The line for the SXSW panel'Eyes in the Sky: The Future of AI and Satellites' snaked around many corners in Austin's JW Marriot Hotel – understandably, AI coupled with space shit, bring it on. Spaceknow Inc's CEO Pavel Machalek did most of the talking during this session. Spaceknow is a San Francisco based company building an AI system that can process the petabytes of data from the hundreds of commercial satellites circling us up above. We're covering the weird and wonderful tech at SXSW, join us in the fun. "We are digitizing the physical world, so we can build apps on top it," Machalek stated. According to the Czech CEO, we're currently going through a sea of change in how we use satellite data.

A'global startup' which makes electric racing vehicles unveiled plans Friday to sell a fully autonomous electric car in the US market by 2020. The company called Nio, founded by Chinese entrepreneur William Li and with offices in Silicon Valley, Europe and China, unveiled a prototype of the vehicle called Eve at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin, Texas. According to a Nio statement, the car will be'a digital companion, a robot on wheels' equipped with'an artificial intelligence engine with an intuitive human interface, providing verbal and visual connections both within the vehicle and with the outside world.' The new design is more like a living room on wheels than a car. The forward two seats have an'enhanced panoramic view', with digital displays provided on the active glass when needed to support non-autonomous driving EVE has no door pillars, and interior is accessed through a wide forward-sliding door.

We study distributed learning with the least squares regularization scheme in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). By a divide-and-conquer approach, the algorithm partitions a data set into disjoint data subsets, applies the least squares regularization scheme to each data subset to produce an output function, and then takes an average of the individual output functions as a final global estimator or predictor. We show with error bounds in expectation in both the $L^2$-metric and RKHS-metric that the global output function of this distributed learning is a good approximation to the algorithm processing the whole data in one single machine. Our error bounds are sharp and stated in a general setting without any eigenfunction assumption. The analysis is achieved by a novel second order decomposition of operator differences in our integral operator approach. Even for the classical least squares regularization scheme in the RKHS associated with a general kernel, we give the best learning rate in the literature.

California is back on the map as a state that's serious about welcoming driverless cars. Truly driverless cars -- vehicles with no human behind the wheel, and perhaps no steering wheel at all -- are headed toward California streets and highways starting in 2018. After months of criticism, state regulators Friday released a proposal for a new set of regulations to govern the testing and deployment of driverless cars on public roadways. They are seeking public comment and expect approval by the end of the year. The regulations lay out "a clear path for future deployment of autonomous vehicles" in California, said Bernard Soriano, deputy director at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Waymo, the company that was formerly Google's self-driving-car division, on Friday sought a court order to stop Uber from using trade secrets allegedly stolen by a former Waymo employee who took a job with the ride-hailing firm. The preliminary injunction, filed in U.S. District Court, seeks to temporarily prohibit Uber from "accessing, using, imitating, copying, disclosing, or making available to any person or entity Waymo's" trade secrets. The filing requests a hearing occur on April 27 before Judge William H. Alsup. When reached for comment, Uber referred The Times to a statement it had issued a month earlier, describing Waymo's legal actions as a "baseless attempt to slow down a competitor and we look forward to vigorously defending against them in court." Waymo last month sued Uber, alleging that former Waymo employee Anthony Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary files shortly before his resignation from the company in January 2016.

A couple of years back, Jay Ruskey, developer of the "Stak Block" -- a wonderful way to reduce a huge source of worldwide carbon emissions by turning waste rice straw into building blocks (BTW, someone needs to go and make a few million dollars selling this to the Indian government) -- told me of a conversation he had when presenting his technology in China. From the US perspective, a major selling point was that the machinery they had developed, and the newer machinery that was under development, would increasingly reduce the manpower needed in the production of Stak Blocks. The Chinese representative protested, saying, "No, no, we want more people needed to do it, not less." Where the US view was looking to more efficiency and profits, the Chinese view was looking to social stability. Last week I attended a talk given by General Stanley McChrystal at the Westmont University President's breakfast.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. Communication with a robot using brain activity from a human collaborator could provide a direct and fast feedback loop that is easy and natural for the human, thereby enabling a wide variety of intuitive interaction tasks. This paper explores the application of EEG-measured error-related potentials (ErrPs) to closed-loop robotic control.

In February, my team went on a four-day innovation technology tour to Israel. We met with more than 25 startups and led panel discussions on innovation at the 2017 OurCrowd Global Investor Summit. The trip impacted how we are thinking about innovation and what is happening in retail right now. The Israeli retail technology startup scene is booming. More than $4.8 billion was invested in Israel-based high-tech startups in 2016, a record total--and more than was invested in Silicon Valley companies.

A rendering of startup automaker NIO's Eve, an automated, electric wagon coming to the U.S. in 2020 (NIO) NIO, a well-funded Shanghai-based automotive startup with operations in Silicon Valley and Europe, intends to sell its first autonomous electric car in the U.S. by 2020. The young company faces lots of competition in a global race to create game-changing 21st-century vehicles. Padmasree Warrior, NIO's U.S. CEO, showed off the Eve, a sleek, wagon-style model in a presentation webcast from SXSW in Austin, Texas. Despite a string of high-production value videos that underscored NIO's commitment to zero-pollution, stylish, AI-enabled cars, few specifics about Eve – which bears a resemblance to fellow startup Faraday Future's FF 91 electric crossover – were revealed during the press conference. Electric range wasn't discussed, though a technical spec sheet provided by the company indicates a target driving range of about 600 miles per charge.

Microsoft has become the latest technology giant to respond to WikiLeaks' release of 8,761 documents allegedly detailing the CIA's spying methods. The files forming the enormous Vault 7 release claim that the agency was able to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows, which it used to secretly monitor users. Microsoft has encouraged customers to update to the latest version of its desktop operating system, saying that most of the vulnerabilities allegedly used by the CIA have already been patched. 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.