Al-Qaida and the extremist Islamic State group have taken advantage of the chaos and lawlessness brought about by Yemen's ongoing civil war to expand their reach in the impoverished Arabian Peninsula nation.

Nairobi, Dec 19 (PTI) The WTO talks entered the fifth day today as a deadlock continued over reducing farm subsidies and on providing protection to poor farmers of developing nations, such as India, in case of import surge. The 10th WTO Ministerial was originally scheduled to end last night but developed and developing countries failed to iron out differences on these issues. "The meeting is still on since last night," sources said, adding that a small group of countries -- India, the US, EU, China and Brazil - are discussing the issues. India has made it clear that it would not compromise the interests of farmers and agri-related sectors. It has also asserted to include the public stockholding issue for food security purposes in the preamble of the Nairobi declaration. It also wants that special safeguard mechanism (SSM) should be delinked from market access.

You'd think that with dating apps like Tinder and Happn, finding a guy good enough to take home your parents wouldn't be that much of an issue. Unfortunately, that's not the case for the 27-year-old Li Chenxi, who's been feeling the pressure from her traditional Chinese parents to settle down. Afraid of being typecast as one of China's "leftover women," Li decided to rent a boyfriend from a Chinese site in Beijing, and documented her plan to fool her parents into believing that she's got a boyfriend called Sean. Li met up with her candidate and concocted a convincing story on how they met and why she kept their relationship a secret for so long. When the time came to introduce Sean to her parents, Li's mother immediately saw through her lie, insisting that her daughter's 24-year-old beau was "too young and good-looking" to be with her.

NEW YORK: Tech giant Microsoft and large equipment manufacturer Liebherr are collaborating on a new generation of smart refrigerators that would help in shopping and planning meals with intelligent food management. "As part of the Liebherr household appliances division's digital initiative, the duo would develop'SmartDeviceBox' -- a communication module which fits into refrigerators and freezers -- connecting them to the internet," T.J Hazen, Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft, wrote. The system, which would utilise the same machine learning technology used in Microsoft's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Cortana, is designed to have a long lifecycle. Microsoft gets big support in its fight for digital privacy with US Technology, media, pharmaceutical and other companies, along with major corporate lobbying groups, filed legal briefs on Friday in support of a Microsoft Corp lawsuit that aims to strike down a law preventing companies from telling customers the government is seeking their data. With this technology, modular units can be integrated and upgraded at any time in existing SmartDevice-ready appliances to create value and comfort for customers through new digital features and solutions, the post on Microsoft blog said.

LG Electronics will invest in robots and develop products that combine hardware, contents, and artificial intelligence to work with smart home appliances, a senior executive of the company has said. "We are planning to unveil new robot products by combining [the best] hardware, artificial intelligence, and contents technology that the customer will need," said Jo Seong-jin, LG's home appliance president, in a press conference at the sidelines of the IFA tradeshow in Berlin. "We are also reviewing new businesses that use autonomous driving technology and robot platforms," he said. The firm will utilize the cross-over platform, the Internet of Things, and new robotics technology to evolve the smart home further going forward, the president said. Besides consumer robots, South Korea's second-largest electronics firm already announced it was entering into the enterprise robotics market.

Machine learning has become a core component of companies' analytic initiatives and is no longer the "fine china" only brought out for special occasions, according to a manager with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which today announced that its Vertica analytics database now runs popular classes of machine learning algorithms. While previous versions of Vertica could run R algorithms -- as opposed to shipping them off to run on a Hadoop cluster or another adjacent system -- Vertica 8.0 will be the first version of the flagship columnar database that formally supports a broad collection of popular machine learning algorithms, according to Jeff Veis, vice president of marketing for Big Data Platforms at HPE (NYSE: HPE). "It used to be niche, or maybe like fine china for special occasions, to use machine learning, and now it's showing up as a must-have for almost all our customers," Veis tells Datanami. "It's becoming very important to do that form of advanced analytics. We brought that in-database so you can run it across your whole data set."

Zhang Yaqin, president of Baidu Inc, speaks at the global business forum during Baidu Technology Innovation Conference 2016, on Sept 2. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc seems to be dazzling the world nonstop. Robin Li, its chairman and chief executive, announced "Baidu Brain" on Thursday, the core of the tech company's plans on artificial intelligence, which consists of three parts - artificial intelligence algorithms, computing power and big data. The next day, at the global business forum also during Baidu Technology Innovation Conference 2016, Baidu's President Zhang Yaqin said the company's revenue coming from its global business has more than quintupled by September from a year earlier. Baidu's globalization, along with "Baidu Brain", is the next big vision for the company, said Zhang.

NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made the announcement today during the Baidu World Conference, noting that the companies will unit to merge their individual technical capabilities to crate a new self-driving car architecture from scratch: "end-to-end, top-to-bottom, from the cloud to the car," as Huang explained. Baidu will use the platform created in tandem with NVIDIA to roll out self-driving taxis in China. Though that's the primary purpose for the partnership, the software's applications are numerous, as both Baidu and NVIDIA are working to make it open for other automotive creators to fit with their own plans for self-driving vehicles. NVIDIA already has its own ideas for autonomous cars, with the Drive PX supercomputer for processing data that's inbound from various sensors, a cloud-based 3D map, and an AI operating system. It's called Drive PX 2, and Volvo is already testing it with a set of self-driving vehicles.

The Chinese Internet giant Baidu Inc. has been making big progress in applying deep learning neural networks to improve image recognition, language translation, search ranking and click prediction in advertising. Now, it's going to give a lot of it away. The company, often called "China's Google," will announce Thursday at the annual Baidu World conference in Beijing that it's offering the artificial intelligence software that its own engineers have been using for years as open source. Available in an early version on GitHub with full availability Sept. 30, it's code-named PaddlePaddle, for PArallel Distributed Deep LEarning. Deep learning is the branch of machine learning that attempts to emulate the way neurons work in the human brain to find patterns in data representing sounds, images, and other data.

Browse the business section of any bookshop and you'll find dozens of titles promising to share the secret to climbing the corporate ladder. But the day is not far off when such books will seem as quaint and outmoded as a housekeeping manual from the 1950s. One of the key workplace trends of the 21st century has been the collapse of the corporate ladder, whereby loyal employees climbed towards the higher echelons of management one promotion at a time. Cathy Benko, vice-chairman of Deloitte in San Francisco and co-author of The Corporate Lattice, says that the ladder model dates back to the industrial revolution, when successful businesses were built on economies of scale, standardisation and a strict hierarchy. "But we don't live in an industrial age, we live in a digital age. And if you look at all the shifts taking place, one [of the biggest] is the composition of the workforce, which is far more diverse in every way," she says.