Ford Motor Co. has bought a majority share in a small artificial intelligence start-up that will help the automaker get driverless vehicles on the road, Ford Chief Executive Mark Fields announced Friday. Argo AI, based in Pittsburgh, will provide the "brains" for virtual driving systems. Argo becomes a Ford subsidiary and will work intimately with Ford engineers to integrate driverless software with sensors and other hardware systems that will be built into Ford vehicles, Fields said. Ford will invest $1 billion in Argo over the next five years. For now the company will focus exclusively on Ford, but in the future the company could license its driverless technology, Fields said.

Ford Motor Co. is investing $1 billion in a months-old startup founded by two pioneers in the nascent autonomous vehicle sector. The Pittsburgh-based artificial intelligence company Argo AI will develop the brains -- specifically, a virtual driver system -- for the fully autonomous vehicles Ford has promised to bring to market in 2021. Founders Bryan Salesky and Peter Rander are former leaders of the self-driving car teams at Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Uber Technologies Inc. "This is a unique partnership," Mark Fields, Ford's chief executive officer, said in an interview. "A lot of tech companies are looking for customers and a lot of OEMs are looking for technology partners. We are getting expertise, and Argo AI is getting a customer in Ford." Salesky, who worked on the self-driving car project at Google, and Rander, who held a similar role at Uber, have no other backers.

The name Volvo conjures up the incredibly safe but visually bland 240 Wagon sold during the '70s, '80s and '90s. You'd buy a Volvo because you were practical and possibly a bit paranoid about other drivers slamming into you. But the Swedish automaker has been working hard to make its cars not only safe but also stylish and high-tech. That work has culminated in the hybrid XC90 T8 luxury SUV. It's a visually striking SUV both inside and out, with clean lines, subtle accents and a few hints of chrome on the outside.

I've checked out a lot of smart light switches since I built my own smart home in 2007, but Brilliant's Brilliant Control is the most exciting lighting control I've seen since I've been able to control my lights with Amazon's Alexa. This one works with Alexa, of course--in fact, Alexa Voice Service is built in--but it also has a touchscreen; Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios; a motion sensor; an integrated camera and microphone; and it can control much more than just lights. Brilliant co-founder and CEO Aaron Emigh said he was in the midst of renovating his own home in the pre-Amazon Echo days when the inspiration for Brilliant Control struck. "I was looking at various smart home options. I wanted an a la carte option, because it suits my hackerish background. Systems like Crestron involved putting holes in your walls and depended on professional installers, and the next tier down was centered around security, which wasn't the lens I was looking through for a smart home. I was going to end up in a weird situation where I was dependent on my smartphone to control anything. So I thought to myself'why not put a screen and a microphone where the light switches are, so there's one in every room?' I was shocked to discover this didn't already exist."

As it goes every year, one hot feature sets a trend in technology, and suddenly every company boasts some variation of which that is uniquely theirs. This year, that feature is AI. Hot on the heels of Alexa's and Google Assistant's holiday successes, Artificial Intelligence on phones has become the de facto must-have feature – whether consumers know it or not. In any case, manufacturers seem not to realize that AI doesn't mean "Anything Intuitive" – that's just how operating systems are supposed to be. Yet it seems that OEM's are eager to label nearly any vaguely intuitive feature as AI.

NASA is preparing for lift off once again. The agency is scheduled to broadcast an unpiloted Japanese cargo spacecraft that will depart the International Space Station Friday morning. The cargo spacecraft, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) H-II Transport Vehicle-6, will be released by the station's robotic arm commanded by the European Space Agency's Flight Engineer Thomas Pesquet with support from NASA's Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough. You can watch the NASA Orbital ATK launch here. Transport Vehicle-6 is expected to move underneath and in front of the International Space Station and gather data for a week using a JAXA experiment which will "measure electromagnetic forces using a tether in low-Earth orbit," a NASA statement read.

Meanwhile the leader of Communist China rebranded his prickly protectionist power as the defender of globalisation and shared values. So after week one in this upside down new world, how stands China's bid for global leadership? A week is just a week, but when it comes to strategic focus, China is on course. It's easier to look laser sharp when the competition is in disarray. Here the internal difficulties of the US and the European Union are helpful to China.

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The complexities of the mind mirror the challenges of Artificial Intelligence. This article discusses the nature of thought itself–can it be replicated in a machine? From Ray Kurzweil's revolutionary book The Age of Intelligent Machines, published in 1990. At a time when computer technology is advancing at a breakneck pace and when software developers are glibly hawking their wares as having artificial intelligence, the inevitable question has begun to take on a certain urgency: Can a computer think? In one form or another this is actually a very old question, dating back to such philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes. And after nearly 3,000 years the most honest answer is still "Who knows?" After all, what does it mean to think? So let's try some others.

This is an updated version of Usability Issues in Description Logic Systems'' published in Proceedings of International Workshop on Description Logics, Gif sur Yvette, (Paris), France, September, 1997.