There is no doubt that Travis Kalanick, the billionaire founder of the Uber lift-sharing platform, built a company that is one of the giants of Silicon Valley. However, recent months have seen him make a series of apologies for both his own behaviour and that of members of his leadership team. He has now told staff he is going to take some time away from the firm. He is set to have fewer responsibilities upon his return. Uber now operates in 662 cities around the world and is valued at nearly $70bn (£55bn).

Only Homo sapiens, of all the descendants of Homo erectus, survived on earth whereas other species such as homo soloensis, homo denisova, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo floresiensis faded away more than 40,000 years ago. What advantages did Homo sapiens possess that helped them to flourish while other species are extinct? Apparently a cognitive revolution (according to Prof. Yuval Harari in his famous book Sapiens) triggered by some kind of genetic mutation provided Homo Species with more cerebral power and thus they acquired an ability not possessed by any other species – ability to imagine things that did not exist. This ability helped them to invent things including powerful communicative languages, religion, tools and more. Does current cognitive revolution ushered under various nomenclatures such as artificial intelligence, cognitive computing etc provide more powers, this time to machines and bring in unprecedented progress to human life?

There have been numerous rumors about Apple's plans to develop self-driving cars, however Company CEO Tim Cook clarified to Bloomberg his company is working on an autonomous car system. Apple has been secretive about its autonomous driving program, called Project Titan. On June 5, during Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, Cook admitted the company is working on self-driving technology. Read: Alexa, Siri, Apple TV: Are Amazon And Apple Putting Their Rivalry Aside? "We're focusing on autonomous systems," Cook told Bloomberg.

Nanalyze prides itself in providing you with objective analyses of technology and the companies that are at the forefront of developing all of this cool, disruptive tech. For example, you may detect a certain amount of disdain when we talk about companies or jobs that we feel don't offer real--or at least substantial--value in the marketplace. That brings us to the ubiquitous Department of Human Resources and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in automating business processes. At best, HR is a necessary evil, like the designated hitter rule in baseball. So, while we would never cheer seeing anyone sent to the back of the unemployment line, we were quite interested to see how many artificial intelligence recruiting startups are going after Human Resources.

Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers the opening keynote address the 2017 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) at the San Jose Convention Center on June 5, 2017 in San Jose, California. OK, Apple is officially working on self-driving cars. "We're focusing on autonomous systems," Cook said in an interview during the Apple Worldwide developers Conference, published online Tuesday. "It's a core technology that we view as very important." Cook was unsure whether Apple would build its own self-driving cars.

Google's latest effort to thaw relations with China involves an artificial intelligence pow-wow -- and a few games of Go. Google's latest effort to thaw relations with China involves an artificial intelligence pow-wow -- and a few games of Go. Years after Beijing locked out virtually every Alphabet Inc. service, executive chairman Eric Schmidt and a cadre of mid-level Chinese government officials kicked off a summit in the historic canal-laced town of Wuzhen Tuesday: a rare instance of the search leader working in tandem with the country's bureaucrats at a high-profile public event. Google experts and prominent local academics will exchange notes and host discussions but the centerpiece will be a contest between DeepMind's so-far undefeated AlphaGo system and Ke Jie, local champion of the 2,500-year-old strategy board game Go.

An Australian startup revealed its flagship product, an earpiece that can interpret 8 different languages in real-time, at a United Nations event in Switzerland on Friday. Lingmo International, a startup based in West Gosford north of Sydney, launched its TranslateOne2One earpiece at the UN's Artificial Intelligence for Good Summit in Geneva, revealing that IBM Watson machine learning technology had been used for its algorithms. Traditionally, converting one language to another orally in real-time is called "interpreting" whereas the term "translation" is reserved for processing text across languages with some delay. Lingmo founder Danny May, however, describes his product as performing "translation in real-time". And what I mean by independent is that it doesn't require any connectivity to your phone by Bluetooth or wi-fi.

Apple has spoken about its plans for self-driving cars for the first time. The company won't be building its own vehicle, boss Tim Cook said. But it's doing something that might be even more important: building technology that can be put into a car to make it able to drive itself. He said that the company was excited about such developments, including electric cars. For the moment however it is focusing on "autonomous systems", something that Mr Cook said could be used to power self-driving vehicles in the future but a range of different products too. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

The government could push through extreme internet regulation while people are distracted by the current political situation, according to activists. Theresa May might use her wide-ranging plans for technology – which includes weakening security and increasing censorship – as a way of restoring some of "image as a tough leader", the Open Rights Group has warned. The prime minister might look to automatically censor the internet, for instance, and weaken security in a way that "could put all of us at a great risk of crime", it said. Despite failing to win a majority at the recent election, Ms May has suggested that she will keep going with her extreme plans. And she might do so specifically because the government's majority is "fragile", he said.

The number of non-Japanese children at public schools who are lacking in Japanese language skills and who need remedial lessons hit a record 34,335 as of May last year, the latest survey by the education ministry showed Tuesday. The number, up 17.6 percent from the previous biennial survey conducted in 2014, accounted for 42.9 percent of the 80,119 non-Japanese children at public elementary schools, high schools and other public facilities across the country, according to the survey. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology conducted the survey covering about 35,000 public schools. The survey looks at children who cannot hold simple daily conversations in Japanese and/or those who have difficulty learning at school due to poor secondary language skills. "We have taken various measures, such as training teachers and allocating Japanese-language lecturers at schools. But the number of (foreign) children is growing so fast that we have been unable to catch up with it," Yasuhiro Obata, head of at the International Education Division of the ministry, said in a phone interview with The Japan Times.