With improvements in facial-recognition technology and the increasing popularity of smartphones, the threat to one's privacy unexpectedly posed by Internet photos posted by strangers is growing day by day. To protect against unwanted scrutiny, trading company Nissey Corp., based in Sabae, Fukui Prefecture, has developed special glasses that thwart electronic facial recognition. The Privacy Visor is a set of white titanium goggles with lenses that have a mesh-like surface providing many tiny spaces to see through. "Since the view might not be clear, driving or riding on bicycles must be avoided," a Nissey spokesman warned. The glasses were jointly developed with the National Institute of Informatics, a research institute dedicated to information technology.

The Brooklyn Cruise Ship Terminal opened in 2006 - the same year that Twitter launched. So, you'd think that when one of the tech sector's biggest events - TechCrunch Disrupt New York - moved to the birthplace of hipsters, that cutting-edge development and a good amount of facial hair would be on display. But this year's New York Disrupt didn't seem very disruptive. TechCruch's biggest Disrupt conference in San Francisco, its London version, and past New York events have always attracted innovative technology developers. Jordan Crook, senior writer for TechCrunch, was unconcerned by what seemed to be a slow burn in the sector, even in areas like virtual reality and artificial intelligence. "It's easy to see with hindsight that what seemed to be a slow transition was really a massive shift," she says.

Apple has invested US 1 billion in China's largest ride-hailing company, Didi Chuxing, in a move that could give it an opportunity to participate in the local company's bid to build a data-driven ride-share platform. Didi, which is already backed by big local players like Tencent and Alibaba, said it has raised the Apple investment as a part of its latest funding round. The investment by Apple is the largest single investment Didi has ever received, it added. Apple has been indicating that such an investment was coming for some time now, said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. The company has already said that it plans to increase its services revenue and that the Chinese market is a key component of its overall strategy going forward, Moorhead said.

Today, Google introduces Parsey McParseface -- a free new tool, born from Google's research division to help computers better parse and understand English sentences. "We were having trouble thinking of a good name, and then someone said, 'We could just call it Parsey McParseface!' So… yup," says a Google spokesperson. Parsey McParseface is a piece of a larger framework called SyntaxNet, itself a big part of Google's popular home-built TensorFlow software for building artificial intelligence, as explained in a blog entry. With this release, any developer anywhere can download, use, and even start to improve Google's tools in their own software. One of the biggest problems in artificial intelligence, today, is that speech recognition by computers may be better than ever, but they still have trouble understanding exactly what we mean. After all, language is complicated: Consider that "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo" is a 100% gramatically correct sentence in American English.

In a recent article on 5 Computer Vision and Image Understanding Companies, we talked about how artificial intelligence is enabling computers to see as well as humans when recognizing images and in even some cases better. A company we wrote about before called Enlitic has developed a deep learning algorithm that can increase the accuracy of a radiologist's interpretation by 50-70% and at a speed 50,000 times faster. Not only that, but Affectiva's technology can also evaluate your emotions in real-time through your webcam. They have an online demo you can try and see for yourself how it works. The ability for a computer to detect human emotions falls into a field of study called "affective computing".

Mobile apps, video games, spreadsheets, and accurate weather forecasts: that's just a sampling of the life-changing things made possible by the reliable, exponential growth in the power of computer chips over the past five decades. But in a few years technology companies may have to work harder to bring us advanced new use cases for computers. The continual cramming of more silicon transistors onto chips, known as Moore's Law, has been the feedstock of exuberant innovation in computing. But it looks to be slowing to a halt. "We have to ask, is this going to be a problem for areas like mobile devices, data centers, and self-driving cars?" says Thomas Wenisch, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.

A Kansas Tinder user was recently kidnapped, beaten and held against her will for six days by a man she met via the app. Shane Steven Allen faces one charge of kidnapping and four of aggravated battery. Should the convictions go through, Allen could serve a 32 year prison sentence. The woman, a 20 year-old student at the University of Kansas, was kidnapped on April 12th and was returned to her sorority on April 18th with multiple injuries including a pair of black eyes, broken blood vessels in her eyes and multiple bruises and abrasions, according to local news outlet Lawrence Journal World.

The new work, which the researchers are presenting this week at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, builds on a long sequence of papers on origami robots from the research group of Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. "It's really exciting to see our small origami robots doing something with potential important applications to health care," says Rus, who also directs MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). "For applications inside the body, we need a small, controllable, untethered robot system. It's really difficult to control and place a robot inside the body if the robot is attached to a tether." Joining Rus on the paper are first author Shuhei Miyashita, who was a postdoc at CSAIL when the work was done and is now a lecturer in electronics at the University of York, in England; Steven Guitron, a graduate student in mechanical engineering; Shuguang Li, a CSAIL postdoc; Kazuhiro Yoshida of Tokyo Institute of Technology, who was visiting MIT on sabbatical when the work was done; and Dana Damian of the University of Sheffield, in England.

General Motors Co. GM 0.32 % and Lyft Inc. within a year will begin testing a fleet of self-driving Chevrolet Bolt electric taxis on public roads, a move central to the companies' joint efforts to challenge Silicon Valley giants in the battle to reshape the auto industry. The plan is being hatched a few months after GM invested 500 million in Lyft, a ride-hailing company whose services rival Uber Technologies Inc. The program will rely on technology being acquired as part of GM's separate 1 billion planned purchase of San Francisco-based Cruise Automation Inc., a developer of autonomous-driving technology. Details of the autonomous-taxi testing program are still being worked out, according to a Lyft executive, but it will include customers in a yet-to-be disclosed city. Customers will have the opportunity to opt in or out of the pilot when hailing a Lyft car from the company's mobile app.

A pill that unfolds into a little robot could one day give parents everywhere a little more peace of mind. Once swallowed, it can open up inside a person's stomach, crawling across the stomach wall to retrieve a single-cell button battery, and even patch wounds. This is no small thing. In the US every year, over 3,500 incidents of swallowed button batteries are reported in the US, and most cases of battery swallowing involve toddlers. Although most of these batteries are safely digested, sometimes they can leak and cause tissue burns, bleeding, and death.