Summer is welcoming us with great news! We are thrilled to announce Baidu Research as part of our AI Meetup series! We will start off with a Q&A with Andrew Ng, Chief Scientist at Baidu and one of the founding fathers of modern AI research. After that, we will follow with presentations from two researchers from Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab – Bryan Catanzaro and Eric Battenberg. Baidu Research brings together top researchers, scientists and engineers from around the world to work on fundamental AI research.

Pepper the robot participates in a Japanese ribbon-cutting ceremony earlier this year. Its manufacturer, SoftBank Robotics, is opening new offices in San Francisco and releasing a development kit for Android programmers. The proposed 32 billion acquisition of ARM Holdings, a U.K.-based maker of smartphone chips, by Japanese conglomerate Softbank is the second deal in two weeks that highlights the ascendancy of Asian technology investors. It likely won't be the last example this year, given global economic and investing trends. Last week, the Korean firm Naver -- parent of Japan-based messaging service Line (LN) -- sold off part of its ownership stake in the biggest tech IPO so far this year.

A Land Rover team of engineers is helping the Land Rover BAR team make its America's Cup entry faster. America's Cup is the pinnacle of sailing competitiveness. Teams spend upwards of 100 million just to sniff success and rumor has it Oracle Team USA owner Larry Ellison blew past that by nearly double when his team won it in 2013. However, in an attempt to bring the Cup to Great Britain for the first time ever, one team is looking not to outspend its opponents, but to outthink them. The Land Rover BAR team is using the brains from one of its sponsors – Land Rover – to build a faster boat … faster because it's smarter.

Consumers can look forward to a future increasingly defined by a global voice, and dominated by robots, the Internet of Things (IoT), and virtual and augmented reality (the last of which has become considerably more plausible since the release of Pokemon Go), according to a new trends report by Toronto-based non-profit innovation hub MaRS. Arguably more fascinating than the report's conclusion, however, is its methods: To determine the trends that will define tech's future, authors Farah Momen and Sue McGill calculated the startups that were receiving the most funding, then divided them into sectors. "By analyzing the capital raised over the past year, we can understand: a) which consumer and commerce verticals are seeing the most activity here in Canada (such as wearables and foodtech); and b) which specific, innovative consumer and enterprise business-to-business companies are gaining traction in the market," Momen and McGill wrote in a July 7 press release announcing the report. While ecommerce might be delivering a wider variety of products to consumers than ever before, the final purchase decision is still frequently influenced by their shopping experience, Momen and McGill write – and advancements in VR and AR have created new opportunities for companies to provide an immersive, unforgettable experience, with manufacturers such as Lexus and Volvo implementing virtual test-driving simulations, and Ikea adding an AR feature to its mobile app that lets viewers virtually place and view nearly 300 of the Swedish furniture giant's products in their homes. Sure, we all know about Alexa and Cortana, but more interesting to Momen and McGill is the role that digital shopping assistants could play in retail's future, with companies like Stitch Fix already delivering monthly boxes of curated items chosen by a combination of machine and human stylists.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Experts say the development of self-driving cars over the coming decade depends on an unreliable assumption by many automakers: that the humans in them will be ready to step in and take control if the car's systems fail. Instead, experience with automation in other modes of transportation like aviation and rail suggests that the strategy will lead to more deaths like that of a Florida Tesla driver in May. Decades of research shows that people have a difficult time keeping their minds on boring tasks like monitoring systems that rarely fail and hardly ever require them to take action. Tesla will release a software update to improve the Autopilot system in its cars following a crash that killed a driver, founder Elon Musk has revealed. The electric car manufacturer's chief executive said he had been talking to the German supplier of the radar systems used in the vehicles about ways of improving the feature.

Kaushik Raghu, Senior Staff Engineer at Audi, is reflected in the passenger side visor mirror while demonstrating an Audi self driving vehicle on I-395 expressway in Arlington, Va., Friday, July 15, 2016. Experts say the development of self-driving cars over the coming decade depends on an unreliable assumption by most automakers: that the humans in them will be ready to step in and take control if the car's systems fail. Experience with automation in other modes of transportation suggests that strategy will lead to more deaths like that of a Florida Tesla driver in May. Kaushik Raghu, Senior Staff Engineer at Audi, is reflected in the passenger side visor mirror while demonstrating an Audi self driving vehicle on I-395 expressway in Arlington, Va., Friday, July 15, 2016. Experts say the development of self-driving cars over the coming decade depends on an unreliable assumption by most automakers: that the humans in them will be ready to step in and take control if the car's systems fail. Experience with automation in other modes of transportation suggests that strategy will lead to more deaths like that of a Florida Tesla driver in May.

Has your child swallowed a small battery? In the future, a tiny robot made from pig gut could capture it and expel it. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are designing an ingestible robot that could bpatch wounds, deliver medicine or dislodge a foreign object. They call their experiment an "origami robot" because the accordion-shaped gadget gets folded up and frozen into an ice capsule. "You swallow the robot, and when it gets to your stomach the ice melts and the robot unfolds," said Daniela Rus, a professor who directs MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

The traditional definition of artificial intelligence is the ability of machines to execute tasks and solve problems in ways normally attributed to humans. Some tasks that we consider simple--recognizing an object in a photo, driving a car--are incredibly complex for AI. Machines can surpass us when it comes to things like playing chess, but those machines are limited by the manual nature of their programming; a 30 gadget can beat us at a board game, but it can't do--or learn to do--anything else. This is where machine learning comes in. Show millions of cat photos to a machine, and it will hone its algorithms to improve at recognizing pictures of cats.

Recruitment is a prime candidate for automation through artificial intelligence and machine learning, but what does this mean for the human side of hiring? The manual nature of many hiring processes has seen the recruitment sector jump to the front of the HR queue in terms of adopting artificial intelligence. Predictive recruitment analytics: are you ready for the future? Even though the market is still immature and uptake is at the earliest of stages, machine-learning software is making its presence felt. But how significant an impact is it likely to have on HR and recruitment over the next few years?