Andrew Ng helped create two of Silicon Valley's leading artificial intelligence labs. First, he built Google Brain, now the hub of AI research inside the internet giant. Then he built a lab in the Valley for Baidu, the company known as the Google of China. Ng was one of the primary figures behind the enormous and rapid rise of AI over the last five years as everyone from Facebook to Microsoft rebuilt themselves around deep learning. And on Tuesday night, he announced his departure from Baidu.

It's been an uphill battle for the coastal prefecture of Fukushima, Japan, since an earthquake and tsunami devastated the region in 2011, causing a nuclear disaster at its power plant. Six years later, workers are still battling to decommission the plant, where radiation is deadly. Officials expect the cleaning won't be finished for decades. "This is an accident that does not exist in the past tense, but in the present progressive form," Fukushima Gov. Masao Uchibori said earlier in March, criticizing Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for not explicitly the disaster in his annual speech. "It's not possible to avoid using the important and significant terms of the nuclear plant accident of nuclear power disaster."

Tokyo Electric said Thursday that it failed to get any photos of potential fuel debris during a five-day probe of the primary containment vessel at reactor 1 of the Fukushima No. 1 power plant. Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc., however, stressed that the investigation was worthwhile because its robot was able to take underwater images in the pool of water at its bottom and gauge its radiation level, which will help it estimate where the melted fuel lies. The monstrous tsunami of March 11, 2011, tipped reactors 1, 2 and 3 into core meltdowns. The molten fuel rods then penetrated their pressure vessels before apparently dropping to the bottom of the giant containment vessels. There is about a 2.5-meter deep water pool at the bottom of the primary containment vessel of reactor 1, and Tepco believes most of its melted fuel rods fell into it.

Honda's revamped Clarity fuel cell sedan is a technological marvel, but hydrogen fuel stations remain scarce. The dogged persistence Honda has shown in its decades-long quest to perfect hydrogen as a zero-emission replacement for gasoline can be seen as quixotic or futile. But the quirky company that makes motorcycles, lawnmowers, jets, humanoid robots, boat engines and a few million cars soldiers on, along with GM, Toyota and Hyundai, in the face of haphazard government support for hydrogen, minimal consumer awareness and withering critics like Elon Musk, a tireless advocate for Tesla's battery-powered cars. All the sweat equity Honda engineers have invested in its fuel cell program, year after year, has yielded a remarkable new version of the Clarity sedan, the most compelling argument yet of the potential of hydrogen cars still hold. Yet for all its technological sophistication, Clarity's fate remains to a skinny network of California hydrogen stations that's expanding slowly, with new headwinds from a Trump Administration that's shown no willingness to aid carbon-cutting technologies.

A robot looks at visitors at the Soft Bank robotics stand at the Cebit technology fair in Hannover on March 20, 2017. The Digital Business fair CEBIT in Hanover with Japan as partner country runs from March 20 until March 24. I've written a number of times about the impact automation will have on both the wider world and on the way we work, and am broadly speaking optimistic about the role new technologies will play in the labor market. Indeed, a recent paper highlighted the minimal impact technology has had on the amount of jobs created in recent economic recoveries. Of course, this doesn't stop a great many articles emerging in the past few months highlighting the huge (negative) impact automation will have.

Every day, we provide data to companies in exchange for great experiences powered by machine learning (ML). Facebook's ability to tag friends in a photo seems obvious. Gmail's ability to prioritize messages provides an intuitive way to triage conversations. Our user data makes these ML-based experiences possible. We provide this data under the assumption of trust that it doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

AI startups have discovered there's value to partnering with tech giants like Intel, Google, and IBM. Entrepreneurs bring the domain expertise, ingenuity, and passion, while large enterprises provide the unparalleled compute and storage capabilities critical to building modern AI systems. "Ninety percent of the world's supercomputers run on Intel technology," Diane Bryant, who leads Intel's Data Center Group, told me at SXSW. "And 95 percent of artificial intelligence solutions run on Intel Xeon and Xeon Phi processors." Graphics processing units (GPUs), once popular mainly with gamers chasing visual performance, inside computers represent images as matrices. Turns out the deep neural nets that power our current AI craze also depend heavily on matrix operations, making GPUs suddenly very useful for AI research.

Microsoft looks set to launch the Windows 10 Creators Update in a matter of weeks, but data suggests users will have to wait months to download it. The major software update will introduce a raft of new features, including Paint 3D, new accessibility features and a multitude of performance enhancements. However, the pace of last year's Anniversary Update suggests the Creators Update could take a long time to arrive. 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. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art Corp's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' performs during its unveiling in Tokyo, Japan Singulato Motors co-founder and CEO Shen Haiyin poses in his company's concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China A picture shows Singulato Motors' concept car Tigercar P0 at a workshop in Beijing, China Connected company president Shigeki Tomoyama addresses a press briefing as he elaborates on Toyota's "connected strategy" in Tokyo.

With the resignation of Baidu chief scientist Andrew Ng, the ability of the country's tech firms to retain top foreign talent is in question.

VW's Hofmann: Embrace machine learning or lose competitiveness (Photo: Claus Dick) HANOVER –Volkswagen CIO Martin Hofmann believes machine learning is coming into its own as a means to achieve significant digital innovation across all business areas. "Machine learning is no longer science fiction," Hofmann told the automotiveIT Congress. The VW CIO also warned that automotive companies need to embrace artificial intelligence and the machine-learning part of the new technology. "For companies that don't do anything today, the race is run," he warned. Hofmann said interest in machine learning has been boosted by a massive increase in automotive data, coupled with a big increase in computing power available today. The growth of open-source software development also is helping the implementation of machine learning, he said.