The trial zone, the first of its kind in China, will allow Baidu to become the only company to test autonomous driving in public transportation in Wuhu. If the technology is proven to be workable, the local authorities in Wuhu are even considering replacing all of the city's buses and part of its taxi fleet with driverless vehicles in another five years.

Ever since IBM's Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game contest in May 1997, humanity has been looking over its shoulder as computers have been running up the inside rail. What task that we thought was our exclusive preserve will they conquer next? What jobs will they take? And what jobs will be left for humans when they do? The pessimistic case was partly set out in the Channel 4 series Humans, about a near-future world where intelligent, human-like robots would do routine work, or stand on streets handing out flyers, while some people worked (law and policing seemed to get a pass, mostly) but others were displaced – and angry.

Chinese online retailer JD.com has teamed up with robot maker Siasun to automate its logistic network, the company said on Friday. JD said it will work with Siasun to develop logistics robots to increase automation from order to delivery. JD has already invested heavily in making its warehouses and deliveries more efficient. "Logistics in the future will go beyond basic infrastructure," said JD's technology chief Zhang Chen, "Technology ranging from the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data to artificial intelligence are making our service smarter." JD said it will work with other companies on automation similar to that at Amazon's distribution centers.

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Google kicks off its annual get-together for software developers on Wednesday, expect to hear about the two major trends shaping the future of the technology industry: artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Thousands will descend on Mountain View, Calif., the first time the tech giant is holding the I/O conference in its hometown. Google's conference, sandwiched between Facebook in April and Apple in June, is vying to put on the greatest show on earth for software developers. For weeks, workers have been constructing a Google-themed park to immerse developers in the artificial intelligence-powered future that Google envisions.The outdoor venue, the Shoreline Ampitheatre, is most famous for showcasing the talents of Neil Young, The Who and Metallica. For I/O, the master of ceremonies is Sundar Pichai, Google's newly minted chief executive who will look to dazzle developers with a demo-packed keynote.

We review the task of Sentence Pair Scoring, popular in the literature in various forms - viewed as Answer Sentence Selection, Semantic Text Scoring, Next Utterance Ranking, Recognizing Textual Entailment, Paraphrasing or e.g. a component of Memory Networks. We argue that all such tasks are similar from the model perspective and propose new baselines by comparing the performance of common IR metrics and popular convolutional, recurrent and attention-based neural models across many Sentence Pair Scoring tasks and datasets. We discuss the problem of evaluating randomized models, propose a statistically grounded methodology, and attempt to improve comparisons by releasing new datasets that are much harder than some of the currently used well explored benchmarks. We introduce a unified open source software framework with easily pluggable models and tasks, which enables us to experiment with multi-task reusability of trained sentence model. We set a new state-of-art in performance on the Ubuntu Dialogue dataset.

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Google kicks off its annual get-together for software developers on Wednesday, expect to hear about the two major trends shaping the future of the technology industry: artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Thousands will descend on Mountain View, Calif., the first time the tech giant is holding the I/O conference in its hometown. Google's conference, sandwiched between Facebook in April and Apple in June, is vying to put on the greatest show on earth for software developers. For weeks, workers have been constructing a Google-themed park to immerse developers in the artificial intelligence-powered future that Google envisions.The outdoor venue, the Shoreline Ampitheatre, is most famous for showcasing the talents of Neil Young, The Who and Metallica. For I/O, the master of ceremonies is Sundar Pichai, Google's newly minted chief executive who will look to dazzle developers with a demo-packed keynote.

Iron Man may only exist in comics and movies, but some of his superpowers may soon be close at hand thanks to Hyundai. In a blog post, the South Korea-based car company reportedly revealed its prototype of a "wearable robot" suit that can lift things that are "hundreds of kilograms" in weight, multiple news outlets reported Friday:

We'll find out this week what the tech giant is planning and how virtual and augmented reality factor into its goal to remain the world's most valuable company, as well as updates on the world's most popular operating system, Android, and possibly details on a return to China. On Wednesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai will take the stage at the Shoreline Amphitheatre -- a 15-minute walk from his office at Google's Mountain View, California, headquarters -- and deliver an update on the company's current and coming projects. Nominally a conference for developers, Google I/O is really a way of keeping everyone updated on what it is working on, to help give products that are underperforming a promotional push and to remain in the public eye about other projects that may have slipped from the public memory due to being in development so long. Last year, it was all about a big update to Android; the previous year Google pushed Android TV and Android Wear; in 2013 it was the launch of Google Music; and 2012 saw a team of skydivers drop onto the Moscone Center stage in San Francisco during the keynote, shooting their exploits on Google Glass and live streaming it to an awestruck audience. This year, while we will hear about Android, Chrome OS, driverless cars and Project Ara, the big focus will be on the tech world's hot topic: virtual reality.

Nintendo may be making a return to the big screen, its president revealed in an interview with Japan's Asahi Shimbun Monday. The company is exploring the potential of films based on popular video game franchises such as "Super Mario Bros." and "The Legend of Zelda." Another possibility is drawing on the material to create other digital content, a firm representative told Reuters. Nintendo is in talks with several production companies, with the goal of releasing its first new movie within the next three years. The production and its successors could introduce the firm's characters to a broader audience, which could bolster its video game business.

Two years ago, a lawyer in Indiana sent me a check for seventy-eight thousand dollars. The money was from my uncle Walt, who had died six months earlier. I hadn't been expecting any money from Walt, still less counting on it. So I thought I should earmark my inheritance for something special, to honor Walt's memory. It happened that my longtime girlfriend, a native Californian, had promised to join me on a big vacation. She'd been feeling grateful to me for understanding why she had to return full time to Santa Cruz and look after her mother, who was ninety-four and losing her short-term memory. She'd said to me, impulsively, "I will take a trip with you anywhere in the world you've always wanted to go." To this I'd replied, for reasons I'm at a loss to reconstruct, "Antarctica?" Her eyes widened in a way that I should have paid closer attention to. But a promise was a promise. Hoping to make Antarctica more palatable to my temperate Californian, I decided to spend Walt's money on the most deluxe of bookings--a three-week Lindblad National Geographic expedition to Antarctica, South Georgia island, and the Falklands. I paid a deposit, and the Californian and I proceeded to joke, uneasily, when the topic arose, about the nasty cold weather and the heaving South Polar seas to which she'd consented to subject herself. I kept reassuring her that as soon as she saw a penguin she'd be happy she'd made the trip. But when it came time to pay the balance, she asked if we might postpone by a year. Her mother's situation was unstable, and she was loath to put herself so irretrievably far from home. By this point, I, too, had developed a vague aversion to the trip, an inability to recall why I'd proposed Antarctica in the first place. The idea of "seeing it before it melts" was dismal and self-cancelling: why not just wait for it to melt and cross itself off the list of travel destinations? I was also put off by the seventh continent's status as a trophy, too remote and expensive for the common tourist to set foot on. It was true that there were extraordinary birds to be seen, not just penguins but oddities like the snowy sheathbill and the world's southernmost-breeding songbird, the South Georgia pipit. But the number of Antarctic species is fairly small, and I'd already reconciled myself to never seeing every bird species in the world. The best reason I could think of for going to Antarctica was that it was absolutely not the kind of thing the Californian and I did; we'd learned that our ideal getaway lasts three days.