company plans to open two labs in China, in the tech giant's home city of Hangzhou and in Beijing. In addition, the Chinese ecommerce and technology titan will open labs in San Mateo, California; Seattle, Washington; Moscow, Russia; Tel Aviv, Israel; and Singapore. Over the next three years, the company plans to spend $15 billion on research and development, a significant increase over its current rate of spending.

Maria, Marvin, Sonny, David, and Ava are all ordinary-sounding names -- but in film, television, and literature, these seemingly ordinary names belong to extraordinary individuals who, despite their exemplary skills and complex personalities, are not human. Since Brigitte Helm's 1927 portrayal of Maria in Metropolis, audiences have developed an increased love/hate fascination with artificial intelligence. While filmmakers continue to address the controversy regarding the acceptance and cohabitation between humans and their modern creations parallel to real-world technological advancements, just how accurate is this representation in modern film, and have cinematic depictions evolved at all? Early films reflected the heightened fear of technology that developed among the working class during the Industrial Age by depicting metal machines as unstoppable forces of mayhem. This successfully fed into the pre-existing "anti-immigrant" nervous anticipation that technological advancements would go from taking over people's jobs to taking over the world.

Before Hisashi Kanbe in 2013 introduced BakeryScan, the world's first image recognition checkout system designed specifically for bread, it was the job of every bakery worker in Japan to memorize the assorted prices of each baked good -- from baguettes back to bagels. Unlike shrink-wrapped food, whose prices are easy to calculate by scanning barcodes, bread is usually displayed sans packaging because "it sells better that way," said Kanbe, CEO of a Hyogo-based company Brain Co. "But in a store with as many as 100 kinds of bread, it's virtually impossible for inexperienced workers to remember all of their prices." But with BakeryScan, even novices can handle purchases by placing a tray of bread under a scanner, which identifies every item based on shape and color, calculates the prices and displays the total on a screen -- all in just one second, eliminating the need for workers to manually enter prices piece by piece at the cash register. "Many bakery owners say our product has made their job much easier and much more efficient," he said, adding that the system is already used by about 250 bakeries nationwide. BakeryScan could be a game-changer for the nation's service industries, which are struggling with the worst labor shortage in a quarter of a century.

KAMISHIHORO, HOKKAIDO – The town of Kamishihoro, Hokkaido, began testing a driverless bus service on Saturday. The test by the Kamishihoro Municipal Government is designed to study technical issues that may arise on roads that traverse hilly and mountainous terrain in the area. "We hope that driverless bus services will be put to practical use and work to help the mobility of residents," Kamishihoro Mayor Mitsugi Takenaka said during a ceremony to mark the occasion. The test made use of a French-made Navya Arma autonomous bus built by SB Drive Corp., a unit of SoftBank Group Corp. Equipped with eight sensors and GPS, the bus ran at a speed of 10 kph near the municipal government office on a 600-meter road that was closed to traffic for the test. Some 120 residents are expected to try the bus during its three-day test run.

NVIDIA's meteoric growth in the datacenter, where its business is now generating some $1.6B annually, has been largely driven by the demand to train deep neural networks for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)--an area where the computational requirements are simply mindboggling. Much of this business is coming from the largest datacenters in the US, including Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft. Recently, NVIDIA announced new technology and customer initiatives at its annual Beijing GTC event to help drive revenue in the inference market for Machine Learning, as well as solidify the company's position in the huge Chinese AI market. For those unfamiliar, inference is where the trained neural network is used to predict and classify sample data. It is likely that the inference market will eventually be larger, in terms of chip unit volumes, than the training market; after all, once you train a neural network, you probably intend to use it and use it a lot.

You can tell a lot about a company's values and its priorities by the way it spends its money. Each October on ZDNet we do a special report on how business leaders are planning to spend their tech budgets for the year ahead. In our survey of 2018 plans, we found that nearly two-thirds of decision makers are increasing their technology budgets in 2018, and almost a quarter of them are boosting their tech spend by 10% or more. SEE: Tech Budgets 2018: A CXO's Guide Aside from specific tech projects, 35% of leaders said they are investing in training existing employees and 29% said they are investing in hiring new employees. We also polled TechRepublic's CIO Jury, where 83% said their IT budgets would increase or stay the same in 2018.

HealthifyMe, a five-year-old start-up backed by Dubai-based NB Ventures, has unveiled a new health and fitness app, by which a user can talk to a nutritionist created by artificial intelligence. The Bengaluru-based firm, which developed the eponymous app, will make the new AI-powered app available to select consumers initially and roll-out the full feature version by January, Tushar Vashisht, co-founder and CEO said in an interview. "There are three million users and 100 million exercises on the app," Mr. Vashisht said. "Millions of exchanges between nutritionists and consumers led us to create a knowledge graph. The graph consisted of both structured and unstructured data. It is probably the world's first completely artificial intelligent nutritionist."

Way back in 2003, the Black Eyed Peas were asking where is the love and George Bush was declaring victory over Saddam Hussein. In the same year, G Dubyah signed the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act which committed somewhere around $771 million for nanotechnology R&D across 10 federal agencies. This captured the attention of investors, and we saw an incredible amount of public interest on "how to invest in nanotechnology". One obvious investment theme was a picks-and-shovels play on microscopes. If you're going to be dealing with the very small, then it only makes sense to invest in microscopes.