Ultimately, Aerialtronics, via Watson, will be able to measure cell phone tower signals as well as conduct antenna position analytics. IBM's Watson is getting into the commercial drone market in a deal with Aerialtronics, a Netherlands-based maker of unmanned aircraft systems. Aerialtronics is using IBM's Watson Internet of Things (IoT) platform for inspection services across a wide range of industries. Under the deal, Watson will connect its visual recognition application programming interfaces, IBM's cloud, drones and high-definition cameras to perform inspections on assets such as wind turbines, oil rigs, and cell towers. The general idea is that drones can do the visual inspections so humans don't' have to climb towers.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced THINK Marketing, a new one-stop destination for marketers to gain knowledge, learn skills and ultimately drive a digital transformation within their business. Designed to help Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) and their teams build proficiency and experience, THINK Marketing delivers news and thought leadership content from the industry's top marketing influencers and news outlets. Through these assets, marketers can gain a deeper knowledge and, when ready, match their needs with solutions from IBM and more than sixty marketing technology companies from around the globe including Sprinklr, Mirakl and MediaMath. THINK Marketing will rapidly grow to include new industry specific content, collections of content on additional marketing functions and double the number of third-party solutions. THINK Marketing will also include a developer marketplace where start-ups and developers can virtually brainstorm, try solutions and also create and bring to market new cognitive and cloud apps that address important marketing challenges.

As a cease-fire in Syria entered its third day, authorities said Wednesday that the government was to begin withdrawing forces from a strategic road in the besieged rebel-held area of Aleppo, a move that would open the way for U.N. relief shipments. Syrian forces, with Russian air support, closed the road in July, thereby completing the encirclement of rebel districts with a population of as many as 300,000. A withdrawal south of Castello Road was to begin Thursday morning, according to Russian state news agency TASS. Rebel forces reportedly were to retreat simultaneously to positions north of the road. But it remained unclear whether residents of the city would accept the sacks of flour and food baskets the United Nations hopes to deliver.

Self-driving cars are raising hopes that we'll get a lot done when we don't have to drive anymore. According to a University of Michigan study, that's about as likely as a parent finishing two memos and a big presentation while taking a teen-age learner out to drive. The average U.S. driver spends an hour a day in their car, but the study concluded that for 62 percent of Americans, freeing up that driving time won't make them any more productive. And the findings suggest riding in a self-driving car may be a white-knuckle nightmare of nerves, car sickness, unsafe seats and flying gadgets. Maybe ordinary people have sensed this already.

LONDON The entrepreneur behind British software company Autonomy has invested in a start-up called Luminance that uses artificial intelligence to read documents and speed up the legal process around deals, potentially cutting out some lawyers. Mike Lynch, who founded technology investment fund Invoke Capital after leaving Autonomy, said on Wednesday he saw great potential in Luminance, which was set up by Cambridge University students and has worked with lawyers at Slaughter and May to develop software to analyze documents. "You can see the excitement around things like driverless cars, so this being all about contracts doesn't sound quite as riveting, but I actually think it's going to have a very big impact" Lynch told Reuters. "Lawyers will be able to do the things that matter rather than the grunt work, they can add better value by doing better analysis of what is found, rather than trying to plough through 50,000 documents." Founded by a combination of lawyers, experts in deals and mathematicians, Luminance has created software that it says can read and understand hundreds of pages of documents every minute, with clients charged according to usage.

HERE is an increasing need to handle large multidimensional datasets that cannot efficiently be analyzed or processed using modern day computers. Due to the curse of dimensionality it is urgent to develop mathematical tools which can evaluate information beyond the properties of large matrices [1]. The essential goal is to reduce the dimensionality of multidimensional data, represented by tensors, with a minimal information loss by compressing the original tensor space to a lower-dimensional tensor space, also called the feature space [1]. Tensor decomposition is the most natural tool to enable such compressions [2]. Until recently, tensor compression is merely based on Tucker decomposition (TD) [3], also known as higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) when orthogonality constraints on factor matrices are imposed [4].

Ford Motor Co. is shifting all of its North American small-car production to Mexico, Chief Executive Mark Fields said Wednesday. "Over the next two to three years, we will have migrated all of our small-car production to Mexico and out of the United States," Fields said. Ford currently makes its Fiesta subcompact in Mexico, but its Focus and C-Max small cars are made in suburban Detroit. Making them in Mexico would boost company profits because of low wages there. The company is building a 1.6-billion assembly plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.

Inbenta, a San Mateo, CA-based enterprise-grade artificial intelligence solutions, raised 12m in Series B funding. The round was led by Level Equity, with participation from Amasia and Scale Capital through its Amérigo Chile fund. In conjunction with the funding, founder and partner George McCulloch and Amasia chairman Ramanan Raghavendran joined Inbenta's board of directors. The company intends to use the funds to expand sales and marketing, and to further drive product development for its technology. Founded in 2005 by Jordi Torras, CEO, Inbenta has developed natural language processing (NLP) technology that powers search, chatbots, and self-service solutions for customer support and e-commerce.

Amazon has brought its voice-controlled Echo speakers to the UK. The devices offer access to local services and feature a British-accented version of the Alexa virtual assistant. The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones tested the tech and spoke to Dave Limp, Amazon's devices chief.

Engineers from Caltech have developed a method that uses data from satellite and street-level images, such as the ones that you can see in Google maps, to create automatically an inventory of street trees that cities may use to better manage urban forests. Their work is described in the proceedings of the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, which was held in Las Vegas this summer. "Cities have been surveying their tree populations for decades, but the process is very labor intensive. It usually involves hiring arborists to go out with GPS units to mark the location of each individual tree and identify its species," says senior author Pietro Perona, the Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science. "For this reason, tree surveys are usually only done every 20 to 30 years, and a lot can change in that time."