If the founders of a new face recognition app get their way, anonymity in public could soon be a thing of the past. FindFace, launched two months ago and currently taking Russia by storm, allows users to photograph people in a crowd and work out their identities, with 70% reliability. It works by comparing photographs to profile pictures on Vkontakte, a social network popular in Russia and the former Soviet Union, with more than 200 million accounts. In future, the designers imagine a world where people walking past you on the street could find your social network profile by sneaking a photograph of you, and shops, advertisers and the police could pick your face out of crowds and track you down via social networks. In the short time since the launch, Findface has amassed 500,000 users and processed nearly 3m searches, according to its founders, 26-year-old Artem Kukharenko, and 29-year-old Alexander Kabakov.

Industrial revolutions are momentous events. By most reckonings, there have been only three. The first was triggered in the 1700s by the commercial steam engine and the mechanical loom. The harnessing of electricity and mass production sparked the second, around the start of the 20th century. The computer set the third in motion after World War II (see "The Man Who Made the Computer Age Possible," by Jeffrey E. Garten). It might seem too soon to proclaim that the fourth industrial revolution, spurred by interconnected digital technology, has begun. But Henning Kagermann, the head of the German National Academy of Science and Engineering (Acatech), did exactly that in 2011, when he used the term Industrie 4.0 to describe a proposed government-sponsored industrial initiative. When you look closely at the rapid pace of digitization in industry today, the name doesn't seem hyperbolic at all. It is a signal of sweeping change that is rapidly transforming many companies and may catch others by surprise.

For 30 years the games industry worked in a certain way. People rented offices and set up studios to create games; they employed staff to work in-house, then got those projects funded and distributed by publishers. If you wanted to opt out of that setup, you worked alone, or in a small team, as an indie developer – you operated in a totally separate stratosphere; the system neatly self-segregated. Meanwhile, in the background, the business worked to the seven-year cycles dictated by the lifespan of the major consoles. It was a machine of discreet components. But that machine is rusting and falling apart.

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: