BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China has outlined plans to become a world-leader in artificial intelligence by 2025, laying down a challenge to U.S. dominance in the sector amid heightened international tensions over military applications of the technology. China released a national AI development plan late on Thursday, aiming to grow the country's core AI industries to over 150 billion yuan ($22.15 billion) by 2020 and 400 billion yuan ($59.07 billion) by 2025, the State Council said. With this major push into AI, China is looking to rival U.S. market leaders such as Alphabet Inc's Google and Microsoft Corp, as it is keen not to be left behind in a technology that is increasingly key from smart cars to energy. "The local and central government are supporting this AI effort," said Rui Yong, chief technology officer at PC maker Lenovo Group, speaking on the sidelines of an AI conference in Shanghai on Thursday. "They see this trend coming and they want to invest more."

In this July 17, 2017, photo, the Afghanistan team, left, walks past two of the team members from Burundi, at right in black shirts, during the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge in Washington. Police tweeted missing person fliers Wednesday asking for help finding the teens, who had last been seen at the FIRST Global Challenge around the time of Tuesday's final matches. The missing team members include two 17-year-old girls and four males ranging in age from 16 to 18. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) The Associated Press

Today it was made public that Google has acquired Halli Labs, a very young (its first public appearance was on May 22 of this year) startup based out of Bengaluru, India, that was focused on building deep learning and machine learning systems to address what it describes as "old problems." The company says it will be joining Google's Next Billion Users team "to help get more technology and information into more people's hands around the world." Halli announced the news itself earlier today in a short post on Medium, and Caesar Sengupta, a product management VP at Google, also confirmed the acquisition with a Tweet. Welcome @Pankaj and the team at @halli_labs to Google. Google has now also confirmed the acquisition with a short statement it provided to TechCrunch.

OSAKA – Major Japanese agricultural machinery makers are preparing to launch full-fledged sales of self-driving tractors, possibly in fiscal 2018, which starts April 1. The government plans to support the introduction of self-driving tractors amid growing hopes that such machines will help farmers cope with labor shortages at a time when many are aging and face difficulties finding successors. In June, Kubota Corp. started selling the country's first tractors with autonomous driving functions on a trial basis. Utilizing the Global Positioning System, the tractors can keep tabs on where they are operating. As the machines still need to be monitored, Kubota assumes that farmers will operate two tractors at a time, one with a driver and the other unmanned.

Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank Group Corp., says artificial intelligence combined with data gathered by billions of sensors will bring on an "information revolution," that will benefit people more than the 19th Century Industrial Revolution. Son, Japan's richest person, told Softbank customers and partners gathered at a Tokyo hotel on Thursday that he believes massive data will help treat cancer, deliver accident-free driving and grow safer food. SoftBank has bought leading British semiconductor company ARM, and its acquisition of U.S. robotics pioneer Boston Dynamics, announced last month, is undergoing regulatory approval. Its investments have included Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. SoftBank, the first carrier to offer the Apple iPhone in Japan, set up a private fund last year for global investments in the technology sector, called the Vision Fund, with the potential to grow to as much as $100 billion.

In this April 26, 2016 photo, a visitor takes a photo of a LeEco LeSEE self-driving electric concept car at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition in Beijing. China's government announced Thursday, July 21, 2017, a goal of transforming the country into a global leader in artificial intelligence in just over a decade, putting additional political support behind growing investment by Chinese companies in developing self-driving cars and other advances.

If Beijing has its way, the future of artificial intelligence will be made in China. The country laid out a development plan on Thursday to become the world leader in A.I. by 2030, aiming to surpass its rivals technologically and build a domestic industry worth almost $150 billion. Released by the State Council, the policy is a statement of intent from the top rungs of China's government: The world's second-largest economy will be investing heavily to ensure its companies, government and military leap to the front of the pack in a technology many think will one day form the basis of computing. The plan comes with China preparing a multibillion-dollar national investment initiative to support "moonshot" projects, start-ups and academic research in A.I., according to two professors who consulted with the government about the effort. The United States, meanwhile, has cut back on science funding.

India has traditionally been two steps behind other major powers when it comes to acknowledging the strategic importance of emerging technologies. China's attention to artificial intelligence (AI) based technologies and machine learning in the US, according to a recent Reuters report, has the US quite concerned. China has been heavily investing in American AI start-ups, alarming the US government enough for it to seriously consider strengthening its existing strategic foreign investment regulatory mechanism – the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The CFIUS was most recently by the Obama administration to block Chinese acquisitions of American chip manufacturing companies. China's focus on AI research and development is a calculated move clearly manifested in the intensity of its domestic investments.

WASHINGTON – Police have received reports that two of the Burundi teenagers listed as missing after an international robotics competition have been seen crossing the border into Canada. The whereabouts of their fellow team members remains unknown and the search for all the teens remains ongoing, but Metropolitan Police spokeswoman Aquita Brown stressed that police have no indication of foul play in their disappearance. The teens seen crossing into Canada were 16-year-old Don Ingabire and 17-year-old Audrey Mwamikazi, Brown said. Police tweeted missing person fliers Wednesday asking for help finding the teens, who had last been seen at the FIRST Global Challenge around the time of Tuesday's final matches. The missing team members include two 17-year-old girls and four males ranging in age from 16 to 18.

Resolving abstract anaphora is an important, but difficult task for text understanding. Yet, with recent advances in representation learning this task becomes a more tangible aim. A central property of abstract anaphora is that it establishes a relation between the anaphor embedded in the anaphoric sentence and its (typically non-nominal) antecedent. We propose a mention-ranking model that learns how abstract anaphors relate to their antecedents with an LSTM-Siamese Net. We overcome the lack of training data by generating artificial anaphoric sentence--antecedent pairs. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art results on shell noun resolution. We also report first benchmark results on an abstract anaphora subset of the ARRAU corpus. This corpus presents a greater challenge due to a mixture of nominal and pronominal anaphors and a greater range of confounders. We found model variants that outperform the baselines for nominal anaphors, without training on individual anaphor data, but still lag behind for pronominal anaphors. Our model selects syntactically plausible candidates and -- if disregarding syntax -- discriminates candidates using deeper features.