Tesla is going to need to make a lot of cars if it's going to fulfill all those Model 3 pre-orders... 500,000 per year by 2018, to be exact. And it's making a big purchase to help it reach that lofty goal. The company is acquiring Grohmann Engineering, a German firm specializing in automated manufacturing. The buyout (which creates Tesla Grohmann Automation) should give Elon Musk and crew more of the expertise and systems they need for high-volume production not only at the Gigafactory, but elsewhere in the world. Grohmann will serve as the base for Tesla's Advanced Automation Germany facility, with more locations coming.

In conjunction with the Web Summit conference in Lisbon today, Facebook is unveiling artificial intelligence (AI) software that it's using in order to let users apply and switch artistic styles for live video streams on Android and iOS. After demonstrating the technology at a conference last month, Facebook is now testing the video style transfer technology on mobile in a few countries, and it will be deployed more widely in the near future. The Caffe2go technology Facebook developed in the past three months is an implementation of a hot type of AI called deep learning, which typically involves training on lots of data, like images, and then making inferences about new data. In this case, Facebook has developed pre-trained neural networks that can then make inferences about new data on the fly on mobile. Google did something similar with a part of Google Translate last year, but Google also recently demonstrated neural style transfer technology of its own, although it's not yet been shown to run on mobile devices.

Want to make your own film soundtrack in minutes? Fancy creating a track to help you sleep? With the AI music maker, Jukedeck, this is all possible. Jukedeck allows anyone to make music. Simply select the genre, such as folk, rock or cinematic; the'mood', which can be uplifting or aggressive, and the length of time for the track.

Note: This is a short version of "Deep Learning -- The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Randomness". The paper submissions for ICLR 2017 in Toulon France deadline has arrived and instead of a trickle of new knowledge about Deep Learning we get a massive deluge. This is a gold mine of research that's hot off the presses. Many papers are incremental improvements of algorithms of the state of the art. I had hoped to find more fundamental theoretical and experimental results of the nature of Deep Learning, unfortunately there were just a few.

Even professional lip-readers can figure out only 20% to 60% of what a person is saying. Slight movements of a person's lips at the speed of natural speech are immensely difficult to reliably understand, especially from a distance or if the lips are obscured. And lip-reading isn't just a plot point in NCIS: It's an essential tool to understand the world for the hearing-impaired, and if automated reliably, could help millions. A new paper (pdf) from the University of Oxford (with funding from Alphabet's DeepMind) details an artificial intelligence system, called LipNet, that watches video of a person speaking and matches text to the movement of their mouth with 93.4% accuracy. The previous state of the art system operated word-by-word, and had an accuracy of 79.6%.

Written by C. Raja Mohan Updated: November 8, 2016 12:21 am Media reports say an artificial intelligence (AI) system called MogIA, developed by Sanjiv Rai, an innovator based in Mumbai, has predicted that Donald Trump will win Tuesday's presidential elections in the United States. Unveiled in 2004, the system apparently got it right in the last three presidential elections. It also predicted that Trump and Hillary Clinton will be the nominees of the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively. Rai is quoted as saying that the algorithm got even better as it has "learnt" from the last few rounds. MogIA is named after Mowgli from The Jungle Book.

Samsung Electronics Co. plans to equip its next Galaxy S smartphones with a Siri-like digital assistant, seeking to make a comeback after the global debacle that precipitated the death of its flawed Note 7 lineup. Samsung, which last month acquired U.S.-based artificial-intelligence software company Viv Labs Inc., said the Galaxy S8 slated for next year will come with AI-enabled features "significantly differentiated" from those in the market, such as Apple Inc.'s Siri or Google. Those services now offer up potentially useful information from the weather to flight times based on user activity. What to eat, drink, wear and drive – in real life and your dreams. The school, work and life hacks you need to get ahead.

UK privacy watchdog says Facebook agrees to suspend using WhatsApp users' data BRUSSELS Britain's privacy watchdog said on Monday that Facebook has agreed to suspend using data from UK users of its WhatsApp messaging app for advertisements or product-improvement purposes after the watchdog said consumers weren't properly protected.

SAP wants businesses struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation in its HANA in-memory database to relax as it readies a new version, to be known as HANA 2. Since introducing HANA in 2010, SAP has been releasing updates twice a year, providing customers with new capabilities but also pushing them to keep their software current to benefit from continuing support. The new version gives businesses two reasons to relax, according to Marie Goodell, vice president of product marketing at SAP. HANA 2 is designed to simplify things for the IT department, reducing the effort it takes to keep the lights on so that businesses can spend more time working on new, next-generation applications that take advantage of new types of data, she said. Even if they choose to keep upgrading, that should involve less work going forward. But for businesses that just want to get off the update treadmill, SAP will provide long-term support through May 2019 for the version released back in May, HANA Support Package Stack (SPS) 12, she said. When the time comes to upgrade, apps that run on SPS 12 should run on HANA 2 with no interruption, and companies that do choose to upgrade can look forward to a host of new features, Goodell said.

Tucked into a courtyard in central Paris, the 35 employees of Snips are hunched over their computers trying to put the finishing touches on a new version of the company's artificial intelligence app for smartphones. The company is packed full of big brains, many of them products of France's leading universities and a culture that is historically strong in mathematics. And they're not afraid to let you know it. Etched into winding wooden staircases that lead to Snips offices are a series of math puzzles that job recruits are asked to solve as they work their way upstairs. Snips' app wants to scan all the data across the apps on your smartphones to deliver insight about you and eventually become a hyper-smart personal assistant. But it promises to take a privacy-friendly approach by keeping all the data on your phone, where it will do the processing, rather than hoovering data up into the cloud.