BEIJING – China on Thursday launched its first unmanned cargo spacecraft on a mission to dock with the country's space station, marking further progress in the ambitious Chinese space program. The Tianzhou 1 blasted off at 7:41 p.m. atop a latest-generation Long March 7 rocket from China's newest spacecraft launch site, Wenchang, in the southern island province of Hainan. Minutes later, as the spacecraft cleared the atmosphere, the mission was declared a success by administrators at ground control on the outskirts of Beijing. It is programmed to conduct scientific experiments after reaching the now-crewless Tiangong 2, China's second space station. A pair of Chinese astronauts spent 30 days on board the station last year.

A rather high profile area generating headlines this year has been connected vehicles. The technological challenges that must be addressed before autonomous cars can be unleashed onto the streets are quite significant. Vision is one critical factor; your car needs to be able to identify all road hazards as well as navigating from A to B. So, how can a car achieve that in an often over-crowded highway space? Computer vision can be described as graphics in reverse. Rather than us viewing the computer's world, the computer turns around to look at ours.

The page "Requested article" is not part of your current subscription. To gain access, please contact your S&P Global Market Intelligence Account Manager or the S&P Global Market Intelligence sales team: sales@snl.com 1 (866) 296-3743 (US & Canada) 44 20 7398 0873 (UK/Europe) 852 5808 1882 (Asia-Pacific) Samsung unit Harman International Industries is teaming up with Baidu for the development of cloud-based artificial intelligence solutions for Chinese automakers.

Depending on your world view, that may or may not seem like a lot of money (or Whoppers). But here's a stat that's big in any context: based on CB Insights' data, 2016's $5 billion resulted from a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53.5%, starting from $589 million invested in 2012. Keep multiplying $5 billion by 1.5 for a few more years and pretty soon you get to serious money -- on top of the already invested $12.5 billion cumulative total for 2012-2016. Earlier this year, CB Insights ranked the top 100 most promising AI startups, and Fortune magazine produced this cool info graphic divvying up the top 50 by industry and global region (speaking of region, 62% of VCs' invested AI dollar value went to U.S. startups in 2016, compared with 79% in 2012). Which brings us to the top four advertising/marketing AI tech startups, as agreed on by CB Insights and Fortune.

Australia's former world snooker champion Neil Robertson says an addiction to video games across his career has harmed both his professional and personal life. The 35-year-old Melburnian says longstanding obsessions with the Fifa football games, World of Warcraft and League of Legends deprived him of sleep and adversely affected his performances. "If you are a single guy and work in a normal job you can get around it," Robertson told Eurosport. "But you can't win professional snooker matches when you are tired." "The years I had the 100 centuries, I should probably have had around 120 because I got addicted like hell to Fifa 14," Robertson said. "That really affected the second half of my season.

Frantz Beautifully shot in black and white with the occasional warm burst of color, French writer-director François Ozon's intricately layered post-World War I drama puts a feminist spin on Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 antiwar film "Broken Lullaby." Graduation A film of gripping moral suspense from the writer-director Cristian Mungiu, this tough, clear-eyed and humane movie follows a father (Adrien Titieni) who will do anything to help his daughter (Maria Dragus) escape post-Ceausescu Romania. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki A lovely piece of work from Finland, a sweet, warmly observed tale about a boxer falling in love before his biggest bout overlaid with just the right amount of Scandinavian melancholy. I Am Not Your Negro As directed by the gifted Raoul Peck, this documentary on James Baldwin uses the entire spectrum of movie effects, not only spoken language but also sound, music, editing and all manner of visuals, to create a cinematic essay that is powerful and painfully relevant. La La Land Starring a well-paired Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, writer-director Damien Chazelle's tuneful tribute to classic movie musicals is often stronger in concept than execution, but it's lovely and transporting all the same.

Bandit structured prediction describes a stochastic optimization framework where learning is performed from partial feedback. This feedback is received in the form of a task loss evaluation to a predicted output structure, without having access to gold standard structures. We advance this framework by lifting linear bandit learning to neural sequence-to-sequence learning problems using attention-based recurrent neural networks. Furthermore, we show how to incorporate control variates into our learning algorithms for variance reduction and improved generalization. We present an evaluation on a neural machine translation task that shows improvements of up to 5.89 BLEU points for domain adaptation from simulated bandit feedback.

The densification of small-cell base stations in a 5G architecture is a promising approach to enhance the coverage area and facilitate the ever increasing capacity demand of end users. However, the bottleneck is an intelligent management of a backhaul/fronthaul network for these small-cell base stations. This involves efficient association and placement of the backhaul hubs that connects these small-cells with the core network. Terrestrial hubs suffer from an inefficient non line of sight link limitations and unavailability of a proper infrastructure in an urban area. Seeing the popularity of flying platforms, we employ here an idea of using networked flying platform (NFP) such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), drones, unmanned balloons flying at different altitudes, as aerial backhaul hubs. The association problem of these NFP-hubs and small-cell base stations is formulated considering backhaul link and NFP related limitations such as maximum number of supported links and bandwidth. Then, this paper presents an efficient and distributed solution of the designed problem, which performs a greedy search in order to maximize the sum rate of the overall network. A favorable performance is observed via a numerical comparison of our proposed method with optimal exhaustive search algorithm in terms of sum rate and run-time speed.

The offer will be available in France for Orange employees from mid-May and for the general public from 6 July 2017. Customers can subscribe directly from the mobile application, online or in one of Orange's 140 certified stores. Innovative and specifically designed for mobile uses, the offer will provide customers from launch with a bank account, a debit card, overdraft protection and an interest-bearing savings account. Additional services, such as credit and insurance, will gradually be included in the offer. Right from the outset, the service will integrate a number of cutting-edge, digital and banking innovations including contactless mobile payments, sending money by SMS, instant bank balances, temporary freezing of the debit card and 24/7 access to a bank advisory service.

NEW DELHI: Microsoft on Thursday announced several new products and services that will empower organisations to easily leverage data driven intelligence in their digital transformation journey. The next generation offerings include first relational database management system (RDBMS) with built-in Artificial Intelligence (AI), SQL Server 2017, Microsoft R Server 9.1 and neural network models, azure cognitive services and Cortana intelligence solution templates. "SQL Server 2017 will be the first version of SQL Server compatible with Windows, Linux and Docker containers. In addition to Windows Server, the new version will also run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server and Ubuntu," the company said in a statement. Microsoft also announced Deep Learning and Machine Learning capabilities to support the next generation of enterprise-grade AI applications for developers and businesses, to create intelligent applications that drive new efficiencies, create better products and improve customer experiences.