SAN FRANCISCO - Tesla Inc. and Apple Inc. both suspect they were betrayed by driverless technology engineers who defected to the same Chinese startup. So Tesla is now asking for Apple's help in a lawsuit in which the electric carmaker accused an engineer who worked on its Autopilot program of taking thousands of highly confidential files when he went to work for XMotors.ai, the U.S. research arm of Guangzhou-based Xpeng. Along with typical information demands in the early fact-finding phase of the lawsuit that are spelled out in a court filing last week -- Tesla wants to see the engineer's emails and have a forensic analysis conducted on his electronic devices -- the company founded by Elon Musk disclosed that it has also served the iPhone maker with a subpoena. The documents Tesla seeks from Apple aren't specified in the filing, but the thinking may be that while the Silicon Valley titans are rivals in the ultra-hot self-driving space, they share a common enemy in Xpeng. Last July, prosecutors charged a hardware engineer in Apple's autonomous vehicle-development team with downloading proprietary files as he prepared to leave the company and start work for the for Chinese company.

If you're looking for a smart plug that hits all the right notes and never puts a foot wrong, the iDevices Switch is still the way to go. On top of Android and iOS compatibility, the Switch offers in-depth energy monitoring and seamless integration with the two most popular smart home ecosystems: Amazon Alexa and Apple HomeKit. Looks aren't everything, but the iDevices Switch is easily the most attractive smart plug we tested. Along with its sleek, minimalist casing, it offers a unique "night light" LED strip that can be set to any color of the rainbow. Mercifully, the Switch only occupies a single outlet on your wall panel, and its own outlet is positioned on the right-hand side--a real advantage if you want to place it snugly behind a couch or bookcase. It could also be a disadvantage if you want to plug something in on the left side, but for most users the side placement will be a plus rather than a minus. The slickly designed iDevices app is more attractive than most, and very easy to use.

It violates The Fair Housing Act to advertise in ways that deny particular segments of the housing market information about housing opportunities. It also violates New York law. But what happens when you use an advertising medium that discriminates on its own? We may just find out. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo recently directed the New York Department of Financial Services to investigate reports of housing providers harnessing Facebook's abilities to target users with precision.

Whilst the'special relationship' between the UK and the US has been put to the test this week following a diplomatic dispute, it's clear that there are still mutually beneficial investment opportunities for the two nations - particularly in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence (RAI). That was the view of a cohort of leading experts from the UK's RAI research, start-up and enterprise communities, who were taken out to California and Texas in March of this year on a mission to meet with some of the US's leading aerospace, marine and cross-cutting technology companies. The cohort included people from D-RiskQ, Shadow Robot, Rolls Royce, London Southbank University, Brunel University, Soil Machine Dynamics, Forth Engineering, Autonomous Devices, Headlight.AI and HyBird. Their feedback was presented at an event yesterday in central London, alongside the publication of their findings in new Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) report - 'USA Robotics & AI in Extreme Environments 2019'. I'd recommend reading the report for a full overview of the mission and the RAI opportunities available.

The world's fish stocks are in decline and our increasing demand for seafood may be one of the main drivers. But the true extent of the problem is hard to estimate, especially when fishing occurs in the high seas, which lie beyond national jurisdiction and are hard to monitor. Conservation planners face growing pressures to combat illegal, unregulated and unreported (IUU) fishing, the value of which has been estimated at US$10-23.5 billion annually. This is an important cost for society as a whole, but also for the major high seas fishing countries such as China and Taiwan that subsidize their fleets and may have low labour costs. Artificial intelligence (AI) could address this global environmental concern -- and satisfy the need of seafood retailers and consumers to know if what they're selling and eating is sustainable.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is nothing new. The field of AI research was founded in 1956. To date, this field has been always covered with huge expectations. Surely, we are in such a hype phase, but Google CEO Sundar Pichai is also right, when he says AI is bigger than the invention of fire and electricity. As one of the largest industrial nations, Germany addresses this big promise and published a AI strategy this month (Nov, 2018).

I want to take a moment to tell the origin story of regression analysis, which will explain why it has that name. I believe that of all the common machine learning techniques (K-means, kNN, PCA), "regression analysis" has the most opaque name. OLS regression was first invented to analyze exceptional genetic traits and their heritability. These early studies seemed to show the offspring of exceptional individuals "regressed to the mean". The inventor was Sir Francis Galton (half-cousin of Charles Darwin²), who had previously invented the standard deviation and first observed the "wisdom of the crowds" in certain estimation tasks. I am trying to predict daily demand for short-term bike rentals made in 2012, and I have data from 2011 to build the model.

Don't simply "all in" if there's a bot at your Texas hold'em poker table, because Facebook and Carnegie Mellon University's new Pluribus AI system just beat five human pros at the same time -- including a couple of World Series of Poker Champs. AI models had already bettered human poker pros one-on-one, but Pluribus's success in a six-player game signals a huge leap in ability. Texas hold'em is one of the most popular poker variants that involves game theory, gambling, and strategy. To win the game, each play must assemble the best five cards from any combination of two "hole cards" dealt face down to each player and five community cards dealt face up. Players can choose to check, bet, call, raise, and fold. Researchers regard poker as a meaningful and complex experimental field where they can explore how AI interacts with gaming theory and imperfect information.

AI will be a major growth driver for Asia in the coming decade. The company priorities for AI are to enhance customer satisfaction, speed up decision-making, and reduce inefficiencies. The loss of some roles to automation, and the restructuring of others to take advantage of technology-created capacity, are likely. Yet reducing headcount is not a top priority in and of itself. Just one-third of survey respondents listed the need to reduce labor costs as a top-three driver for AI.

In Q2 2018, Chinese investors sank $2.87b into AI startups; in Q2 2019, it was $140.7m. It's part of a massive slowdown in China's AI industry, which kicked off with massive political/economic fanfare from the Chinese state, which promised that the sector would be worth $150b by 2030, a boast that touched off anxiety about a global AI arms race. Two years later, valuations for the companies that bet biggest on AI are plummeting. Baidu has sunk to a valuation of 10% of the worth of rivals Alibaba and Tencent, though they were all level as recently as 2017; the company's top AI scientists have quit, and the company just booked its first losses since 2005. Many of the early promising AI demos have fizzled or turned out to be smoke-and-mirrors: much-vaunted demonstrations of health-tech companies like Ping An to diagnose diseases early and head them off before they could spread represent mere incremental improvements over techniques that were documented and demonstrated in the 1970s.