Two major car companies announced on Tuesday investments in ride-hailing apps, signaling both a growing role for on-demand cars and a new groundwork for app-enabled self-driving fleets. Toyota will be investing and partnering with Uber, and Volkswagen is putting 300m into Tel Aviv-based ride-sharing app called Gett. In January, General Motors, a longtime Toyota rival, announced that it was putting 500m into Lyft, Uber's most direct competitor. "Ride-sharing has huge potential in terms of shaping the future of mobility," said Shigeki Tomoyama, senior managing officer of Toyota Motor Corporation and president of the Connected Company, a new group within Toyota. "Through this collaboration with Uber, we would like to explore new ways of delivering secure, convenient and attractive mobility services to customers."

Zebra capitalizes on Israel's strong computer vision industry and automates medical diagnoses computed by looking at x-rays, MRIs, and other scans The new investment was led by Intermountain Healthcare with participation from existing funders Khosla Ventures and Marc Benioff. The round brings their total funding to 20 million following an 8 million round in April 2015. Zebra capitalizes on Israel's strong computer vision industry and automates medical diagnoses computed by looking at x-rays, MRIs, and other scans. The company already claims hundreds of thousands of cases have been scanned with algorithms specifically focused on liver health, lung health, cardiovascular analysis, and bone density. They currently claim over 1,100 customers.

This interview took place at the Boao Forum For Asia Annual Conference on March 28 in Qionghai, Chine. An open letter by artificial intelligence scientists to ensure that artificial intelligence has good consequences is available at www.futureoflife.org/misc/open_letter.

The US government is set to deploy two radiation-detecting drones at the former'Nevada Test Site' to test new sensing capabilities that could help in future nuclear disasters. The'Sandstorm' unmanned aircraft will be used for remote radiation sensing and environmental monitoring, along with other security applications. Researchers are now working to expand the sensor technology for unmanned aerial systems, and they expect the Sandstorm drones to begin tests in the fall. The'Sandstorm' unmanned aircraft, above, will be used for remote radiation sensing and environmental monitoring, along with other security applications. The drones were purchased from Unmanned Systems Inc (USI).

Zebra Medical Vision, an Israeli startup that uses machine learning to teach computers to read and diagnose imaging data, raised 12 million in its latest funding round, including a re-investment from Salesforce.com Inc. co-founder Marc Benioff. Zebra has been building a database of millions of files such as CT-scans and MRIs of real patients over the past three years, offering enough data so that machines can learn to accurately detect illnesses including breast cancer, and health problems with bones, the liver and lungs, said President and co-founder Eyal Gura. Company developers are writing specific algorithms for each health issue and three have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, according to Gura. The company says its product can help the medical industry deal with a growing shortage of radiologists amid more chronic diseases, an aging population and an expanding middle class seeking more advanced health care. According to the World Bank, the middle class in low and middle income countries will jump from 5 percent in 2005 to 25 percent in 2030.

Just how worried should we be about killer robots? To go by the opinions of a highly regarded group of scholars, including Stephen Hawking, Max Tegmark, Franz Wilczek, and Stuart Russell, we should be wary of the prospect of artificial intelligence rebelling against its makers. "One can imagine (AI) outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand," Hawking wrote in a 2014 article for The Independent. "Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all." The fear that our irresponsible creations might bring about the end of humanity is a common one.

A company claims it can identify terrorists, paedophiles and ace poker players simply by looking at their face. Faception, an Israeli start-up, says its technology can spot character traits that are undetectable to the naked eye. The company claims its software classified nine of the 11 Paris massacre jihadists as terrorists from their facial features without inputting any prior knowledge of their involvement. It appears to have been so successful, the firm says it is now working with a homeland security agency to help identify criminals. Shai Gilboa, Faception chief executive, said: 'We understand the human much better than other humans understand each other.

Getting stuck in a traffic jam can be one of the most frustrating parts of travelling around a busy city. Now engineers in China, the world's most populated country, have come up with a way to overcome the problem of getting around in traffic. Designs for a new elevated bus has been unveiled at a tech expo in China, which will apparently be able to carry 1,200 passengers over the top of cars and let traffic to pass underneath it. A model of a new elevated bus (pictured) has been unveiled at a tech expo in China, which will allegedly carry over 1,000 passengers over the top of cars, to allow traffic to pass underneath it. The scale model of the'Transit Elevated Bus' was demonstrated this week at the 19th China Beijing International High-Tech Expo.

An autonomous vehicle startup backed by Ford Motor Co. F 1.22 % Chairman Bill Ford raised 16 million in additional funding with an eye on launching autonomous taxis in Singapore this autumn. One of the leading developers of self-driving technology, Cambridge, Mass.-based nuTonomy is racing heavyweights--including Uber Technologies Inc., General Motors Co. GM 1.14 % and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL 1.96 % --to further testing of autonomous cars on public roads. The company was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2013, and counts Highland Capital Partners LLC and Singapore's economic development arm among its investors. In January, it raised 3.6 million from a group of investors that included Mr. Ford's venture-capital firm, Fontinalis Partners. NuTonomy Chief Executive Karl Iagnemma said the latest round is "going to let us accelerate our progress--more people and more cars."

Deep learning is a topic that is making big waves at the moment. It is basically a branch of machine learning (another hot topic) that uses algorithms to e.g. Scientists have used deep learning algorithms with multiple processing layers (hence "deep") to make better models from large quantities of unlabeled data (such as photos with no description, voice recordings or videos on YouTube). It's one kind of supervised machine learning, in which a computer is provided a training set of examples to learn a function, where each example is a pair of an input and an output from the function. Very simply: if we give the computer a picture of a cat and a picture of a ball, and show it which one is the cat, we can then ask it to decide if subsequent pictures are cats.