Chinese internet firm Baidu Inc has agreed to acquire US computer vision firm xPerception for an undisclosed amount to support their renewed efforts in artificial intelligence as Chinese tech firms face regulatory headwinds in the United States. "The acquisition of xPerception is the latest in a recent series of notable investments aimed at strengthening Baidu's position as a global leader in AI," it said. Baidu is targeting foreign personnel and technology as part of a wider drive to refocus company resources on developing artificial intelligence capabilities. Revenues from the firm's core search unit took a beating last year when the Chinese government tightened online ad regulations, culling a chunk of existing advertisers with new eligibility requirements. The announcement comes as other Chinese tech firms struggle with regulatory push-back on acquisitions in the US market.

Workhorse Group Inc. of Loveland, Ohio, received permission Wednesday from the Federal Aviation Administration to begin testing a delivery drone nicknamed HorseFly that is launched from atop the company's electric trucks. SAN FRANCISCO – The world's largest drone maker has teamed up with the nation's largest thermal camera company to create ready-to-fly drones that can see in the dark. The drone maker is DJI, a China-based company that currently has about 70% of the world drone market. The camera is by FLIR Systems, a Wilsonville, Ore.-based thermal and infrared imaging company. The collaboration will produce drones that can be used in search-and-rescue, firefighting, security and surveillance.

The next wave of IT innovation will be powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. We look at the ways companies can take advantage of it and how to get started. First prize in the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize was awarded to Final Frontier Medical Devices, a team in Pennsylvania. The team, led by brothers Dr. Basil Harris, an emergency medicine physician, and George Harris, a network engineer, created an artificial intelligence engine called DxtER that learns to diagnose medical conditions via data from emergency medicine and analyzing patients. Final Frontier Medical Devices was awarded $2.6 million at the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize ceremony on Wednesday.

The earthquakes that jolted Kyushu a year ago killed dozens, left tens of thousands homeless and were a reminder of how much the global supply chain for smartphones and digital cameras depends on Sony Corp. The tremors knocked out production at plants that produce image sensors, the chips that convert light particles into bits and make digital pictures and videos possible. To lead its recovery, the company turned to 33-year veteran engineer Hiromi Suzuki, who crisscrossed the country to secure parts needed to get its Kumamoto factory back online. A year on from the temblor and Sony is taking sensors into augmented reality, self-driving cars, factory robots and drones as more machines begin using the chips to see the world around them. With control of about half the market, and customers including Apple Inc., Google and Nikon Corp., it's building on technology pioneered in the 1980s with the Handycam.

Deep Learning waves have lapped at the shores of computational linguistics for several years now, but 2015 seems like the year when the full force of the tsunami hit the major Natural Language Processing (NLP) conferences. However, some pundits are predicting that the final damage will be even worse. Accompanying ICML 2015 in Lille, France, there was another, almost as big, event: the 2015 Deep Learning Workshop. The workshop ended with a panel discussion, and at it, Neil Lawrence said, "NLP is kind of like a rabbit in the headlights of the Deep Learning machine, waiting to be flattened." Now that is a remark that the computational linguistics community has to take seriously!

The man dragged off a United Airlines flight in an incident that sparked an international uproar suffered a broken nose and concussion, his lawyer said, adding that he is planning to sue. David Dao has been released from the hospital, attorney Thomas Demetrio said at a news conference on Thursday during which a member of Dao's family spoke out for the first time. Dao's lawyers filed a petition in court requesting that the city, which operates O'Hare International Airport, and United Airlines preserve evidence related to the incident. They also said a lawsuit was forthcoming. "This lawsuit, among other things, hopefully, will create a not just national discussion, but international discussion, on how we're going to be treated going forward," Demetrio said.

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is abruptly reversing himself on key issues. "After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it's not so easy," the president said after a discussion with Chinese President Xi Jinping that included his hopes that China's pressure could steer North Korea away from its nuclear efforts. "I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power" over North Korea, he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. "But it's not what you would think." That's just one of several recent comments offering insight into what looks like a moderate makeover for an immoderate president.

It seems like hardly a week goes by without Uber fending off bad press. The situation has gotten so bad that employees are leaving in droves; President Jeff Jones left last month, AI Labs director Gary Marcus did as well, and so has VP of Product Ed Baker. Rachel Whetstone, Uber's head of policy and communications for two years, announced this week she was stepping down too. But until CEO and founder Travis Kalanick leaves and Uber changes its "Always be hustlin'" mantra, it's highly unlikely that anything will change. Take the most recent Uber scandal, for example.

After the Storm A sublimely simple family drama from Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, a filmmaker assured enough to hide his mastery in plain sight. Nothing is overemphasized, and nothing escapes his attention. 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 anti-war film, "Broken Lullaby." Heal the Living Unusual in its story, unexpected in its structure, made with an unerring instinct for emotional connection, this French drama wallops us without ever overplaying its hand. 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.

BENGALURU: The humongous amount of digital data being generated, and companies' need to glean insights and make predictions from them have made skills in data visualisation, data science, and machine learning among the most valued for technology recruiters today. This is reflected in the number of working professionals signing up for specialised courses in these spaces. Candidates who complete the courses tend to get between 20% and 50% increase in salaries. Kashyap Dalal, chief business officer at online learning platform Simplilearn, says that big data and analytics courses were the big growth drivers in the past three years. While data science continues to remain popular, accounting for 30% of all learners, courses on visualisation tools and machine learning have become very attractive over the past six months, he said.