British AI talent is about to be given a boost after Founders Factory, a company specialising in growing startups, announced today that it will receive a "multimillion pound" investment from a top Chinese private equity firm. CSC Group is one of China's largest private equity firms, specialises in tech investment, and has previously pumped 400m into AngelList, an US startup accelerator. Now, the firm is turning its attention to the UK. CSC has agreed to a five-year deal with Founders Factory to invest in and scale five AI startups and co-create two new companies every year. "The partnership will build a bridge between AI talent in Europe and China; giving Founders Factory startups access to the Chinese market and Chinese talent the opportunity to enter the European tech ecosystem," Founders Factory said.

DENSO Corporation and Toshiba Corporation have reached a basic agreement to jointly develop an artificial intelligence technology called Deep Neural Network-Intellectual Property (DNN-IP), which will be used in image recognition systems which have been independently developed by the two companies to help achieve advanced driver assistance and automated driving technologies. This Smart News Release features multimedia. DNN, an algorithm modeled after the neural networks of the human brain, is expected to perform recognition processing as accurately as, or even better than the human brain. To achieve automated driving, automotive computers need to be able to identify different road traffic situations including a variety of obstacles and road markings, availability of road space for driving, and potentially dangerous situations. In image recognition based on conventional pattern recognition and machine learning, objects that need to be recognized by computers must be characterized and extracted in advance.

Every year there is a new hot topic in tech. The difference between now and the past is that everything is becoming interconnected at a faster rate. We are entering an extremely critical time in history where society will change dramatically – how we work, live and play. Science fiction is morphing into reality. Flying cars exist, cars that drive themselves are on the road, and artificial intelligence that automates our lives is here.

In the West, we rely on the grid, which provides most people with ample power. In off-grid communities such as those in large parts of rural Africa, energy is a highly valued resource and consumers are much more aware of energy efficiency. The limited energy that is available is disproportionately expensive and innovative solutions, such as small-scale renewable power, that cannot yet compete in the West, are gaining ground where, compared to the cost of the fossil fuels they replace, they are seen as a bargain. Developments such as small solar home systems are bringing power for the first time to millions of off-grid consumers in sub-Saharan Africa, thanks to technological advances in LED lights, batteries and mobile payment, creating what many are referring to as the "clean energy revolution" in rural electrification. While LED lighting and phone charging were the first volume application in this rapidly evolving market, consumers of the clean energy revolution in Africa want, and increasingly demand, more. Customers now expect to be able to access the latest technology, media and communications through the growth of the largely familiar pay-as-you-go technology, even in areas where there is no little or no grid access.

The determination of cluster centers generally depends on the scale that we use to analyze the data to be clustered. Inappropriate scale usually leads to unreasonable cluster centers and thus unreasonable results. In this study, we first consider the similarity of elements in the data as the connectivity of nodes in an undirected graph, then present the concept of a connection center and regard it as the cluster center of the data. Based on this definition, the determination of cluster centers and the assignment of class are very simple, natural and effective. One more crucial finding is that the cluster centers of different scales can be obtained easily by the different powers of a similarity matrix and the change of power from small to large leads to the dynamic evolution of cluster centers from local (microscopic) to global (microscopic). Further, in this process of evolution, the number of categories changes discontinuously, which means that the presented method can automatically skip the unreasonable number of clusters, suggest appropriate observation scales and provide corresponding cluster results.

This is Patricia Murphy, Vice President of Investor Relations for IBM. I'd like to welcome you to our third quarter earnings presentation. The prepared remarks will be available within a couple of hours and a replay of the webcast will be posted by this time tomorrow. I'll remind you that certain comments made in this presentation may be characterized as forward-looking under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Those statements involve a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Additional information concerning these factors is contained in the Company's filings with the SEC. Copies are available from the SEC, from the IBM website, or from us in Investor Relations. Our presentation also includes certain non-GAAP financial measures in an effort to provide additional information to investors. All non-GAAP measures have been reconciled to their related GAAP measures in accordance with SEC rules. You'll find reconciliation charts at the end of the presentation and in the form 8-K submitted to the SEC today. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Martin Schroeter. In the third quarter, we generated 19.2 billion in revenues, 3.7 billion in pre-tax income and 3.29 of operating earnings per share. As we think back to the discussion 90 days ago, it was around Brexit and its impact on Europe, global spending and sectors like banking and the attractiveness of investment in the emerging markets, all of these topics have the capacity to drive some volatility and results, but what you see in our third quarter results is stability in our revenue with continued strong growth and strategic imperatives and a top and bottom line consistent with what we expected. Our revenue was essentially flat relative to last year. Looking at the revenue dynamics, I want to point out a few things. Our clients are focussed on becoming digital businesses and have strong growth in cloud, security, mobile, and across our analytics portfolio reflects this. In total, we continue to deliver double-digit revenue growth in our strategic imperatives led by our cloud business. Cloud delivered as-a-service is part of a solid recurring revenue base across software and services, and our annuity revenue continued to grow. Of course, the acquisitions we made in the last 12 months contributed to growth about the same amount as last quarter and for the first time in quite a while currency was a modest tailwind to revenue growth.

It was just over a year and a half ago that the consumer technology and auto aficionado communities became jointly engulfed in a tizzy over a single rumor: Apple was going into the car manufacturing business. If you've read this far, you probably already know the punchline: Apple is getting out of the car manufacturing business. More precisely, according to Bloomberg, it appears it was never actually in the car manufacturing business. Hundreds of members of Apple's once 1,000-strong car team, dubbed Project Titan, are gone. The program has been redirected at building self-driving programs that can be sold to existing carmakers as an Apple add-on, the way Pullman sleeper cars were sold to railroads more than 100 years ago as a branded luxury enhancement to transcontinental train travel.

A centuries-old Yemeni city stands alongside the gleaming towers of Hong Kong as one of the world's most beautiful architectural views, writes Jonathan Glancey. And, like the faces of those we hold dear, we hold certain skylines in our minds' eyes even when far … This election has been particularly noisy. Ask not what the government can do for Silicon Valley; ask what Silicon Valley can do for the government. How a tiny Florida community could influence the way we fight Zika around the world.By Graphics by Ella KoezePhotography by Erika LarsenIllustrations … The Harry Potter books have sold more than 400 million copies worldwide and been translated in over 60 languages. The books are filled with a tricky mix of wordplay, invented words, songs, allusions, British cultural references, and more.

Apple CEO Tim Cook recently visited Japan for the opening of their state-of-the-art research and development facility. He described it as a "center for deep engineering that will be very different from the R&D base Apple plans to build in China." "I cannot tell you the specifics," Apple CEO Tim Cook told Nikkei Asian Review while riding on a bullet train in Japan. "The specific work is very different." According to the report Cook is seeking to integrate artificial intelligence into all of their product offerings including presumably the iPhone.

Google achieves that by pulling together the best features from Apple, Samsung and other phones and offering them at prices comparable to iPhones -- starting at about 650 for the regular, 5-inch model and 770 for the 5.5-inch "XL" edition. Both versions go on sale Thursday through Verizon, Best Buy and Google's online store. We tested the Pixel XL model; the regular version has identical features except for its smaller display and battery -- still enough for 13 hours of Internet use, according to Google. With either, you get an excellent camera and a strong voice assistant that promises to get smarter. The Pixel isn't quite an iPhone replacement, as Google wants you to believe; hardware is just part of what makes an iPhone an iPhone.