Wearing black headsets with tentacle-like sensors stretched over their foreheads, the competitors stare at cubes floating on computer screens as their small white drones prepare for takeoff. Some struggle to move even a few feet, while others zip confidently across the finish line. The competition -- billed as the world's first drone race involving a brain-controlled interface -- involved 16 pilots who used their willpower to drive drones through a 10-yard dash over an indoor basketball court at the University of Florida this past weekend. The Associated Press was there to record the event, which was sponsored with research funding from Intel Corp. Organizers want to make it an annual inter-collegiate spectacle, involving ever-more dynamic moves and challenges, and a trophy that puts the brain on a pedestal. "With events like this, we're popularizing the use of BCI instead of it being stuck in the research lab," said Chris Crawford, a Florida PhD student in human-centered computing.

IBM Watson project manager Leanne LeBlanc views analytics of healthcare data. Each person generates more than 1,100 terabytes of health-related data across his or her lifetime, the equivalent of more than 300 million books. What alarms Dr. Craig Thompson, president and CEO at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, is that 20% of cancer patients in the U.S. are misdiagnosed. Thompson made those remarks during an IBM investor briefing in February as he discussed the cancer hospital's partnership with IBM Watson. Three years ago, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and IBM Watson formed a partnership to develop Watson for Oncology, a cognitive computing system that can analyze large volumes of data including medical literature, patient health records, and clinical trials, to offer personalized, evidence-based treatment recommendations for cancer patients.

Earlier today, SMRT Services has just announced that it is partnering with 2 Getthere Holding to bring in automated vehicle systems into Singapore. This could happen as early as end of the year. According to the press release, what we might be seeing end of the year are Group Rapid Transit (GRT) vehicles being tested on the roads. "The new Singapore-based JV, called 2getthere Asia Pte Ltd will market, install, operate and maintain the Automated Vehicle systems for customers in Singapore and the Asia-Pacific. The JV aims to showcase 2getthere's 3rd Generation Group Rapid Transit (GRT) vehicle capabilities in Singapore by the end of the year."

A century ago, more than 60,000 tigers roamed the wild. Today, the worldwide estimate has dwindled to around 3,200. Poaching is one of the main drivers of this precipitous drop. Whether killed for skins, medicine or trophy hunting, humans have pushed tigers to near-extinction. The same applies to other large animal species like elephants and rhinoceros that play unique and crucial roles in the ecosystems where they live.

German automaker Daimler AG, which makes the Mercedes and Smart car brands in the U.S., said Friday it had launched an investigation, at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, into how it measures diesel exhaust emissions. The carmaker was approached by USDJ last week, following a class-action lawsuit filed against the company in February. In its statement, released Friday, Daimler dismissed the claims as being "without merit" and said it was cooperating fully with the authorities. The announcement came in the same week which saw Japan's Mitsubishi Motors admitting it had rigged data on some of its models' fuel efficiency, while France's PSA Peugeot Citroen's offices were raided by anti-fraud investigators as part of ongoing investigations in the auto industry. Regulators and carmakers have increased their scrutiny of emission tests in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, which emerged in late September.

Alibaba has invested some serious dollars in their AI program, and as an e-retail platform it's no surprise that cranky customers are one of their top concerns. The company is now using audio speech recognition to guess just how angry a customer is over anything from a botched product to a bungled order. "Speech recognition will enable [Alibaba] to tell [us what] our customer's emotions are like, and how angry [they are]. Then our customer service will be able to react to the customers accordingly, with the help of data derived from speech recognition," Wanli Min, Senior staff data scientist in Alibaba Cloud said in Cloud Computing Conference held in Shenzhen on Wednesday. Speech recognition is the next step of Alibaba's AI development plan.

Kelly Fisher started using a robo-advisor a year and a half ago because she thought it would be more convenient and easier than investing through a human advisor. What she didn't anticipate, though, was just how much more truthful she would be with an automaton rather than a living, breathing person sitting across the desk. When someone starts asking me about my net worth, I get uncomfortable. The San Francisco-based retail executive has about 8,000 invested in accounts with robo-advisors. These are sites that ask a series of questions and then they match a fund with that investor's risk tolerance and lifestyle.

Unless otherwise specified, we will refer to non-GAAP metrics on the call. The non-GAAP measures exclude the net impact from revenue deferrals and the impact of integration and restructuring charges. The non-GAAP financial measures provided should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to the measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. They are included as additional clarifying items to aid investors in further understanding the company's third-quarter performance in addition to the impact that these items and events had on the financial results. All growth comparisons we make on the call relate to the corresponding period of last year unless otherwise noted.

Pattern analytics, deep learning, and machine learning have fueled a rapid rise in interest in GPU computing, in addition to GPU computing applications in high performance computing (HPC) and cloud-based data analytics. As a high profile example, Facebook recently contributed its "Big Sur" design to the Open Compute Project (OCP), for use specifically in training neural networks and implementing artificial intelligence (AI) at scale. Facebook's announcement of Big Sur says "Big Sur was built with the Nvidia Tesla M40 in mind but is qualified to support a wide range of PCI-e cards," pointing out how pervasive Nvidia's Tesla platform has become for AI research. Big Sur is a 4U high chassis housing a two-processor (2P) board connected to a daughter card featuring eight full-height double-width PCIe Gen3 x16 300W accelerator card slots intended to house GPU or other PCIe-based compute accelerators. The processor board and daughter card are linked via one PCIe Gen3 x16 slot in the initial implementation.

Last fall, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Washington, launched a challenge to Google Scholar, PubMed, and other online search engines by unveiling a service called Semantic Scholar. The program, originally trained on 2 million papers from the field of computer science, was intended to provide a search engine, driven by artificial intelligence (AI), to actually understand--to a limited extent--the content of published literature. Its corpus has grown to 4 million papers. And today, the institute is adding a new capability to Semantic Scholar with an equally ambitious aim: measuring the influence that a scientist or organization has had on subsequent research. The tool, which focuses only on computer science for now but will expand to neuroscience by the fall and then to other subjects, can rank papers, authors, and institutions by a specific influence score. For instance, the tool finds that the most influential computer science is happening at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.