A self-driving car will soon be one ride option available from Lyft in the San Francisco Bay Area, as the ride-services company ramps up its efforts to become a serious player in autonomous vehicle technology. Lyft said on Thursday that self-driving cars will soon be dispatched to certain passengers who request a ride through the app in the area. The cars will come from Drive.ai, a Mountain View, California, startup that builds software to turn cars into autonomous vehicles. A self-driving car will soon be one ride option available from Lyft in the San Francisco Bay Area. Lyft will partner up with Drive.Ai, a startup that builds software to turn cars into autonomous vehicles It is the latest in a string of partnerships between Lyft and an autonomous car company, but it is the one with the most immediate impact to Lyft passengers.

If Uber's scandals, lawsuits, and federal investigations haven't already driven you into the backseat of its competition just yet, maybe this will: Lyft is launching a fleet of self-driving cars and select customers in the San Francisco Bay Area will be offered free rides in autonomous cars developed and operated by self-driving outfit Drive.ai. "We really want to understand, what are all the pieces that need to come into place?" For Drive.ai, a two-year-old self-driving startup, it's a chance to see test out its tech and see how real customers interact with its product. To start, the program will include about a dozen AVs (drawn from Drive.ai's mixed fleet of Lincoln MKZ and Audi A4 sedans), but that number will grow as the company starts spending the $50 million it recently raised in a Series B funding round led by VC firm New Enterprise Associates. Both companies will collect data from customers (mostly through in-app reviews) about their experience, in the hopes of making sure they're comfortable, or at least not terrified. Uber started a pilot program in Pittsburgh last year, which it has since expanded to Tempe, Arizona.

The recently launched LinkedIn Salary product has been designed with the goal of providing compensation insights to the world's professionals and thereby helping them optimize their earning potential. We describe the overall design and architecture of the statistical modeling system underlying this product. We focus on the unique data mining challenges while designing and implementing the system, and describe the modeling components such as Bayesian hierarchical smoothing that help to compute and present robust compensation insights to users. We report on extensive evaluation with nearly one year of de-identified compensation data collected from over one million LinkedIn users, thereby demonstrating the efficacy of the statistical models. We also highlight the lessons learned through the deployment of our system at LinkedIn.

Two Los Angeles Unified teachers play a tabletop game created during a two-day professional development workshop last week at the Annenberg Space for Photography's Skylight Studios. Two Los Angeles Unified teachers play a tabletop game created during a two-day professional development workshop last week at the Annenberg Space for Photography's Skylight Studios. About 1,000 middle and high school students in Los Angeles are expected to design video games this school year that expose players to the importance of kindness, wildlife conservation or news literacy. The best student gamemakers could earn scholarships and other prizes. With the gaming effort, it recruited Riot Games, the Los Angeles company behind the hit computer game "League of Legends," to host participants on upcoming field trips.

China Internet Trends 2017 Edith Yeung August 2017 2. Selected by Inc's Magazine as one of the Silicon Valley's investors you must know, Edith Yeung is the head of 500 Startups Greater China and partner of 500 Mobile Collective Fund. Edith invested in over 40 mobile, VR, AR, AI and machine learning startups, including Hooked - #1 reading app for millennium, DayDayCook - #1 Asian Cooking media and platform, Fleksy (acquired by Pinterest), Human (acquired by Mapbox), AISense, and many more. Before 500, Edith was the head of marketing for Dolphin Browser, a Sequoia- backed mobile browser with over 150 million installs worldwide. Edith also worked with many Fortune 500 companies such as Siebel, AMS, AT&T Wireless and Autodesk. There are so many Chinese people...

As Earth-observing satellites become more plentiful and climate models more powerful, researchers who study global warming are facing a deluge of data. Some are now turning to the latest trend in artificial intelligence (AI) to help trawl through all the information, in the hope of discovering new climate patterns and improving forecasts. "Climate is now a data problem," says Claire Monteleoni, a computer scientist at George Washington University in Washington DC who has helped to pioneer the marriage of machine-learning techniques with climate science. In machine learning, AI systems improve in performance as the amount of data that they analyse grows. This approach is a natural fit for climate science: a single run of a high-resolution climate model can produce a petabyte of data, and the archive of climate data maintained by the UK Met Office, the national weather service, now holds about 45 petabytes of information--and adds 0.085 petabytes a day.

The iPhone has been my primary smartphone for well over a decade, and therefore I've had Siri on my phone ever since its introduction in 2011. But I never really found a reason to use it. I've always felt self-conscious when talking to my phone -- I find people who use voice commands in public really annoying -- so I wanted to avoid doing it myself. I have Bluetooth in my car so I don't have to use my phone while driving, and when I'm at home, I have my trusty fingers instead. So I imagined that being forced to use Siri for a whole week was going to be a nightmare.

SpaceX is poised to fire off a fresh Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday, delivering a comically tiny payload for Taiwan's National Space Organization. At 1,047 pounds, the Formosat-5 Earth-observing satellite is almost light enough for a human to deadlift--but it'll launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket with 50 times more capacity. The overkill is thanks to a years-long delay, and SpaceX will take a substantial financial hit to make good on a contract it signed in 2010. Elon Musk's spaceflight company will attempt to launch the rocket from Vandenberg Air Force base in California during a 42-minute window opening at 11:51am PDT on Thursday. The satellite is bound for heliosynchronous orbit, where it will pass over Taiwan every two days for data retrieval. After the lightest single payload to ever hitch a ride on a Falcon 9 separates, the booster will fly back for a drone ship landing--hopefully to be reused in future, more economically viable missions.

Austin Russell hops in a motorized cart and goes whizzing through a cavernous building on the edge of San Francisco Bay that is normally used to disembark cruise-ship passengers. As the lanky 22-year-old CEO tools around, he passes a mannequin, a tire and a co-worker on a bicycle--all elements of a demonstration to show how well his company's sensor can monitor the environment. On a nearby screen, those shapes appear in rainbow colors that signify exactly how far away they are. All of it is the result of laser beams shooting out of a black box and bouncing off more than a million points around the room every second. "It's easy to make an autonomous vehicle that works 99% of the time," Russell says later.

A Zipline drone is launched in Rwanda. The company is now expanding to set up a national network in Tanzania. A Zipline drone is launched in Rwanda. The company is now expanding to set up a national network in Tanzania. Eight-year-old boy bitten by dog.