Chinese search engine Baidu and chipmaker Nvidia announced a partnership Thursday that will focus on using artificial intelligence to develop a computing platform for self-driving cars. The platform will include cloud-based high-definition maps. The announcement, made by Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at the Baidu World Conference, will bring together two companies that see vast potential in artificial intelligence. It also comes on the heels of Baidu receiving approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicle to test autonomous vehicles on public roads in the state. Baidu bidu is the 15th company to receive a permit to test autonomous vehicles in California.

By 2020, the market for machine-learning applications will reach 40 billion, per IDC. The next time you see Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton with an unflattering look on her face in a TV spot supporting GOP rival Donald Trump, it's all but certain you can attribute the ad creative to artificial intelligence. The Republican National Committee is using machine-learning software from Veritone, a 2-year-old player that just secured 50 million in funding. Designed to work with laser-fast precision, its audio-based system lets the RNC zip through all the publicly available times Clinton has spoken on TV, radio or online video to scoop up her angriest or oddest moments. The company is about to add a visual-sentiment feature, which will zero in on facial expressions and make cringe-worthy moments even easier to find.

Chatbots are a hot topic in tech -- positioned at the intersection of many macro tech trends like the rise of artificial intelligence, messaging apps surpassing social apps in users, and enterprises struggling with customer acquisition and engagement on mobile. Investment dollars are gushing into the leading messaging apps, and all of the tech giants have announced significant new initiatives. If you have ever used Amazon Alexa, you can see what the hype is about. But will chatbots be as revolutionary as the hype would have it? To predict how chatbots will evolve, we can look to Asia, a region that has led the West in this space. WeChat is often cited as the poster child for chatbots.

There's an emerging market called Dataism, which venerates neither gods nor man - it worships data. From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. A city of 100,000 people has more computing power than a village of 1,000 people. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in a single system may therefore increase its dynamism and creativity. A conversation between a peasant, a priest and a physician may produce novel ideas that would never emerge from a conversation between three hunter-gatherers. There is little point in increasing the mere number and variety of processors if they are poorly connected. A trade network linking ten cities is likely to result in many more economic, technological and social innovations than ten isolated cities. 4. Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections. Connecting processors is hardly useful if data cannot flow freely.

While many of the different works on artificial intelligence (A.I.) focus on improving the quality of human life and easing the burden on people for certain tasks, the threat of machines taking over our jobs is nothing new. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution that brings fancy concepts like Internet of Things (IoT) or Big Data to the traditional industrial facilities in order to embrace unprecedented automation opportunities, more and more blue collar workers are faced with the unemployment threat. But judging by the way things are going, robots will not stop at factories. Another traditional profession, news reporting, is also under near threat of A.I. and the reason for this is very simple: Machines love categorical information. If it is possible to put every piece of data in order on an Excel spreadsheet, no matter how complex it is, then A.I. is perfectly capable of analyzing and producing meaningful information from this sheet.

Chinese firm switches focus on smart AI devices and a new AI platform for self-driving cars and taxis. China-based internet services firm Baidu is aiming to ramp up its presence in the Internet of Things (IoT), with a number of new projects. The firm plans to work with speaker manufacturer Harman International Industrial to create a smart AI device similar to Amazon's Echo, which can understand spoken commands, enabling users to instruct it to order food, call a cab or control smart home products, reports Bloomberg. The Chinese company is also partnering with chipmaker Nvidia, to develop a computing platform for self-driving cars and taxis which would incorporate cloud-based HD maps, according to Fortune. Nvidia's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told delegates at the Baidu World Conference, that the firms were going to "bring together the technical capabilities and the expertise in AI and the scale of two world-class AI companies to build the self-driving car architecture from end-to-end, from top-to-bottom, from the cloud to the car".

Beauty contests are slightly computational to begin with. While the notion of beauty is of something ephemeral and unquantifiable, a beauty pageant asks that we categorize and rank it: determining rules that let us objectively measure an idea which must be, at its root, mysterious and subjective. No surprise, then, that here in 2016 we have just witnessed the first beauty contest judged by AI, as a jury of decidedly non-human bots picked out what they considered to be the best-looking people from a dataset of 6,000 entries. "New tools like machine learning let us analyze images in a way that was never available to us before," Anastasia Georgievskaya, co-founder and research scientist at Youth Laboratories, the company behind Beauty.AI, told Digital Trends. "Our goal was to investigate methods that would show new approaches to beauty evaluation."

Q-learning is a simple and powerful tool in solving dynamic problems where environments are unknown. It uses a balance of exploration and exploitation to find an optimal solution to the problem. In this paper, we propose using four basic emotions: joy, sadness, fear, and anger to influence a Qlearning agent. Simulations show that the proposed affective agent requires lesser number of steps to find the optimal path. We found when affective agent finds the optimal path, the ratio between exploration to exploitation gradually decreases, indicating lower total step count in the long run

The ethics of driverless car technology is . . . A report [in June] in the journal Science found that most people surveyed think that it would be more moral for a driverless car to be programmed to crash into a wall and sacrifice its passengers rather than hit a larger number of pedestrians, if it only had those two choices. If you don't brake, you will kill the squirrel. However, you happen to know that the squirrel is on his way to kill two other squirrels. What if the two other squirrels are known arsonists? It would be easy for you to adjust your software so that the dashboard "change oil" icon lights up only when the car is in reverse and your owner is looking over his shoulder.

Visitors arriving to Japan through Tokyo's Haneda airport will soon be greeted by a fleet of tiny humanoid robots. Standing just 90 centimetres tall, the humanoid named'EMIEW3' will guide users to the proper destination at the terminal and has the ability to communicate in both Japanese and English. Hitachi Ltd began its trials with the robots on Friday, and it's hoped that these assistants will be able to perform autonomously as early as December. Visitors arriving to Japan through Tokyo's Haneda airport will soon be greeted by a fleet of tiny humanoid robots. Standing just 90 centimetres tall, the humanoid named'EMIEW3' has the ability to communicate in both Japanese and English Trials will run through December at the airport's domestic Terminal 2, The Japan Times reports.