If you're one of the few mobile gamers who actually spend money on in-app purchases, you might begin to see fewer ads. While developers make most of their money with advertising, in some cases, ads hurt in-app purchases by disrupting the gameplay of cash-flush gamers. Now, Google is using machine learning to only show ads to players who aren't likely to spend money on in-game purchases. This will spare big spenders the interruption. Released today in Google AdMob, the machine learning tool segments players based on their likelihood to make purchases.

Hidden in the most recent version of Chrome is the ability to change its default search engine to a more privacy-friendly option. With the release of Chrome 73, Google has quietly introduced DuckDuckGo as a preferred search option in more than 60 markets including the United States and the United Kingdom. While Google didn't offer much fanfare for the change -- at least in comparison to flagship features like new support for media keys -- the change can be spotted on GitHub. In a note on the code repository site, Google acknowledges that it updated the available search engines based on "new usage statistics" from "recently collected data." In most countries, the list of options also includes Google, Yahoo and Bing.

SalesHero, a platform that meshes robotic process automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence (AI) to help businesses automate repetitive software-based processes, has raised $14.5 million in a series A round of funding led by Atomico, with participation from Baidu Ventures and Cherry Ventures. The San Francisco-based startup also announced that it is now called Automation Hero -- a name-change that reflects its renewed focus beyond sales teams. This round takes Automation Hero's total amount raised to $19 million, following its $4.5 million seed round last April, and Atomico principle Ben Blume will now join Automation Hero's board of directors. While RPA may not be the sexiest concept to emerge from the technology sphere, it is becoming a driving force behind companies' efforts to optimize workflows through automation and machine learning. In a nutshell, RPA involves installing software that sits on top of a company's own applications and observes what an employee does at the user interface level.

Sheer cliff faces present a traversal challenge for most wheeled robots on the market, but researchers at the University of Tokyo say they've developed a two-robot framework that works pretty reliably in their testing. In a newly published paper on the preprint server Arxiv.org "[We] propose a novel cooperative system for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) which utilizes the UAV not only as a flying sensor but also as a tether attachment device," the authors of the paper explain. "[It enhances] the poor traversability of the UGV by not only providing a wider range of scanning and mapping from the air, but also by allowing the UGV to climb steep terrains with the winding of the tether." The UGV is permanently attached via mechanized winch and cable to the UAV, a custom-made quadcopter with an Nvidia Jetson TX2 chipset, a flight controller, and a raft of sensors including a modular fisheye camera, time-of-flight sensor, inertial measurement unit (IMU), and laser sensor.

China is poised to overtake the United States in artificial intelligence with a surge in academic research on the key technology, an analysis published Wednesday showed. The analysis by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence showed China has already surpassed the US in published papers on AI -- although many of these were considered "medium-quality" or "low-quality." But the researchers said China is likely to top the US in the most-cited 50 percent of papers this year, the most-cited 10 percent of papers next year, and in the top one percent by 2025. The findings highlight concerns in Washington and Silicon Valley that China is racing ahead of the US in key areas of technology such as autonomous vehicles, virtual reality and fifth-generation wireless networks. Allen Institute researchers Field Cady and Oren Etzioni said the surge in AI investment in China began more than a decade ago, well before the 2017 announcement by Beijing that it planned to become the world leader in the sector by 2030.

Artificial intelligence may soon get a power boost from quantum computing. Researchers have shown that it's possible to sort and classify complex datasets that algorithms running on classical computers struggle to handle. "We've shown a particular way of moving data into higher dimensions that would be hard for a classical computer but manageable for a quantum computer," says Antonio Córcoles at IBM in New York.

HEJERE, ETHIOPIA - Canada joined much of the world in barring the Boeing 737 Max 8 jet from its airspace on Wednesday, saying satellite tracking data show possible but unproven similarities between the Ethiopian Airliner crash that killed 157 people and a previous crash involving the model five months ago. The decision left the U.S. as one of the few remaining countries to allow the planes to keep flying. Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said a comparison of vertical fluctuations found a "similar profile" to the Lion Air crash that killed 187 people in October. Garneau emphasized that the data are not conclusive but crossed a threshold that prompted Canada to bar the Max 8. He said the new information indicated the Ethiopian Airliner jet's automatic system kicked in to force the nose of the aircraft down after computer software determined it was too high.

While it may not lead to the next Cold War, the growing rivalry between the United States and China has certainly led to some frosty competition between the great powers. This is especially true of the tech sector, where some analysts liken the U.S. and China's heavy strategic investments in cybersecurity, quantum computing, 5G, and artificial intelligence to a digital arms race, one that, because of China's long-term positioning and access to vast amounts of data to train on, that country will win. But Anne-Marie Slaughter argues that when it comes to the world-shifting technology of artificial intelligence, the narrative isn't so simple. She explains why she is putting her money on the United States. Great power conflict isn't the only thing we at Future Tense have been fretting about this week.

DoorDash is getting in the car with General Motors' Cruise autonomous-vehicles to bring people food and groceries. General Motors has donated its first self-driving car, a 3-year-old Chevy Bolt electric car modified for autonomous operation, to the Henry Ford Museum. The car, GM Cruise Automation 01, will be on display immediately. "It'll be right at the front of the auto display, where we explain to people what a car is," The Henry Ford transportation curator Matt Anderson said Tuesday. The white hatchback, which sprouts sensors like a cat's whiskers, will be next to a '59 Cadillac in the museum's "Driving America" collection.

At the perfect intersection of technology and civil service, every government process will be an automated one, streamlining benefits, outcomes, and applications for every citizen within a digitally-enabled country. With that approach comes a significant layer of protocol that is necessary to ensure citizens feel empowered regarding decision-making processes and how their government addresses needs from a digital perspective. Right now, Canada is leading the world in AI, thanks largely to huge government investments like the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy. The growing field is pervasive right now--there is hardly an industry it has not disrupted, from mining to legal aid. In fact, government might be one of the most obvious choices as to where automated decision processes can save time and money.