Where else but the Code Conference can you expect to hear from the Tech industry's biggest players like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Sundar Pichai? Speaking to the Code conference here, Bezos, whose company has a hit on its hand with the Echo connected speaker, said "it's hard to overstate how big of an impact this will have on society over the next 20 years. It doesn't mean phones are going to go away or that voice actions will replace screens. As long as people have eyes, they have screens." The Echo speaker can turn on lights, access online music and answer queries by waking the speaker by stating the word Alexa.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Google loves to organize information. It's the company's mission statement, after all, and there's no common life task that generates more details than planning a trip. Flight itineraries, hotel reservations, car rentals, tour bookings, you name it. There's a reason that sometimes you need a vacation from your vacation. Organizing all of this madness is pretty well done by apps like Tripit, and in some respect, by Google Now.

Toyota is close to acquiring two robotics companies from Google, according to a report in Wednesday's Nikkei newspaper. The newspaper said the two companies are in final talks, but details are yet to be discussed so the deal could still fall through. The deal would see Boston Dynamics, a developer of advanced two- and four-legged robots for the U.S. military, and Schaft, a Tokyo-based developer of humanoid robots, transferred to the Toyota Research Institute. The unit is a recently launched billion-dollar research arm based in Silicon Valley. Google acquired Boston Dynamics and Schaft several years ago as part of a push into robotics, but that hasn't gone anywhere since robotics head Andy Rubin left the company in late 2014.

The U.S. military's plans to build a satellite-launching robotic space plane are moving forward. On May 23, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out its official call for proposals for the futuristic space plane design. The goal of the Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) project is to build a reusable space plane that, at optimal operation, should be able to fly 10 times in 10 days, at a cost of no more than 5 million per flight. Typically, space vehicles are not fully reusable, and the pieces that are reused need to undergo time-consuming safety checks between flights. XS-1 would be used primarily as a cheap and fast way to deliver satellites to orbit, DARPA officials said.

In a bid to stem hate speech, Facebook has revealed that its Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are spotting more offensive photos than humans on its platform. According to a Tech Crunch report, nearly 25 percent of Facebook engineers now regularly use its internal AI platform to build features and do business but the best use is to check and find offensive photos. "One thing that is interesting is that today we have more offensive photos being reported by AI algorithms than by people. The higher we push that to 100 percent, the fewer offensive photos have actually been seen by a human," Joaquin Candela, Facebook's director of engineering for applied machine learning was quoted as saying. "This AI system helps rank News Feed stories, read aloud the content of photos to the vision impaired and automatically write closed captions for video ads that increase view time by 12 percent," he informed.

A rough estimate would show that thousands of Chinese robotics companies may have recorded, on average, annual sales of less than 100,000 yuan each. Mainland media reported that low-end robots have been installed on the assembly line of known labour-intensive factories as a showcase for local government subsidies and left unused. "There remains a big shortage of specialists who can assess the true situation in the country's robotics industry and determine arbitrary decision–making by local governments in granting subsidies," Wang said. His urgent call for a sweeping audit of subsidies to the domestic robotics industry followed a recent nationwide investigation launched by the Ministry of Finance on so-called "new energy vehicle" makers. The agency is targeting electric car manufacturers suspected of fraudulently obtaining subsidies from the government in 2013 and 2014, as well as those firms that applied last year.

The Netherlands is not the only country concerned about drones near airports. Last month, the European Aviation Safety Agency said it is setting up a task force to examine the risk of collisions between drones and aircraft.

What has Kaggle learned from 2 million machine learning models? Feb 04, 2016 What has Kaggle learned from 2 million machine learning models? Anthony Goldbloom, founder, and CEO of Kaggle Kaggle is a community of almost 450K data scientists who have built nearly 2MM machine learning models to participate in our competitions. Data scientists come to Kaggle to learn, collaborate and develop the state of the art in machine learning. This talk will cover some of the lessons on winning techniques we have learned from the Kaggle community.

When Tesla Motors introduced the Model S sedan in 2012, one of its many notable features was an always-on cellular Internet connection. A Tesla executive explained today that it has turned into a powerful advantage in the company's contest with other carmakers and Internet giants such as Google to get self-driving cars onto public roads. Tesla can pull down data from the sensors inside its customers' vehicles to see how people are driving and the road and traffic conditions they experience. It uses that data to test the effectiveness of new self-driving features. The company even secretly tests new autonomous software by remotely installing it on customer vehicles so it can react to real road and traffic conditions, without controlling the vehicle.