SAN FRANCISCO - Uber's autonomous-vehicle unit has raised $1 billion (¥112 billion) from a consortium of investors including SoftBank Group Corp., giving the company a much-needed funding boost for its pricey self-driving ambitions ahead of its public stock offering. Uber Technologies Inc. said Thursday that the investment values its Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), which works to develop autonomous driving technology, at $7.25 billion. SoftBank will invest $333 million from its $100 billion Vision Fund, while Toyota Motor Corp. and automotive parts supplier Denso Corp. will invest a combined $667 million. Toyota will also contribute up to an additional $300 million over the next three years to help cover the costs of building commercial self-driving vehicles, Uber said. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the funding "will help maintain Uber's position at the forefront of" a transforming transportation industry.

Spotting inequality can now be done by a computer using a pre-existing, vast and easily available database of images - Google Maps street view. More than half a million pictures from this catalogue of'on-the-ground' photos were inputted into a deep learning algorithm which unpicked signs of inequality in London. Data collection was done over 156,581 different postcodes and was then applied to Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester. Overview of the street images and outcome data used in the analysis pictured). Esra Suel and colleagues from Imperial College London used deep-learning to train a computer programme designed to detect signs of austerity.

Despite concerns over facial recognition's impact on civil liberties, public agencies have continued to apply the tool liberally across the U.S. with one of the biggest deployments coming to an airport near you. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that it plans to expand its application of facial recognition to 97 percent of all passengers departing the U.S. by 2023, according to the Verge. By comparison, facial recognition technology is deployed in just 15 airports, according to figures recorded at the end of 2018. In what is being referred to as'biometric exit,' the agency plans to use facial recognition to more thoroughly track passengers entering and leaving the country. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that it plans to expand its application of facial recognition to 97 percent of all passengers departing the U.S. by 2023 The system functions by taking a picture of passengers before they depart and then cross-referencing the image with a database containing photos of passports and visas.

The UK government's plan to prevent children and teenagers from viewing pornographic content online has a major flaw that means not all porn will be blocked. Critics have called the so-called porn ban "disastrous" for people's privacy, as it will require people to share their personal data online in order to visit porn sites. But the new rules, which come into effect on 15 July, can be skirted by visiting sites that are not subject to the age verification checks. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

Daisy, one of Apple's most valued resources, eats iPhones. She's very, very good at it, and getting better: trained with a precision that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. She is a robot, with a variety of tools built to rip the phones apart. That includes, for instance, a tool that can chill phones down so that the battery holding the glue inside becomes brittle, and it can be knocked out with two aggressive bangs; precise pins that can pick the display off the housing that surrounds it; drills that can punch into the phone and drive out the things that might make it difficult to recycle. It won't surprise anyone to hear that Apple is pretty good at making iPhones.

Many Twitter users expressed dismay this week at the "loss" of Notre Dame following the blaze that engulfed the top of the Paris cathedral on 15 April. But, thankfully, the situation isn't as disastrous as that: most of the building is still intact thanks to its clever design, and hundreds of millions of euros have already been pledged for restoration. It took around 17 hours, and the efforts of 1000 firefighters and a 500-kilogram robot, to extinguish the fire.

The latest game by Media Molecule, the delightfully whimsical studio behind LittleBigPlanet and Tearaway, was first teased at the PlayStation 4 reveal event in 2013. A Creator Early Access was released on Tuesday (April 16th), mere hours before Mark Cerny, a systems architect at Sony, revealed the first details about the PlayStation 5. Dreams, then, was dangerously close to missing an entire console generation. I was nervous to boot up Dreams and see what Media Molecule has been slaving over for so many years. Part of me was sure the package couldn't justify such a protracted development cycle. From the opening screen, though, it was obvious where all the company's time and resources had gone.

With Earth Day just around the corner, Apple announced it's quadrupling the number of locations US customers can send their iPhones for recycling. The company's recycling robot, Daisy, will now disassemble select iPhones returned to Best Buy stores in the US, KPN retailers in the Netherlands, as well as those recycled at any Apple Store or online through the Apple Trade In program. According to Apple, each of the Daisy robots can disassemble 1.2 million devices per year, or 15 different iPhone models at a rate of 200 per hour. Recovered materials are recycled back into the manufacturing process, and Apple sends the iPhone batteries Daisy removes to select manufacturing sites. There, for the first time, the cobalt is recovered, combined with scrap and used to make new batteries.

Rumors started circulating last week that Amazon was exploring a free, ad-supported tier of its streaming music service. Turns out there was something to those rumblings. Today, the commerce giant announced that Alexa device owners in the US will be able to listen to top playlists and stations on Amazon Music at no additional charge, even if they are not Amazon Prime subscribers. Of course, this news also comes on the same day that Amazon's frenemies over at Google launched ad-supported free YouTube Music streaming on Google Home smart devices. Listeners will be able to ask Alexa to play music by creating stations based in a song, artist, era or genre.

In 1909, a poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow travelers, sending his car into a ditch and completely destroying the vehicle. Here's how Marinetti described the encounter: The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I spun my car around with the frenzy of a dog trying to bite its tail, and there, suddenly, were two cyclists coming toward me, shaking their fists, wobbling like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments. Their stupid dilemma was blocking my way--Damn! Ouch! ... I stopped short and to my disgust rolled over into a ditch with my wheels in the air … You can already tell from this account that Marinetti was a bit of an eccentric.