Humans gather information by engaging in conversations involving a series of interconnected questions and answers. For machines to assist in information gathering, it is therefore essential to enable them to answer conversational questions. We introduce CoQA, a novel dataset for building Conversational Question Answering systems. Our dataset contains 127k questions with answers, obtained from 8k conversations about text passages from seven diverse domains. The questions are conversational, and the answers are free-form text with their corresponding evidence highlighted in the passage. We analyze CoQA in depth and show that conversational questions have challenging phenomena not present in existing reading comprehension datasets, e.g., coreference and pragmatic reasoning. We evaluate strong conversational and reading comprehension models on CoQA. The best system obtains an F1 score of 65.1%, which is 23.7 points behind human performance (88.8%), indicating there is ample room for improvement. We launch CoQA as a challenge to the community at http://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/

Alphabet is broken out into its core Google business and a number of other subsidiaries, which it deems "Other Bets." The majority of Google's business comes from advertising revenues, which the company generates through its search engine as well as a number of other Google-affiliated and partnership websites. Outside of search and advertising, Google generates revenue from products including cloud and enterprise, consumer hardware, mapping, and YouTube. In addition to Google, Alphabet encompasses a host of other subsidiaries called "Other Bets." These companies are more experimental in nature, and as a result are not material to Alphabet's bottom line.

As artificial intelligence (AI) makes a "powerful impact" on other sectors, more North Sea players are expected to deploy digital innovations. Louise Sayers is head of natural resources at advisory firm BDO, whose comments come as Shell announced its commitment to the North Sea yesterday. The energy giant said it hopes to be in the region for another 50 years, as it celebrates five decades of North Sea production. Ms Sayers said this was welcome news, and said now is the time for the North Sea to "grasp digital innovation". She said: "Oil and gas companies were forced to ruthlessly cut costs and sharpen their investment filters to survive the oil price crash in 2014.

Canada's rankings in innovation has lagged that of other peer nations for decades despite government efforts to address this issue. Considering its success in developing research programs at its universities, its mediocre rankings overall in technology development is disappointing. Those programs alone have not been enough to translate into entrepreneurial innovation. A 2017 C.D. Howe Institute study points out that, even though Canadians have been at the forefront of breakthroughs in emerging technologies, in many cases, the chief beneficiaries of those breakthroughs have been other nations' economies. Canada needs to take a stronger role in building an environment in which Canadian know-how spurs Canadian business growth. According to a 2017 PwC global survey, Canadian companies stand significantly ahead of their global counterparts in having a dedicated team for digital innovation, with 54% of Canadian respondents reporting that their company does, as opposed to 43% of global respondents. Looking deeper, though, shows a far less innovative spirit, as 47% of respondents said that their pursuit of digital innovation takes the form of seeking to copy others' innovations rather than pursuing their own. Already a decade ago, experts recognized factors that constrain Canadian innovation growth. A 2009 study by the Council of Canadian Academies pointed to two key issues that have held Canadian businesses back from prioritizing innovation in their business strategies. The first issue deals with what has been called "the resource curse." Canada is largely "upstream" in the international supply chain, providing raw materials for other businesses that create products that are in turn passed down the value chain until they reach the stage of finished products sold to end customers. That places Canada in a position far distant from end customers, whose evolving needs spur businesses at the downstream end of the supply chain to adapt, which, in turn, spurs innovation.

As Britain braces for a second bout of scorching weather this weekend, experts have warned this summer could finally break the records set by the infamous heatwave of 1976. The blistering temperatures in June stood toe-to-toe with those of June 1976, while this summer's July was hotter than its counterpart 42 years ago. If Britain is hit by a hotter-than-average August - as has been forecast by advanced computer models - 2018 could be the hottest summer ever recorded. This year's prolonged heat is the result of a number of factors, including extended high pressure and higher than average surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean. Experts have also warned that rising global temperatures caused by climate change are making the heatwaves gripping the northern hemisphere more ferocious and more likely.

We won't be able to comfortably live on Mars, experts have revealed. Scientists – as well as science fiction fans – have long hoped that we might be able to change Mars so it has an Earth-like atmosphere, allowing us to comfortably live there. Plans to do so have included dropping thermonuclear weapons at the planet's poles – an idea supported by Elon Musk. But there simply isn't enough carbon dioxide on the planet to allow the atmosphere to ever become habitable for humans, according to new research. At best we could achieve only a fiftieth of what is needed, and would only be able to raise the surface temperature by less than 10 degrees Celsius, the study published in Nature Astronomy reveals.

Nasa has begun a major search for alien worlds. The agency's Tess spacecraft has started its science missions, exploring the universe as it looks for new planets. It engineers hope that it will eventually find thousands of alien worlds, some of which could be habitable. The craft – whose name stands for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite – will look deep in the universe for signs of planets. Any that are found will be explored from afar, as scientists try to work out what it might be like on those planets, and whether life could survive there.

The scorching heatwave gripping northern Europe was made twice as likely to happen by climate change, scientists have revealed. An initial assessment of the prolonged period of record-breaking hot weather suggests rising temperatures caused by human activity increased the odds of it happening. The preliminary research claims to have found'unambiguous' evidence that human interference has triggered the recent heatwave, which computer models predict will continue until the end of August. People enjoy the Bournemouth beach in Dorset, England, as the hot weather continues across Britain. Britain is experiencing a severe heatwave which has prompted its national weather service to issue an alert for people to'stay out of the sun' 'The logic that climate change will do this is inescapable – the world is becoming warmer and so heatwaves like this are becoming more common,' said one of the authors Dr Friederike Otto, deputy director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and and part of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium that did the latest research.

LONDON, / CHICAGO – Boffins at U.K. engineering giant Rolls-Royce proudly displayed an array of miniature robots at this year's Farnborough air show, best known as a major marketplace for passenger planes but also a test bed for the aviation industry's wilder imaginings. Designed to speed up engine overhauls, the manufacturer's tiny cockroach-like drones would remove the need for power plants to be detached from aircraft during maintenance work. The "swarming" bots, less than half an inch across, are designed to roam engine turbines in gangs, beaming pictures back to inspection crews after being deposited by so-called "snake" hosts that work their way through the engine. If the bots don't get you the drones will. The biannual air show was awash with unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, ranging from delivery craft that guarantee to gently deposit a parcel by your door to the latest military types intent on blowing stuff up.

On May 27, a deluge dumped more than 6 inches of rain in less than three hours on Ellicott City, Maryland, killing one person and transforming Main Street into what looked like Class V river rapids, with cars tossed about like rubber ducks. The National Weather Service put the probability of such a storm at once in 1,000 years. Yet, "it's the second time it's happened in the last three years," says Jeff Allenby, director of conservation technology for Chesapeake Conservancy, an environmental group. Floods are nothing new in Ellicott City, located where two tributaries join the Patapsco River. But Allenby says the floods are getting worse, as development covers what used to be the "natural sponge of a forest" with paved surfaces, rooftops, and lawns.