Spotify has launched a new voice-controlled smart device, marking a debut in the hardware industry. Dubbed'Car Thing,' it plugs into a vehicle's cigarette lighter and allows users to turn on their favorite playlist hands-free while they're driving. The device is being rolled out among a small group of test users in the coming weeks, according to the Verge. Spotify has launched a new voice-controlled smart device, marking a debut in the hardware industry. It allows users to turn on their favorite playlist hands-free while they're driving Users plug it into their car's 12-volt outlet, or cigarette lighter.

The Diet on Friday enacted legislative revisions aimed at creating systems to ensure the safety of self-driving vehicles. The revisions to the Road Transport Vehicle Act, approved unanimously by the House of Councilors at a plenary session, call for the applying of vehicle safety standards to self-driving equipment necessary to check the surroundings, including cameras and radars. Under the revised law, special certification will be granted to auto safety inspection business operators capable of undertaking maintenance work for self-driving equipment. The original law did not have provisions that assumed vehicles would ever be self-driving. The revisions also require automakers to provide technical information necessary to carry out inspections of self-driving equipment.

NAGOYA - Toyota Motor Corp. is considering offering autonomous driving technologies to ride-hailing firms, sources close to the matter said Thursday, in its latest push to become a company offering not only cars but also various mobility services. The automaker is planning to supply a new driverless system to be developed with U.S. ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. to companies such as Grab Taxi Holdings Pte Ltd. of Singapore and ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.'s Ola of India, the sources said. Toyota said last month it will jointly invest $1 billion in Uber's new subsidiary to develop autonomous vehicles, together with SoftBank Group Corp. and auto parts supplier Denso Corp. SoftBank Group is the biggest shareholder in Uber and has also invested in Grab and Ola. Toyota is also a stakeholder in Grab, which has a wide range of businesses across Southeast Asia.

Shop and save during The Home Depot's Memorial Day sale happening now. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. Cookouts, backyard bashes, and getting to relish a hard-earned long weekend--these are just a few of the things that might leap to mind when you think about Memorial Day. But if you're someone who absolutely loves DIY projects and just generally doing stuff around the house, chances are you also think of Home Depot, since their annual Memorial Day sale is one of the best events they run all year.

Elizabeth Keatinge tells us about Tesla's Autonomy Investor Day where robotaxis were discussed. A Tesla Model 3 had Autopilot engaged in the seconds before it crashed into a semi truck in March, killing the driver, federal investigators confirmed in a report on Thursday. The car drove beneath the trailer in a crash that is similar to one that occurred in another part of Florida in 2016, also involving Autopilot. In both instances, drivers died and the top of the car was sheared off. In the most recent crash in Delray Beach, Florida, the 50-year-old driver turned on Autopilot about 10 seconds before the sedan collided with a semi-truck, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

Microsoft and Mojang have announced a new Minecraft game, 'Minecraft Earth,' for mobile devices, which uses augmented reality to place objects from the game in your real world. Minecraft is expanding its reach – into your real world. A new game, "Minecraft Earth," coming this summer for mobile devices (Android and iOS), uses augmented reality – à la "Pokémon Go" – to let you find objects in real-world locations and place objects from the game there, too. "The game's mechanics are simple: explore your neighborhood to find blocks and unique mobs for your builds. Once you have them, any flat surface is an opportunity to build," said Minecraft creative director Saxs Persson in a post on Xbox.com.

Since its beta launch in 2009, the blocky, world-building adventure game Minecraft has been released on more than 20 different platforms, from PC to consoles to mobile phones, selling 176m copies. News of a Minecraft AR (augmented reality) app leaked a few weeks ago, but now Microsoft has officially announced Minecraft Earth. It is being developed at the company's Redmond campus, using an array of its mobile, GPS and tracking technologies. Minecraft Earth is best pictured as Pokémon Go with building blocks. When you enter the game, you see an overhead map of your surroundings (Microsoft is working with StreetMap), overlaid with the quaint blocky look of the Minecraft world.

Machine learning (ML), a form of artificial intelligence that recognizes faces, understands language and navigates self-driving cars, can help bring to Earth the clean fusion energy that lights the sun and stars. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are using ML to create a model for rapid control of plasma--the state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions--that fuels fusion reactions. The sun and most stars are giant balls of plasma that undergo constant fusion reactions. Here on Earth, scientists must heat and control the plasma to cause the particles to fuse and release their energy. PPPL research shows that ML can facilitate such control.

As founder and CEO of Appier, a company that uses artificial intelligence to help businesses solve problems, Chih-Han Yu, Ph.D. '10, is immersed in the latest technological trends. But for Yu, who knew nothing about computers during his youth in Taiwan, the journey to becoming a tech-savvy innovator was nearly derailed before it began. While he decided to follow his father's advice and study computer science in college, he didn't enjoy the classes and nearly abandoned the field completely. It wasn't until his junior year, when he took an artificial intelligence class, that Yu became captivated by the seemingly endless potential of computers. His desire to build a program to recognize human faces soon bordered on an obsession, he said.

I previously worked for a year and a half at an Airbnb property management company, as head of the team responsible for pricing, revenue and analysis. One thing I find particularly interesting is how to figure out what price to charge for a listing on the site. Although'it's a two bedroom in Manchester' will get you reasonably far, there are actually a huge number of factors that can influence a listing's price. As part of a bigger project on using deep learning to predict Airbnb prices, I found myself thrown back into the murky world of property data. Geospatial data can be very complex and messy -- and user-entered geospatial data doubly so.