Yusuke Goto would have crashed his Toyota Crown five years ago if the premium sedan hadn't detected the 45-year-old was veering off and righted the steering wheel. So when he found similar features in the cheaper Nissan Serena minivan, it was an easy choice. "Earlier you could only find such features in premium sedans but I have a big family and I want to make sure they are safe when we drive for a weekend getaway," Goto said on a recent visit to a Nissan showroom in Tokyo with his family. "I've become hugely interested in autonomous driving after that experience." At ¥3 million ($27,400), Nissan Motor's Serena minivan was the first model in Japan in its price bracket that offers what's known in the industry as "level 2" autonomous driving features, similar to what Tesla offers with its Autopilot function in the $80,000 Model S. A car with level 2 functionality can control steering and speed simultaneously without intervention for a short period, allowing the driver to take his hands off the wheel and foot off pedal at the same time. Nissan chose to debut its autonomous features in its mass-market model instead of the premium Infiniti brand, and the decision has paid off for the automaker.

We knew that Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of telecom giant SoftBank, loved robots. Now the Japanese billionaire is about to significantly expand his collection. Minutes ago, SoftBank announced that it will be acquiring Boston Dynamics and Schaft for an undisclosed sum, in order to "collaborate in advancing the development of smart robotics technologies." Boston Dynamics and Schaft were two of the nine robot companies that Google acquired in 2013 to form the core of its robotics division, headed by Android founder Andy Rubin. As far as anyone could tell, not much happened after all those companies became part of Google, and not much continued to happen through 2016, much to the frustration of roboticists everywhere.

Mumbai: Researchers are increasingly striving to help machines translate words from one language to another the way professional translators would. This implies that machines must understand the context of words and sentences, and make sense of idioms, phrases and jokes. However, despite the fact that billions of words are being translated daily by multilingual machine translation services like Google Translate, Microsoft Translator, Systran's Pure Neural Machine Translator, WordLingo, SDL FreeTranslation, China's Baidu, Russia's Yandex or Babel Fish, machines have a long way to go before they can function as fluently as humans do when speaking in, and translating, different tongues. Barak Turovsky, product lead at Google Translate--a free multilingual machine translation service from Google Inc.--understands this dilemma well. "Today, translation by machines can be likened to my five-year-old son speaking Russian. Since I speak fluent Russian, I know the mistakes he makes and how he forms words," he says.

It's been over a year since we heard that Google's parent company Alphabet wanted to sell its robotics company Boston Dynamics, and now it has a buyer: Softbank. The Japanese company has been working on its own robots for years, including the helpful Pepper, and now they'll be under the same umbrella as Handle, Big Dog, Atlas, WildCat and all the rest. Google acquired the MIT spin-off in 2013, when Andy Rubin was still still leading its robotics efforts instead of building his own phone. Along with Japan's SCHAFT (which dominated the 2013 DARPA challenge and is also being acquired by Softbank), it became a part of the reorganized X division under Alphabet, but clearly fell out of the company's long-term plans. The terms of the deal have not been revealed, however Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son said in a statement that "Smart robotics are going to be a key driver of the next stage of the Information Revolution, and Marc and his team at Boston Dynamics are the clear technology leaders in advanced dynamic robots. I am thrilled to welcome them to the SoftBank family and look forward to supporting them as they continue to advance the field of robotics and explore applications that can help make life easier, safer and more fulfilling."

An American F-15 warplane has shot down a pro-government drone in Syria after it fired at coalition forces, officials said, marking an escalation of tensions in the war-torn country's south. No one was hurt in Thursday's incident which occurred near the coalition's At-Tanaf garrison close to the Jordan border, Colonel Ryan Dillon, spokesman for the coalition against ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), told Pentagon reporters. The drone "was armed and still had weapons on it when it was fired upon by US forces from an aircraft", said Dillon. Although the weapon deployed by the drone deployed hit only dirt, the action was "clearly meant" as an attack, added Dillon. Dillon said it was not immediately clear who owned the drone. "Regardless of what kind of drone it was, it fired upon our coalition forces, and therefore showed hostile intent, and it was perceived as a threat," he said.

WASHINGTON – A drone likely connected to Iranian-supported militias fired on U.S.-backed troops near a military camp in southern Syria on Thursday, near where the U.S.-led coalition is training Syrian rebels fighting the Islamic State group, an American military spokesman said. The weapon fired by the drone did not detonate and no one was hurt, but Army Col. Ryan Dillon told reporters at the Pentagon that it was considered a direct threat and that a manned U.S. aircraft shot it down. The attack came just hours after the U.S. bombed Syrian government and allied troops inside a protected zone in that area, and marked a sharp escalation in the skirmishes between the coalition and those pro-Syrian government forces there. Dillon said this was the first time that forces supporting Damascus had attacked coalition troops in that region, which is near the training camp in Tanf, close to the border with Jordan. He declined to say who owned or operated the drone, but other officials said it was likely Iranian or Iranian-backed Hezbollah.

In this tutorial I'll explain how to build a simple working Recurrent Neural Network in TensorFlow. This is the first in a series of seven parts where various aspects and techniques of building Recurrent Neural Networks in TensorFlow are covered. A short introduction to TensorFlow is available here. For now, let's get started with the RNN! It is short for "Recurrent Neural Network", and is basically a neural network that can be used when your data is treated as a sequence, where the particular order of the data-points matter.

Every time we go to a conference, we see flying robots that are getting smaller and more talented, capable of dynamically avoiding all sorts of obstacles, indoors and out. What's less work is floating calmly through the air, without any concern for hurting people or running into things, or running out of battery: Such is the life of the gentle and slightly chubby Miniature Autonomous Blimp from Georgia Tech (GT-MAB), which can now detect faces and autonomously follow people around. Using a blimp rather than something with spinning rotors solves lots of common problems with UAVs, though it also creates a few new ones. A blimp is inherently very safe, since impacts, even with people, are more comical than dangerous. Without wasting energy keeping itself aloft, battery life is measured in hours rather than minutes, and hovering in particular is very energy efficient, since it's the default state of the blimp.

Apple revealed features that will be included in the upcoming iOS 11 update at WWDC this week. The iOS 11 is expected to roll out this fall, coinciding with Apple's new smartphone lineup, which will include the company's much-anticipated iPhone 8, which will be the company's 10th anniversary iPhone. Apple wants to help you out. The iOS 11 update will allow you to see floor plans, let you browse floors, view directories and search. The feature will be available at malls in select cities to start, including New York, Boston, Tokyo, Chicago and London.