Uber will stop using its "Greyball" tool to evade law enforcement efforts, the ride-hail company announced Wednesday, just days after it defended the controversial program as necessary to protect its drivers from harm. "We have started a review of the different ways this technology has been used to date," Uber's chief security officer Joe Sullivan wrote in a blog post. "In addition, we are expressly prohibiting its use to target action by local regulators going forward." Uber's backtracking comes less than a week after the New York Times revealed that the company had been serving up an alternative (and non-functioning) version of its app to public officials in cities where its service violated regulations. It also comes shortly after the company reversed course on applying for a permit to test self-driving cars in California.

Didi Chuxing President Jean Liu speaks at the WSJ D Live technology conference in Laguna Beach, California, on Oct. 25, 2016. The market for Silicon Valley engineers with expertise in artificial intelligence and automated driving tech keeps getting tighter. Didi Chuxing, the ride-hailing giant backed by Apple that forced Uber to abandon its efforts to win over the Chinese market last year, just opened an R&D center in the self-driving car capital with a big "help wanted" sign in the window. Mountain View, California-based Didi Labs will focus on "AI-based security and intelligent driving technologies," the company said on March 8. It will be led by computer scientist Fengmin Gong, vice president of the Didi Research Institute and a co-founder of Palo Alto Networks.

A Japanese theme park is creating floating sleeping capsules to allow visitors to drift along to different attractions while they snooze. Huis Ten Bosch, in Sasebo, Japan, is developing the novel service with the upper half of the two-storey spherical structures designed as a bedroom and the lower section a bathroom. By the end of the year, the Dutch-themed park hopes guests will be able to stay overnight in the capsule while travelling to an island where they can explore its various attractions. The operator aims to draw tourists with its adventurous attractions and augmented reality technology across the 39,000sqm uninhabited island in Omura Bay, four miles southwest of its main theme park area in Nagasaki. According to Bloomberg, there are plans to use the island for survival games where toy guns can be used.

We introduce a method by which a generative model learning the joint distribution between actions and future states can be used to automatically infer a control scheme for any desired reward function, which may be altered on the fly without retraining the model. In this method, the problem of action selection is reduced to one of gradient descent on the latent space of the generative model, with the model itself providing the means of evaluating outcomes and finding the gradient, much like how the reward network in Deep Q-Networks (DQN) provides gradient information for the action generator. Unlike DQN or Actor-Critic, which are conditional models for a specific reward, using a generative model of the full joint distribution permits the reward to be changed on the fly. In addition, the generated futures can be inspected to gain insight in to what the network 'thinks' will happen, and to what went wrong when the outcomes deviate from prediction.

The company has hired Uber's Charlie Miller, best known for his remote control Jeep hack (and plenty of Apple device hacks before that), to head up its safety and security work on self-driving cars. He'll make sure that intruders can't compromise your ride, to put it succinctly. Didi has also scored some engineers from Alphabet's Waymo, one of which (Jia Zhaoyin) will be a principal engineer. It wasn't a secret that Didi was interested in driverless cars, but the creation of the lab makes it official. And setting up shop in the US is as much a declaration of its commitment to self-driving tech as it is a practical move.

Facebook on Wednesday rolled out some staggering statistics related to its social networks. Each day, users watch 100 million hours of video, 400 million people use Messenger, and more than 95 million photos and videos are posted on Instagram. That puts a heavy load on Facebook's servers in data centers, which help orchestrate all these services to ensure timely responses. In addition, Facebook's servers use machine learning technologies to improve services, with one visible example being image recognition. The story is similar for Microsoft, which is continually looking to balance the load on its servers. For example, Microsoft's data centers apply machine learning for natural language services like Cortana.

Imagine that, in 20 or 30 years, a company creates the first artificially intelligent humanoid robot. She looks like a person, talks like a person, interacts like a person. If you were to meet Ava, you could relate to her even though you know she's a robot. Ava is a fully conscious, fully self-aware being: She communicates; she wants things; she improves herself. She is also, importantly, far more intelligent than her human creators.

"Let us consider an augmented architect at work. He sits at a working station that has a visual display screen some three feet on a side, this is his working surface, controlled by a computer with which he can communicate by means of small keyboards and various other devices." This vision of the future architect was imagined by engineer and inventor Douglas Engelbart during his research into emerging computer systems at Stanford in 1962. At the dawn of personal computing he imagined the creative mind overlapping symbiotically with the intelligent machine to co-create designs. This dual mode of production, he envisaged, would hold the potential to generate new realities which could not be realized by either entity operating alone.

The video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto once called the land of Hyrule "a miniature garden that you can put into a drawer and revisit anytime you like." Miyamoto conceived Hyrule, the setting for Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series, in 1986, and though its layout has changed often in the intervening decades, its ambiance of bucolic, occasionally threatening whimsy hasn't. Neither has the company's understanding of Zelda's essential purpose: to bring the great outdoors--the rollicking hills, the whispering caves, all that breezy, alfresco escapade--indoors. In recent years, Miyamoto, who is now sixty-four, has retreated to the position of Zelda's overseer, relinquishing control to younger directors inside the clandestine, Willy Wonka-esque factory that is Nintendo's Kyoto headquarters. But Hyrule remains indelibly his.

At this moment in history, there are more satellites photographing Earth from orbit than just about anyone knows what to do with. Planet, Inc., has more than 150 orbiting cameras, each the size of a shoebox. And more startups are planning to launch their own. What should we do with all that imagery? How can we search it and process it?