Apple is trying to introduce wireless charging into the next iPhone, according to reports. Rumours have long swirled around the iPhone 8 – even before the iPhone 7 was released this year. Reports have suggested that Apple is planning a major redesign for the new handset, which will mark the tenth anniversary of the iPhone, which might include an entirely glass body and a screen that takes up all of the front of the phone. And new reports suggest that Apple is currently exploring the possibility of adding wireless charging modules to the next phone, too. That would mean that it would just need to be set down on a special surface to charge it – in keeping with Apple's commitment to keep moving towards a wireless future, which it stressed when it dropped the headphone jack from the iPhone.

The three men who anchored the massively successful "Top Gear" automotive TV show will bring their large personalities back to the small screen Nov. 18, when Amazon Prime debuts the new series "The Grand Tour." Starring Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond, the first season will include 12 one-hour episodes, shot in exotic locations, where the three men drive, discuss and destroy various motor vehicles to comic effect. As in "Top Gear," which ended a 12-year syndicated run when the BBC declined to renew Clarkson's contract following a series of friction-causing incidents involving the outspoken former auto journalist, "The Grand Tour" features globe-trotting hi-jinks laced with boyish jibes. It will be different from "Top Gear," the men said during a visit to The Times -- but not much. "Well, it has us three hosting it," Clarkson said. "(May) is slow and lost and (Hammond) is short and I am bombastic and tall, and fat," Clarkson concluded.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 1, 2016) - Today, Redis Labs, the home of Redis, introduced an open source project Redis-ML, the Redis Module for Machine Learning that accelerates the delivery of real-time recommendations and predictions for interactive apps, in combination with Spark Machine Learning (Spark ML). Machine learning is fast becoming a critical requirement for modern smart applications. Redis-ML accelerates the delivery of real-time predictive analytics for use cases such as fraud detection and risk evaluation in financial products, product or content recommendations for e-commerce applications, demand forecasting for manufacturing applications or sentiment analyses of customer engagements. Spark ML (previously MLlib) delivers proven machine learning libraries for classification and regression tasks. Combined with Redis-ML, applications can now deliver precise, re-usable machine learning models, faster and with lower execution latencies.

In the next five years, every important decision, whether it's business or personal, will be made with the assistance of IBM Watson. Watson, the company's artificial intelligence-fueled system, is working in fields like health care, finance, entertainment and retail, connecting businesses more easily with their customers, making sense of big data and helping doctors find treatments for cancer patients. The Watson system is set to transform how businesses function and how people live their lives. "Our goal is augmenting intelligence," Rometty said. "It is man and machine. This is all about extending your expertise. It doesn't matter what you do. IBM's conference this week, which the company said drew 17,000 attendees, explored how companies, including retailers, educators, human resources departments and financial institutions, amon others, can use Watson. "The challenge IBM has right now is to define the marketplace," said Jeff Kagan, an independent industry analyst, who attended the conference. "Ten years from now, will IBM be the leader?

The University of New South Wales has announced a partnership with outsourcing giant Tata Consultancy Services that will see the pair undertake joint research in areas such as machine learning, virtual reality (VR), robotics, data analytics, and cloud computing. Under the memorandum of understanding, UNSW said the organisations will work together on ideas which stem from pure technology research and give them real-world applications, with the agreement also opening up the prospect of exchanges of scholars and internships for UNSW students at Tata Consultancy's global research facilities. The memorandum was signed by Tata Consultancy's CTO Ananth Krishnan and UNSW's deputy vice-chancellor enterprise professor Brian Boyle at the consultancy firm's Asia-Pacific Summit in Sydney. "There is a lot that UNSW and Tata Consultancy Services can offer each other," Boyle said. "UNSW excels in taking our research breakthroughs and partnering with industry to make a significant global impact. Working with TCS will build on UNSW's strong international links and help accelerate innovation by opening up new opportunities around the world."

An artificial intelligence system has already successfully predicted the outcome of hundreds of cases at the European Court of Human Rights, according to rsearchers from the University College London and the universities of Sheffield and Pennsylvania who developed it. According to reports, the AI "judge" examined data sets for 584 cases, with all cases either relating to torture, degrading treatment and privacy. The algorithm analyzed the English language information for each case and then made a decision – a decision that proved to be 79 percent accurate. The vast majority of applications lodged with ECHR are deemed inadmissible, due to the fact the applications don't meet the court's required criteria. This means that each year the court receives thousands of applications it must read through to determine admissibility.

Artificial intelligence is the next big thing in the world of computing, and it is already there. Google's Pixel smartphones, which come with an inbuilt Google Assistant that can get you anything from the daily dose of news to meditation tips, has already started selling in India. Siri is more intelligent than before; it lets you chat her up to find a good place to eat nearby and even draft an email for you. But the biggest use of artificial intelligence might be in bringing down the bar to access for millions of people who find all the text and foreign languages on smartphones hard to comprehend. That is exactly what companies like Karbonn, who think more mass than niche, are working on.

It was Halloween 1936 when seven young men convened in the San Gabriel Mountains to turn the idea of a working rocket from fantasy to reality. That effort helped usher in the Space Age and marked the founding of one of the world's leading centers for robotic exploration of the solar system, NASA's famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Caltech-managed exploration hub in La Cañada Flintridge. Monday was the 80th anniversary of that first exhilarating trek into the nearby foothills to light a liquid rocket engine. It was much like any other workday at JPL-- the sprawling campus leans casual, with scientists dressed in jeans and running sneakers or Halloween costumes ranging from a pirate to "Star Trek's" Captain Kirk-- but on this day many also remembered highlights from the past. The laboratory has seen major successes, including the first orbiting spacecraft in 1968, the successful launches of Voyager I and II in 1977 and the landing of the Mars rover Pathfinder in 1997.

Honda Motor Co. will spearhead its artificial intelligence efforts out of a new lab in Tokyo so that researchers can work closely with its engineers to commercialize the technology. Honda, based in Tokyo, will start the R&D center next year and combine existing AI teams in Silicon Valley, Europe and Japan at the downtown location, according to Yoshiyuki Matsumoto, president of the automaker's largely independent research arm. In choosing Tokyo over Silicon Valley, the carmaker is betting closer interaction between its scientists and developers will lead to AI-enabled products consumers want, he said in an interview. Advances in artificial intelligence are sprouting like "bamboo shoots after rain," so it's time to find commercial uses for the technology by marrying research with Japan's traditional strength in hardware, Matsumoto said. "We won't make much difference if we did the same things as everyone else in Silicon Valley. And not everyone has succeeded there."

At the inaugural O'Reilly AI conference, 66 artificial intelligence practitioners and researchers from 39 organizations presented the current state-of-AI: From chatbots and deep learning to self-driving cars and emotion recognition to automating jobs and obstacles to AI progress to saving lives and new business opportunities. There is no better place to imbibe the most up-to-date tech zeitgeist than at an O'Reilly Media event as has been proven again and again ever since the company put together the first Web-related meeting (WWW Wizards Workshop in July 1993). The conference was organized by Ben Lorica and Roger Chen, with Peter Norvig and Tim O'Reilly acting as honorary program chairs. Here's a summary of what I heard there, embellished with a few references to recent AI news and commentary: In contrast to traditional software, explained Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, "what is produced [by machine learning] is not code but more or less a black box--you can peak in a little bit, we have some idea of what's going on, but not a complete idea." Tim O'Reilly recently wrote in "The great question of the 21st century: Whose black box do you trust?": Because many of the algorithms that shape our society are black boxes… because they are, in the world of deep learning, inscrutable even to their creators – [the] question of trust is key.