SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Apr 11, 2016) - Grishin Robotics announces new 100 million fund, four times the size of its initial 25 million fund, announced in mid-2012. Originally one of the first exclusively robotics funds in the world, the firm now expands its investment focus to companies involved in the "Hardware Revolution" and becomes one of the ecosystem's largest players. While Dmitry self-financed Grishin Robotics' investments until now, a number of institutional and individual investors from Europe and the U.S. became partners in this new fund. Until recently, people mainly thought about robots as multi-functional products in humanoid form-factor. Today single-purpose devices, combining sensors with software and data analytics components, have the potential to radically automate the physical world around us -- eliminating "dirty, dull & dangerous" tasks from our lives and, thus, realizing the ultimate purpose of robotics.

Mobileye, the Israeli car automation company that came onto the self-driving car scene as sort of an anti-Google, is now looking at the future in terms that seem a bit closer to Google's than used to be the case. Speaking Friday at a conference organized by Goldman Sachs (which owned a chunk of Mobileye's shares when the company first became publicly traded in 2014), Amnon Shashua, Mobileye's founder and chief technical officer, placed a lot of emphasis on mapping, something Google has done all along. And now Shashua is predicting utterly hands-free driving--if only on the highway--by 2021. Mobileye had always emphasized incremental steps, such as active cruise control and emergency braking, collectively called advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). It was Google that proposed to skip all half measures and get right to full-bore self-driving cars.

Humankind shuddered once again as machines seemed to score yet another triumph in what had been an exclusively human arena. In case you missed it, last month an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated novel almost won a Japanese literary competition, inspiring awe, intrigue, and eventually skepticism. The new novel's plot "is essentially told from the subjective of an AI that becomes aware of its budding talents as a writer, and abandons its primary task of serving humanity," according to the "Motherboard" channel at Vice.com, and the Los Angeles Times, citing a report in The Japan News, even provided a translation of the novel's final thrilling sentence. "I writhed with joy, which I experienced for the first time, and kept writing with excitement. The day a computer wrote a novel. The computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans."

From package delivery drones to bomb-sniffing dogs, a bill approved by the Senate on Tuesday makes extensive changes to aviation safety, security and consumer programs and policies. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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

That's the first day of Apple's 2016 Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, when the company is expected to reveal the latest version of iOS, a bump to the Apple TV, and maybe even a renamed release of OS X – or "MacOS", as it hinted at last week. The event was announced, bizarrely, through Siri, which started giving out a more precise answer to the question "when is WWDC?" than previously. Until Monday evening, the digital assistant had answered with "WWDC is not yet announced", but now it correctly says that "the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) will be held June 13 through June 17 in San Francisco. Although WWDC is more developer-focused than most other Apple events, it usually involves the first look at major software updates coming later in the year. If past events are any indication, this June will see the launch of iOS 10, as well as updates to WatchOS and tvOS (the software that runs the Apple TV). It will also be the first chance for developers (and Mac users) to find out information about the next version of OS X.

As a thank you to customers, Amazon is offering a sale on its Echo and Dot for today only. It seems like every week the Amazon Echo is in the news for one reason or another. But instead of adding new features or announcing new hardware partners, this week Amazon has decided to do something a bit more exciting and a lot more rare: put the Amazon Echo and Amazon Tap on sale. The sale is in celebration of being recognized by the Reputation Institute, which named Amazon the "No. 1 Most Reputable Company in the U.S." Amazon is proudly displaying the award in banners on its homepage, and to say thank you to its customers, it's offering the Echo and Tap for 15 percent off list price--for one day only. That means you can get the Echo for 153.71 instead of 179.99, and the Tap for 111.01 instead of 129.99.

People platform to discuss and share, research, ideas, #deeplearning methods and applications.

Once the stuff of science fiction novels, machine learning--where computers improve automatically through experience--is now attracting the attention of a wide range of industries. As with many recent advances in tech, machine learning's growth has been largely fueled by the development of new learning algorithms and theory, and by the ongoing explosion in the availability of online data and low-cost computation. Machines are better equipped than ever to capture and analyze large quantities of multisourced, ever-changing data. But analyzing data is not the same thing as using it to make decisions--and here is where humans come in. Humans are still needed to innovate, to put ideas in an appropriate context, and to suss out an action's wide-ranging implications.

Spoiler alert: If you are yet to watch the Season 5 finale of "Game of Thrones" and have also managed to avoid a year of headlines about the fate of one particular character, read on at your own peril. For the rest of us, we've been subject to months of speculation that Jon Snow may not be completely dead, despite being run through with cold, hard steel by most of the Night's Watch when we saw him last. Now, a machine learning algorithm designed by a team at the Technical University of Munich has analyzed data on all the characters in Westeros, both dead and alive, and concluded that it is very likely that Snow is actually a survivor. The project, dubbed "A Song of Ice and Data", basically scrapes info from the online Wiki of Ice and Fire encyclopedia, which focuses largely on the series of books by George R.R. Martin, but also covers the HBO show they inspired. Using this data source, two dozen features of each character are statistically compared to try and figure out which features make a character most likely to die.