After years toiling away in secret on a car project, Apple chief executive Tim Cook has for the first time elaborated on the company's plans in the automotive market. "We're focusing on autonomous systems," Mr Cook said in a 5 June interview on Bloomberg Television that amounted to his most detailed comments yet on Apple's automotive plans. "It's a core technology that we view as very important." He likened the effort to "the mother of all AI projects," saying it's "probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on". The prospect of self-driving cars has seen a slew of technology companies push into the auto industry, according to McKinsey & Co. Alphabet's Waymo unit has signed partnerships with Fiat Chrysler and Lyft to develop the technology.

After years toiling away in secret on a car project, Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook has for the first time elaborated on the company's plans in the automotive market. "We're focusing on autonomous systems," Cook said in a June 5 interview on Bloomberg Television that amounted to his most detailed comments yet on Apple's automotive plans. "It's a core technology that we view as very important." He likened the effort to "the mother of all AI projects," saying it's "probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on." The prospect of self-driving cars has seen a slew of technology companies push into the auto industry, according to McKinsey & Co. Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo unit has signed partnerships with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV and Lyft Inc. to develop the technology.

David Yang is an Armenian-born Russian founder, CEO of ABBYY an up and coming AI startup and an investor in AI startups. David is a co-founder, entrepreneur and/or co-investor of a number of other projects in addition to ABBYY. Foundation and participation in iiko company, which develops a new-generation system of restaurants and hospitality services management (http://www.iiko.ru, Participation in charity and educational projects, such as educational fund Ayb (http://www.ayb.am, David holds a, Ph.D. in Memeology, and received the Laureate of Russian Government Award in Science and Technology He has a BSc in Mathematics from Novosibirsk State University (Russia) and an MBA from the University of Brighton (UK).

This weekend's big SpaceX news has nearly reached its logical conclusion point: the reused Dragon cargo capsule has been successfully captured by the International Space Station. While that sounds an awful lot like the opening scene of a certain space opera, it's all par for the course. From here, the ISS' ground crew will take control of the station's robotic arm and dock the capsule, according to NASA. TechCrunch writes that resupply craft will stay attached for around a month before returning to Earth. If all goes according to plan, the capsule will be recovered after landing in the Pacific Ocean and then be refurbished for another trip to the stars -- you know, SpaceX's thing.

Doom-and-gloom headlines about the shrinking number of stores in malls, closing department stores, and thinning foot traffic have been everywhere lately, and not without good reason. If one were to venture a guess based on brick-and-mortar store performance, it would appear the U.S. consumer has stopped spending. But in fact, consumer spending has been rising steadily every year since 2009. It's just that an ever-greater number of people are choosing to do their shopping online. According to the U.S. Census Bureau's monthly retail report, retail sales were up 4.5% year over year in April, but online sales grew 12%.

Elon Musk's company SpaceX will attempt to launch a Falcon 9 rocket Saturday evening, in a bid to send a refurbished Dragon cargo spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS). The CRS-11 mission is the eleventh for the commercial space company and was originally scheduled for Thursday evening, but had to be postponed due to weather conditions. The weather could play spoilsport once again Saturday, which has an instantaneous launch window at 5:07 p.m. EDT. According to forecast by meteorologists with the U.S. Air Force 45th Weather Squadron, announced Friday morning, there was a 60 percent chance of favorable weather at the time of the planned launch. That forecast was worse than the 70 percent favorable forecast announced Thursday night. "The primary weather concerns for Saturday's launch are anvil clouds, cumulus clouds and flight through precipitation," the forecast announcement on NASA's website said.

These days there are so many self-driving cars coming down the pipeline it seems inevitable they'll soon be stuck in a robot traffic jam – just like the human-piloted cars of today. Well, not if Anthony Barrs and Baiyu Chen get their way. The two graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, have devised a system that would have tightly-packed clusters of autonomous vehicles zipping past local traffic at speeds of more than 100mph, all on existing roadways. They call it Hyperlane, and it works a lot like high-speed toll lanes already do, only with a central computer controlling everything. Although fully autonomous cars are not yet legal on most public roads, manufacturers like Volvo and Tesla already offer autonomous features on their vehicles – adaptive cruise control and, in some cases, systems that steer the car with limited driver input.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared as an answer to a Quora question, which also included the following: "As I understand, the chance of having a derivative zero in each of the thousands of direction is low. Is there some other reason besides this?" Yes, there is a'theoretical justification', and has taken a couple decades to flush it out. I will first point out, however, it has been observed in practice. This was pointed out by LeCun in his early work on LeNet, and is actually discussed in the'orange book', "Pattern Classification" by David G. Stork, Peter E. Hart, and Richard O. Duda. The problem has been addressed in condensed matter physics 20 years ago in the study of spin glasses.

Might such things as school examinations, tests, marked classwork and progress checks soon all be a thing of the past? They will be if Rose Luckin, Professor of Learner-Centred Design at the Knowledge Lab at the University College, London (UCL) Institute of Education, has her way. She argues that the way school pupils are assessed today is unsatisfactory. "Decades of research have shown that knowledge and understanding cannot be rigorously evaluated through a series of 90-minute exams. The prevailing exam paradigm is stressful, unpleasant, can turn students away from education, and requires that both students and teachers take time away from learning. And yet we persist in relying on these blunt instruments, sending students off to universities and the workplace ill-equipped for their futures," writes Professor Luckin in a research paper.

A disembodied voice sounded over a loudspeaker. Take cover," it warned to anyone within earshot. Then, the sirens began to wail. Erin Delaney assumed it was a drill. She peeked down the hallway to see how other people were responding. Then she hit the deck. The NATO base in Kabul where Delaney had been working for weeks was being attacked. Delaney, 24, had never had any military training. She grew up in San Diego, traveled up the coast for college at UC Berkeley, and spent the next two years nestled in the safe, Tesla-filled San Francisco bubble, working in the compliance department at Dropbox. Now, with her nose to the ground, she was getting a taste--however brief--of life in a war zone. She flipped over the visitor's badge she'd received when she first arrived at the base. In case of attack, it said, she should stay on the ground for two minutes. Assuming nothing dire happened, she was to shelter in place until the shelling stopped. So, for about an hour, that's what she did.