Silicon Valley is training computers to see, hear and speak and cars and trucks to drive themselves. Some people aren't so sure how they feel about this new wave of artificial intelligence that summons fears of Terminator-like sentient machines. So Facebook is trying to dispel some of the pop-culture myths with a series of six instructional videos that attempt to explain this complex field of computer science. "I think the more open we can be about it and the more we can demystify and explain how it actually works, the more quickly we can address concerns," said Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, director of applied machine learning at Facebook. The campaign is part of a broader industry effort to influence public opinion as artificial intelligence is being used for more everyday tasks and even to automate warfare.

Facebook is working on automatically flagging offensive material in live video streams, building on a growing effort to use artificial intelligence to monitor content, said Joaquin Candela, the company's director of applied machine learning. The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site. Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company "community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company. Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material.

One of Silicon Valley's most idiosyncratic players -- the Mozilla Foundation -- just reported a 28% leap in revenue for 2015, to $421 million, with cash flow more than tripling, to about $80 million. Further increases appear likely this year. In a section of its newly released annual report, called The State of Mozilla, the foundation said that in 2017, Mozilla will invest in more mobile-product development and will build a recommender system for the web, known as Context Graph. Mozilla also said that in 2017 it will launch its first Internet Health Report. This will examine "the state of the open internet . . .

The social media company has been embroiled in a number of content moderation controversies this year, from facing international outcry after removing an iconic Vietnam War photo due to nudity, to allowing the spread of fake news on its site. Facebook has historically relied mostly on users to report offensive posts, which are then checked by Facebook employees against company "community standards." Decisions on especially thorny content issues that might require policy changes are made by top executives at the company. Candela told reporters that Facebook increasingly was using artificial intelligence to find offensive material. It is "an algorithm that detects nudity, violence, or any of the things that are not according to our policies," he said.

Asia-based senior executives at global companies believe that the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics on their business performance in Asia will be profound and positive--and will be felt sooner than we may think. Outside of global robotics industry leaders Korea and Japan, most of Asia currently lacks the depth of technical skills and R&D facilities needed to keep pace with AI development. However, China, India, and other large Asian economies generate a copious amount of data, a tremendous "natural resource" that is critical to pushing AI's capabilities forward. Ironically, given the commonly held view that AI will be responsible for disintermediation of jobs at all levels, it is Asia's massive human capital dividend--the billions of constantly Internet-connected workers and consumers--that will propel AI development in the region farther and faster. MIT Technology Review's International Markets division surveyed more than 60 Asia-based senior executives to gather perspective on the impact of AI and robotics on Asia's business landscape.

With the advent of photography, a tiny fraction of 19th-century scientists believed they could develop methods of accurately identifying criminals by their facial features. While their hypotheses were eventually discredited, new artificial intelligence technology suggests their claims might've been valid after all. Xiaolin Wu and Xi Zhang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have resurrected this facial recognition tradition and built a neural network that can supposedly pick out criminals by simply looking at their faces. TNW Conference is back for it's 12th year. To accomplish this, the researchers used an array of machine-vision algorithms to examine a series of facial juxtapositions between photos of criminals and non-criminals with the goal of finding out whether a neural network can reliably tell them apart.

The $300 billion Chinese trucking market is filled with long hauls and chaos. The government and technology firms are betting that self-driving 18-wheelers are the solution. Last month at the Shanghai New International Expo Center, the Internet services company Baidu (BIDU) and Foton showed off Super Truck. Apart from its array of sensors and distinctive surround windshield, the level 4 autonomous freight truck would not stick out in a crowd of diesel burners. China needs an answer to its freight logistics problem now.

A company behind a health care information website under fire over inaccurate, plagiarized articles on Thursday said it had temporarily suspended operations of eight other niche online services. It emerged this week that articles on DeNA Co.'s website Welq were not properly fact-checked and that outside contributors were told to write stories by taking information from other medical websites and rewriting it. "It was seriously wrong to provide medical information in an inappropriate manner when it needed to be handled with extra care," said DeNA CEO Isao Moriyasu in a statement Thursday. BuzzFeed Japan on Monday revealed how DeNA, which is known for its mobile game business and professional baseball team, instructed its writers in a manual to create stories that are likely to top search engine lists, while also explaining how to rewrite information to avoid simply copying and pasting, which could draw accusations of plagiarism. As a result, the stories were a hodgepodge of information from various sites and lacked any attribution.

The on-and-off affair between Silicon Valley and Japan can be said to now be on its third round. The first round came in the 1980s and early 1990s when the affair centered on the personal computer and hardware. The second round was all about the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the dotcom bubble. When the bubble burst and the market crashed, many of the Japanese companies that had set up shop in Silicon Valley quickly turned around and sent their employees packing back to Tokyo. Now, the Japanese are back with a vengeance.

American space agency produces crew posters for every International Space Station expedition Nasa also created similar posters for the space shuttle missions that came to an end in 2011 Posters feature international astronauts and cosmonauts in series of comical film poster parodies Designs areinspired from everything from Star Wars and the Matrix to India Jones and Ocean's 11 The space agency produces a poster for each of its mission, featuring the crew of the ISS, often in a mock-up of a sci-fi film poster. The designs have been inspired from everything from Star Wars (left) to Harry Potter (right), featuring astronauts taking on the role of a variety of characters, including Jedi Knights even wizards. China's first astronaut reveals mysterious knocking on his... Private rovers to visit Apollo 17's abandoned moon buggy... How Pluto got its broken heart: Ice-build up on the dwarf... Watch the Earth change before your eyes: Google unveils a... China's first astronaut reveals ...