Take a short walk through Singapore's city center and you'll cross a helical bridge modeled on the structure of DNA, pass a science museum shaped like a lotus flower, and end up in a towering grove of artificial Supertrees that pulse with light and sound. It's no surprise, then, that this is the first city to host a fleet of autonomous taxis. Since last April, robo-taxis have been exploring the 6 kilometers of roads that make up Singapore's One-North technology business district, and people here have become used to hailing them through a ride-sharing app. Maybe that's why I'm the only person who seems curious when one of the vehicles--a slightly modified Renault Zoe electric car--pulls up outside of a Starbucks. Seated inside the car are an engineer, a safety driver, and Doug Parker, chief operating officer of nuTonomy, the MIT spinout that's behind the project.

Apple could soon update the iPhone with a special mode meant for the cinema. Tweets sent by regular Apple leaker Sonny Dickson claim that the first beta of iOS 10.3, the latest update to iPhones, will be sent out on 10 January. It will include a special theatre mode that will be triggered by clicking a popcorn-shaped icon in the phone's control centre. Mr Dickson didn't indicate what that icon would actually do. But several outlets have speculated that it could be linked to a patent that Apple already owns, intended for making the phone easier to check in the cinema.

A new year usually comes with new years resolutions, like getting fitter, reading more, and for some people, falling in love. However some singles are now joking that they'll never find their soulmate after an apparent glitch with dating app Tinder left them with no matches. The issue first started being reported by Twitter users at around 9:30am AEDT, with many tweeting the company. 'I might cry': Many users took to Twitter to complain about the problem'Tinder, why are you doing this to me? I had almost 600 matches, where are they?' one user called Connor Jordan tweeted.

Chinese firm Lenovo has created its own version of Amazon's Echo home assistant. The company announced its new Smart Assistant today at the CES technology conference in Las Vegas. The gadget, which is a similar shape to the Amazon Echo but comes in a variety of colours, uses Amazon's Alexa Voice Services and works in the same way as Amazon's own smart assistant. Chinese tech firm Lenovo has created its own version of Amazon's Echo home assistant. Lenovo says 65 per cent of people around the world already use voice recognition technology on their phone, PC or tablet.

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Lenovo came out with their guns blazing by stepping up their product announcements more than I have ever seen them do in the past five years. Lenovo is entering new markets, adding new brands and further improving current offerings. When Lenovo came out with the Yoga they showed that they were innovators and willing to take a risk, and I see their CES 2017 offerings build on that. Lenovo is really pushing their technology portfolio and their engineers to deliver the latest and most cutting edge technologies inside their products and it's nice to see. The first of these new products is the Smart Home which is an area Lenovo hasn't really played in a big way before.

Mosul, Iraq - As fighting raged in eastern Mosul on a recent afternoon, a black Humvee arrived at an Iraqi army command post with a collection of plastics, electronics and rotor blades lashed to its back. Soldiers leaped to unload the cargo, which comprised the remnants of the latest tool in ISIL's armoury: drones. The haul included a number of small devices of the kind favoured by filmmakers and hobbyists, costing a few hundred dollars apiece. But there were also larger, fixed-wing craft fashioned out of corrugated plastic and duct tape, apparently made by the fighters themselves. Since mid-2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group has held Mosul, after sweeping through northern Iraq in a shock offensive.

A 29-year-old Nepalese student in Tokyo has found herself stuck in limbo with her dreams derailed, and the state of Japan's language schools is to blame. A survivor of human trafficking in the past, the woman, who wished to be identified only by her last name, Puri, came to Japan in 2014 as an exchange student. Brimming with high expectations at the time, she said she was determined to acquire a master's degree in sociology, with an emphasis on a subject dear to her, women's rights. Imagine her disappointment, then, when her dream was cut short by the Japanese-language school in Tokyo where she was studying. The school taught her only the very basics of the language, lumped her in with unmotivated students who frequently fell asleep in class and -- to her shock -- informed her that a vocational school was the only educational path it could prepare her for.

Most of us already know that adopting new cloud applications can boost a business's productivity by enabling organizations to be more agile and ready to change course in our fast-moving and connected digital world. But the rapid adoption of cloud apps and services also brings with it profound security threats, including visibility and control challenges that aren't present in traditional on-premises environments. At the same time, the cloud - because of its interconnected, flexible and adaptable nature - can also provide new possibilities for addressing cloud security problems. By leveraging the power of the cloud with a data science and machine learning cloud-based solution, security and risk professionals can solve many of the traditional security challenges found in popular apps like Office 365, Google Drive, Salesforce and Box. In her session at 19th Cloud Expo, Deena Thomchick, Senior Director of Cloud Security at Symantec, detailed how cloud-based data science, machine learning, computational analysis and intelligent algorithms can work together to help to deliver truly intelligent and responsive security and compliance for the cloud.

Ditto Labs, Inc., a pioneer in deep learning announced today that Red Fort Capital led a new round of investment in the vision-as-a-service company. Ditto's vision-as-a-service API can find nearly anything appearing in a photo -- a specific product, brand logo, location, demographic profile -- even subjective measures of sentiment -- in near real time. Ditto's service is a high value AI application for thousands of digital business's. "Humans can no longer keep up: ubiquitous cameras are casting off reams of big data. Today, critical business decisions need computers to act on visual data at massive scale and in real-time," said Red Fort Capital CEO Parry Singh.

India's patent laws allow for reverse-engineering of certain technologies. A prime example of this reverse-engineering is in the pharmaceutical space, where Indian pharma companies are allowed to reverse-engineer drugs, especially life-saving ones. These drugs may have been developed by pharma majors in other parts of the world--and then introduced into western markets--after India-based outsourcing firms had helped them out with clinical trials, data gathering and reporting to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or its equivalent to get these drugs passed. Indian courts have continued to allow such reverse-engineering of drugs--famously prompting Bayer AG's then CEO Martin Dekkers to say at a conference a few years ago, "We did not develop this medicine for Indians. We developed it for western patients who can afford it."