For four years I've waited for a spiritual successor to Never Alone. Part game, part documentary, E-Line Media and Upper One Games managed to adapt traditional Inupiaq folklore into an accessible platformer while educating players about the culture in question. It was flawed, but beautiful and memorable. Memorable enough, I guess, that the BBC got in touch and asked E-Line to do it again. At Gamescom this week I got to take a look at Beyond Blue, a spiritual successor to Never Alone and a companion piece to the BBC documentary Blue Planet 2. As you might expect from the Blue Planet 2 pairing, Beyond Blue takes you deep under the ocean.

Common-sense and background knowledge is required to understand natural language, but in most neural natural language understanding (NLU) systems, this knowledge must be acquired from training corpora during learning, and then it is static at test time. We introduce a new architecture for the dynamic integration of explicit background knowledge in NLU models. A general-purpose reading module reads background knowledge in the form of free-text statements (together with task-specific text inputs) and yields refined word representations to a task-specific NLU architecture that reprocesses the task inputs with these representations. Experiments on document question answering (DQA) and recognizing textual entailment (RTE) demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the approach. Analysis shows that our model learns to exploit knowledge in a semantically appropriate way.

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.

The stern of a US destroyer that was blown off the ship by a Japanese mine 75 years ago, killing 71, has been found off Alaska. The fragment of the USS Abner Read was found in the Bering Sea off the Aleutian island of Kiska, where it sank after being torn off by an explosion while conducting an anti-submarine patrol. The remaining crew managed to save the ship, which was repaired after the attack. On July 17, a NOAA-funded team of scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the University of Delaware discovered the missing 75- foot stern section in 290 feet of water off of Kiska, one of only two United States territories to be occupied by foreign forces in the last 200 years. After sonar mounted to the side of the research ship Norseman II identified a promising target, the team sent down a deep-diving, remotely operated vehicle to capture live video for confirmation.

An Amazon office building at 27 Melcher St. in Boston, which houses some of the 1,200 Amazon corporate staff who work in the greater Boston area. The newly refurbished building was formerly a Necco wafer candy factory. Amazon has 17 tech hubs in North America outside Seattle that employ more than 17,500 corporate, as opposed to warehouse and fulfillment, staff. That number is anticipated to rise to 26,200 by 2023. Here's where they are -- and why. Why: Silicon Valley is here, in addition to Stanford University, University of California-Berkeley and other universities with strong computer science and engineering programs.

You could work for Amazon in your PJs. Amazon has more than 1,200 Amazon staff in the greater Boston area. BOSTON – Amazon isn't just a Seattle company anymore, and a visit to its offices in this university city explains why. Here, in an old Necco wafer candy factory in the formerly industrial neighborhood of Fort Point, Rohit Prasad oversees 1,200 workers developing Alexa, the company's digital assistant. Walls made out of shipping containers, a playful nod to Amazon's main business, and exposed brick echo the urban tech vibe of its Seattle headquarters.

A Californian metropolis will soon become pilot city for fully-automated and driverless driving -- thanks to Bosch and Daimler who are speeding up the SAE Level 4/5 tech in the city. The chosen city will see a fleet of autonomous shuttle service on selected routes in the San Francisco Bay in Silicon Valley, which will be operated by Daimler Mobility Services. The pilot project will demonstrate how mobility services, such as car sharing (car2go), ride-hailing (mytaxi) and multi-modal platforms (moovel), can shape the future of mobility. Both have selected Nvidia as the AI platform supplier as part of their control unit network. This network will also be used in the fleet vehicles wherein both companies will put on the Californian roads in Q2/2019.

LONDON – Tokyo has topped a list of the world's most innovative cities, leapfrogging London and New York after embracing the "globe-shaking trends of robotics and 3-D manufacturing." The Japanese capital has risen rapidly since entering the top 10 of the Innovation Cities Index three years ago behind Paris, and was one of three Asian cities to feature this year. "What really surprised us this year was the resurgence of Tokyo, moving up to eclipse rival cities like Boston," said Christopher Hire, director of commercial data provider 2thinknow, which published the annual ranking on Friday. "They showed clear direction by embracing smart technology change to lead innovation and leadership in what we have identified as the twin long-term globe-shaking trends of robotics and 3-D manufacturing." Singapore, Sydney and Seoul also ranked highly in the index, which judges cities on 162 indicators including web censorship, wealth distribution and the potential for green businesses.

China is planning to upgrade its naval power with unmanned AI submarines that aim to provide an edge over the fleets of their global counterparts. A report by the South China Post on Sunday revealed Beijing's plans to build the automated subs by the early 2020s in response to unmanned weapons being developed in the US. The subs will be able to patrol areas in the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean that are home to disputed military bases. While the expected cost of the submarines has not been disclosed, they're likely to be cheaper than conventional submarines as they do not require life-supporting apparatus for humans. However, without a human crew, they'll also need to be resilient enough to be at sea without onboard repairs possible.

As hot as stories about artificial intelligence (AI), augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR), blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have been in recent months, we often can't help but think of these technologies as a long way off from mainstream adoption. Movies like Ready Player One and Avengers: Infinity Wars only perpetuate this perception by mixing real technologies with fantasy, making the tech we wield in the real world seem primitive in the process. AI, AR/VR, blockchain, and IoT are already playing an important role in our everyday lives, with countless examples hiding in plain sight. In this first article, we're going to look at Artificial Intelligence (AI). In pop culture, AI is often represented as a highly-evolved and self-aware artificial "brain" in a robot capable of overthrowing the human race, as in Ex Machina or The Terminator movies.