Uber just showed how committed it is to mapping the planet. The ridesharing outfit has started rolling out map cars in Singapore, putting the vehicles on five major continents (sorry, Antarctica, you'll have to wait). As in other cases, the cartographic cars are really driver rides with mapping tech on top to collect data based on real trips. Privacy shouldn't be an issue, Uber says -- they won't keep imagery from the end points of your trip, and what data they do collect won't be made public. The company is still a long way off from having comprehensive mapping data of its own.

MOSCOW/UNITED NATIONS – Russia released drone footage Monday showing new destruction in Syria's historic town of Palmyra, which was recently recaptured by the Islamic State group, and warned that the militants could be planning the further demolition of antiquities. The Russian Defense Ministry says Syrian government forces are advancing toward the town as another battle for the ancient site looms. The video showed that the militants have badly damaged the facade of the Roman-era amphitheater and the Tetrapylon -- a set of four monuments with four columns each at the center of the colonnaded road leading to the theater. The video appears to show that only two of the 16 columns remain standing. IS militants have destroyed ancient sites across their self-styled Islamic caliphate in Syria and Iraq, perceiving them as monuments to idolatry.

Artificial intelligence has been a dream in technology ever since Alan Turing first wrote his seminal paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Now, thanks to advances in hardware power and algorithm design, AI is a growth industry – and it has no shortage of vocal advocates. These are some of the most vocal and influential leaders working on artificial intelligence, robotics, chat bots, virtual reality, the ethics of autonomous software and vehicles and more. Organizes the London.AI meet up and the annual Playfair AI Summit. Thanks to all who kicked off discussion on the back of my piece on "6 areas of #AI/ML to watch closely" Keep going! Designs intelligent systems into working AI systems to help understand natural intelligence.

It has animal hairs coated with ionic liquid gel to pollinate a flower like a bee. They may be small, but bees and other insects play a critical role in pollination and maintaining a natural balance in our environment. On February 10, 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the rusty-patched bumblebee as an endangered species, now found in only 13 states. Bumblebees and other pollinating insects help pollinate 75 percent of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables we eat and removing them from the equation could trigger a global food crisis according to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The short term solution could lie with drones.

As Valentine's Day approaches, a recent report shows North Americans lead the rest of the world when it comes to dating app engagement. North America has a dating app subscription rate 7.2 times that of Europe and 2.6 times more than Asia. User acquisition firm Liftoff, released its annual review of dating app trends and insights. Liftoff analyzed nearly three billion dating app ad impressions across more than one million app installs and 3.4 million post-install events in 2016. If you think dating app subscriptions spike just before Valentine's Day, the report shows that's not the case.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk was in Dubai to launch Tesla in the United Arab Emirates at the World Government Summit Monday. The South African billionaire inventor was interviewed onstage and gave his opinion on aliens, artificial intelligence, universal basic income and the future of humanity. Universal basic income will solve the economic problems caused by automation. However, the existential problems that come from a world with few workers will be harder to solve, Musk said. "There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. These are not things I wish will happen; these are things I think probably will happen. And if my assessment is correct and they probably will happen, than we have to think about what are we going to do about it? I think some kind of universal basic income is going to be necessary. The output of goods and services will be extremely high. With automation there will come abundance. Almost everything will get very cheap. I think we'll end up doing universal basic income. It's going to be necessary. The much harder challenge is, how are people going to have meaning? A lot of people derive their meaning from their employment. That's a much harder problem to deal with."

That's the size of the workforce dedicated to a business that's thrived for the past three decades on a growth model of labour arbitrage. In the process, it's matured into a industry worth almost $150 billion. The multi-billion dollar question today is, where does it go from here, as it comes head to head with a series of challenges. Consider: New Bills being introduced by the Trump administration in the US Congress seek to make outsourcing not only tougher but more expensive. This comes at a time when protectionist sentiments that call for onsite hiring of locals are spreading globally. All this, even as traditional IT services are moving towards the digital economy.

China represents a huge opportunity for chip designer ARM as it looks to extend its low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture beyond the mobile and embedded devices spaces and into new areas, such as the datacenter and emerging markets like autonomous vehicles, drones and the Internet of Things. China is a massive, fast-growing market with tech companies – including such giants as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent – looking to leverage such technologies as artificial intelligence to help expand their businesses deeper into the global market and turning to vendors like ARM that can help them fuel that growth. ARM Holdings, which designs SoCs and licenses those designs to third-party companies, has more than 1,000 such partners worldwide, including more than 200 in China alone, where over the past decade, the number of ARM-based chips shipped by Chinese partners has jumped 114-fold. The company has a dominant position in the mobile device market, with ARM-based chips powering the bulk of smartphones and tablets on the market around the globe. The rise of the IoT, the growth of hyperscale computing environments and the greater focus on energy efficiency in the datacenter has created opportunities for ARM to push beyond those mobile and embedded computing areas and rapidly grow its addressable market possibilities.

Four Questions to Ask When It's Time to Modernize Your Data Center Cloud computing is here to stay. The agility and scalability of the cloud model - as well as its ability to transform up-front capital expenditures into flexible operating expenditures - are too compelling to ignore. For CIOs in organizations of all sizes, the question is no longer whether to take advantage of the cloud ... but how. Unfortunately, that question isn't as easy to answer as it might sound. Not all cloud providers are created equal.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu is one of the latest brands in the Asia-Pacific region to transform its customer experience through artificial intelligence (AI) technology: In October, the Chinese search engine launched Melody, an AI-powered chatbot that lives inside the search engine's existing Doctor app. The app collects users' medical information to help doctors make more informed diagnostic decisions. While the concept of chatbots–a technology that simulates human conversation–isn't new, its potential is being transformed thanks to advancements in AI. This, along with adoption by legacy brands, will drive the refinement of chatbot use to effectively engage customers in a more personalised way. Growing Use In APAC People are becoming so accustomed to chat application interfaces that chatbot use is pegged to explode.