Honda is the latest automaker to commit to an ambitious self-driving car goal. It wants cars with SAE Level 4 autonomy on the road by 2025, CEO Takahiro Hachigo announced at a media event in Japan.

Anant Bajaj, Joint Managing Director of Bajaj Electricals believes his organization has always been light years ahead of the competition. Way back in 2003, the company created the CIDCO Kharagar electric circle when the concept of smart lighting was but a whisper. The FMEG company, as Bajaj likes to call it has been lighting up iconic city buildings and landmarks like the CST station, Worli sea face, Rajabai clock tower and Wankhede cricket stadium. Bajaj Electricals was also the lighting partners of the Indian leg of Justin Bieber's Purpose World Tour. Six years into his role as the Joint Managing Director of BEL, Anant Bajaj is all set to drive the company into the next orbit of growth. In an interview with ETCIO, Anant Bajaj talks about the digital transformation of the company, the recently launched digital center and the technology led product innovations at Bajaj Electricals.

To be able to drive safely and reliably, autonomous cars need to have a comprehensive understanding of what's going on around them. They need to recognize other cars, trucks, motorcycles, bikes, humans, traffic lights, street signs, and everything else that may end up on or near a road. They also have to do this in all kinds of weather and lighting conditions, which is why most (if not all) companies developing autonomous cars are spending a ludicrous (but necessary) amount of time and resources collecting data in an attempt to gain experience with every possible situation. In most cases, this technique depends on humans making annotations to enormous sets of data in order to train machine learning algorithms: hundreds or thousands of people looking at snapshots or videos taken by cars driving down streets, and drawing boxes around vehicles and road signs and labeling them, over and over. Researchers from the University of Michigan think there's a better way: Doing the whole thing in simulation instead, and they've shown that it can actually be more effective than using real data annotated by humans.

While Apple recently introduced the HomePod and iOS 11, former employees who worked on Siri told the Wall Street Journal the virtual assistant is lagging behind its competitors because of company concerns about user privacy. Siri, which competes with Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices, is struggling to rise above the competition because of Apple's culture, which prioritizes user privacy, making it hard to personalize and improve the product, former Siri team employees said. Read: Amazon Sees Apple's Siri Talking With Alexa Virtual Assistant, Report Says Amazon and Google assistants had an advantage over Siri because they had more data from their search engines they could use to train their virtual assistants and have less-restrictive privacy policies than Apple, the former employees said. The Journal report said Apple protects user privacy by randomly tagging Siri searches and keeping the information tagged for a timeframe of six months, unlike its competitors Amazon and Google, which retain the data until ask for it to be discarded. That issue has delayed efforts to boost Siri because Apple "relinquished control of data before it could be used to gauge the impact of software tweaks," employees told the Journal.

The main attraction at a UN-hosted conference in Geneva this week was Sophia, a humanoid robot who argued that the benefits of AI technology outweigh the concerns associated with the rise in AI technology. "AI is good for the world, helping people in various ways," reported Agence France-Presse, according to Phys.org. According to the source, it said that she tilted her head and furrowed her brow in an almost lifelike manner aside from the various cables coming out of the back of her head. Created by Hanson Robotics, Sophia is part of the company to push robots that are capable of being "smart, kind and wise," reads a statement on their website. Sophia is an exponent of that company philosophy and said that work is underway to make artificial intelligence "emotionally smart, to care about people," and insisted that AI "will never replace people, but we can be your friends and helpers."

Hackers have been found trying to attack users through a cleverly disguised comment on an Instagram picture posted by Britney Spears' account. The unusual incident was spotted by security firm ESET, which investigated a comment that most web users would typically dismiss as spam. The picture, which was posted on 7 January, is still up, but the comment has been deleted. It was posted under the username'asmith2155', and appeared to read, "#2hot make loved to her, uupss #Hot #X." However, security expert Jean-Ian Boutin uncovered a bit.ly link hidden in the comment, which was linked to a malicious extension for the Firefox internet browser designed to steal people's data.

It was a very good sign that Warren bought Apple. Either he's gone crazy or is learning. I prefer to think he's learning.

Facebook is planning to secretly watch and record users through their webcams and smartphone cameras, a newly discovered patent suggests. The document explains how the company could use technology to see how your facial expressions change when you come across different types of content on the site. It would analyse those images to work out how you feel, and use the information to keep you on the site for longer. 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 giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

A smart machine made by a company in Chengdu, Sichuan province, took the math test of the national college entrance examination, or gaokao, on Wednesday. AI-MATHS finished the paper version of the test for liberal arts students in Beijing with a score of 105. A full score was 150. "The score is satisfactory," said Lin Hui, CEO of Zhunxingyunxue Technology of Chengdu, which developed the machine. AI-MATHS is an artificial intelligence program developed in 2014, based on cutting-edge big data technology, artificial intelligence and natural language recognition from Tsinghua University.

Once again, we find ourselves at the dawn of a new year. And many would say, not a moment too soon. With a series of tumultuous elections around the world and an unusual number of celebrity passings, it's been a rough year. But there is at least one bright spot from 2016: Intellyx's digital transformation prognostications were close to spot on! As is our tradition, each year we review last year's predictions and make all new fresh ones!