AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Germany's three biggest carmakers have accelerated R&D spending at HERE after their 2015 acquisition of the digital mapping company as they race to develop the navigation technology needed for self-driving cars.

A chatbot is one of the oldest envisioned use cases for Artificial Intelligence. Alan Turing suggested that instead of debating whether a machine could think, we should measure how it imitates human language. Microsoft's Xiaoice already passes the Turing test for 10 minutes. Do you already have a customer service chat bot or are you looking to build a new one? Here we have a comprehensive list of vendors your enterprise can partner with to build an intelligent chat bot.

How can artificial-intelligence lift your business? There is a lot of talk about artificial-intelligence (AI) right now, mainly about the risks involved in technology development. Some critics precit an end of the world scenario, however this is a a misleading picture, especially for those who make investment decisions. AI can significantly increase a business' assets and drive competition forward very fast. Therefore, companies around the world invest billions to capitalize on opportunities.

RIGA – By 2040, 100 people will live on the moon, melting ice for water, 3-D printing homes and tools, eating plants grown in lunar soil, and competing in low-gravity "flying" sports. To those who mock such talk as science fiction, experts such as Bernard Foing, ambassador of the European Space Agency-driven "Moon Village" project, reply the goal is not only reasonable but feasible too. At a European Planetary Science Congress in Riga this week, Foing spelled out how humanity could gain a permanent foothold on Earth's satellite, and then expand. He likened it to the growth of the railways, when villages grew around train stations, followed by businesses. By 2030, there could be an initial lunar settlement of six to 10 pioneers -- scientists, technicians and engineers -- which could grow to 100 by 2040, he predicted.

The UN Food & Agricultural Organization says 20% to 40% of all global crops are lost each year because of plant pests and diseases that aren't managed properly. Developed by a small team in Germany, Plantix offers guidance to farmers who don't have the privilege of human consultants. "There's a huge gap between agricultural consultancy and people's needs on the ground in emerging countries," says Korbinian Hartberger, one of four cofounders of PEAT, the startup that develops the free-to-use app. They can't wait for someone to come along two months [after the infestation] and say, 'yes, I think you should have sprayed this.'" The Android interface is simple but makes use of sophisticated machine learning technology working in the background.

The question seemed to baffle the head of Russia's biggest tech firm, who was giving Putin a tour on the company's Moscow HQ on Thursday. "I hope never", he replied after taking a pause to gather his thoughts. "It's not the first machine to be better than humans at something. An excavator digs better than we do with a shovel. But we don't get eaten by excavators. A car moves faster than we do…" "They don't think," he remarked.

Killer Mike and El-P, collectively known as Run the Jewels, are no strangers to video games. Previously they appeared in Gears of War 4 as multiplayer characters, and now the duo are lending their talents to FIFA 18. You can outfit your virtual footballer in kit featuring the group's trademark fist and gun logo on a teal jersey reminiscent of the album art for Run the Jewels 3, and there's also a black variant. More than that, the soundtrack features and exclusive track from the group, "Mean Demeanor." Now, this isn't the first time RTJ has graced a game from EA ("Blockbuster Night Part 2" was in Battlefield: Hardline), but FIFA soundtracks are a bit different, hitting a huge audience around the world.

Dozens of perfectly preserved ancient shipwrecks have been found at the bottom of the Black Sea. A total of 60 wrecks were discovered dating back as far as 2,500 years, including galleys from the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires. Scientists stumbled upon the graveyard while using underwater robots to survey the effects of climate change along the Bulgarian coast. Because the Black Sea contains almost no light or oxygen, little life can survive, meaning the wrecks are in excellent condition. Researchers say their discovery is'truly unrivalled'.

Content-dense news report important factual information about an event in direct, succinct manner. Information seeking applications such as information extraction, question answering and summarization normally assume all text they deal with is content-dense. Here we empirically test this assumption on news articles from the business, U.S. international relations, sports and science journalism domains. Our findings clearly indicate that about half of the news texts in our study are in fact not content-dense and motivate the development of a supervised content-density detector. We heuristically label a large training corpus for the task and train a two-layer classifying model based on lexical and unlexicalized syntactic features. On manually annotated data, we compare the performance of domain-specific classifiers, trained on data only from a given news domain and a general classifier in which data from all four domains is pooled together. Our annotation and prediction experiments demonstrate that the concept of content density varies depending on the domain and that naive annotators provide judgement biased toward the stereotypical domain label. Domain-specific classifiers are more accurate for domains in which content-dense texts are typically fewer. Domain independent classifiers reproduce better naive crowdsourced judgements. Classification prediction is high across all conditions, around 80%.