If you want a clear idea of the boom in testing of autonomous vehicles, look to Velodyne Acoustics Inc., a Morgan Hill, Calif., maker of the all-important laser range finder that gives driverless cars their sight. Velodyne, the world's biggest supplier of the laser sensor used on autonomous vehicles in testing, expects to double its sensor sales in 2016 and has just begun shipping a new version that will cost as little as 500 at...

When trying to communicate with future customers, it's important to strike the right tone. When it isn't right, as in the case of Microsoft's Tay, things can spin out of control quickly. That's why more companies are trying to understand how to integrate emotional intelligence into the machines that interact with people. In 2015, GE inaugurated a new, Multi-Modal manufacturing facility in Chakan, India. If the company's ambitions for the space are realized, it could drive a massive change in global manufacturing.

Real-world artificial-intelligence applications are popping up in unexpected places--and much sooner than you might think. While winning a game of Go might be impressive, machine intelligence is also evolving to the point where it can be used by more people to do more things. That's how four engineers with almost zero knowledge of Japanese were able to create software, in just a few months, that can decipher handwriting in the language. The programmers at Reactive Inc. came up with an application that recognizes scrawled-out Japanese with 98.66 percent accuracy. The 18-month-old startup in Tokyo is part of a growing global community of coders and investors who are harnessing the power of neural networks to put AI to far more practical purposes than answering trivia or winning board games.

Singapore: Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., a US-based information technology (IT) firm with most of its employees working out of India, expects its business growth in the Asia-Pacific region to outpace the company average this year, maintaining the trend seen in recent years, Jayajyoti Sengupta, president and Asia-Pacific head, said in an interview. Automation, which includes robots, machine learning and artificial intelligence, will be among the new frontiers for Cognizant, as rote and repetitive processes become "digital, instrumented, analyzed and intelligent", he said. Cognizant has said it expects its revenue growth to slow to between 10% and 14.3% for the calendar year 2016. How do you see the situation in the Asia-Pacific? It would be pertinent to note that Cognizant's growth of 21% in calendar 2015 included revenues from the acquisition of TriZetto.

The Drone Racing League flew in to the capital this week as machines soared around Wembley Stadium at speeds of 75mph (120km/h). Drones buzzed around the iconic venue and further proved why the sport of drone racing is gaining popularity. The racing was live streamed to spectators for the first time over EE's 4G network at the stadium, with 4G cameras attached to the drones giving people a drone's-eye-view. The event was attended by 16-year-old Luke Bannister, from Somerset, who recently won 174,000 ( 250,000) in the Drone Grand Prix in Dubai. First Person View (FPV) drone racing involves live video being streamed to the pilot's headset to enable split-second manoeuvres. This perspective is usually only available to the team controlling the drone, however for the first time spectators in the stadium and online were also able to'ride' around the stadium.

The environmental costs of moving data around the world or building a better smartphone often go unappreciated. Both tasks take a great deal of energy and other resources, though the effects are often felt hundreds or thousands of miles from most end users. The world's biggest technology firms are increasingly focused on finding ways to go green. Facebook announced in January that it is building a new data center in Ireland powered entirely by renewable energy. In March, Apple introduced a recycling robot named "Liam" that can surgically disassemble old iPhones so their parts can be reused.

DETROIT -- The battle over who gets how much of the reported 1-billion General Motors is paying to acquire a San Francisco self-driving car startup escalated late Thursday as Cruise Automation's previously silent partner filed a countersuit to get his share of the proceeds. Jeremy Guillory says he was indeed a 50% owner of Cruise with co-founder and current CEO Kyle Vogt, based on an October, 2013, application for funding from Y Combinator, a Mountain View, Calif., seed capital investment fund. He wants a jury trial to determine his share based on an accounting of Cruise's financial records and documents related to the GM deal. GM declines to say how much it paid, but several media outlets have said it is more than 1 billion, based on sources in the Silicon Valley venture capital community. Last week, Vogt and Cruise sued Guillory, alleging he left the company shortly after it was incorporated and he didn't hold shares or invent or patent any technologies or hardware in the system that attracted GM's interest.

Technology has transformed how customers and brands interact with each other. Shoppers once relied on face-to-face, in-store interactions to make purchases and receive support. Now, shoppers do their research before entering a store (81 percent of shoppers conduct online research before buying) and seldom rely on salespeople to help them make decisions. Retailers, for their part, have realized that by embracing technology, they can extend their storefronts to their customers' fingertips. The Internet, buy buttons, mobile payment apps such as Square and Venmo, and couponing and price-matching apps like SnipSnap have changed how we shop.

A patient walks into the emergency department at Rush University Medical Center with a fever and bloodshot eyes. In days of yore, doctors would have to exhaust the obvious possibilities -- like a flu or allergic reaction -- before finally figuring a patient was suffering from Zika virus. But Rush says its predictive software, a system called Guardian, helps alert doctors to a possible diagnosis hours faster than physicians normally would. When dealing with more rare diagnoses, doctors typically think, "it's going to be everything else besides smallpox," said Dr. Dino Rumoro, who's been working on the technology for more than 20 years and is the chairman of Rush's Department of Emergency Medicine. "This gives the clinician a crutch."

A Russian photographer has proved how easy it is to track down people on social media using facial recognition software. Yegor Tsvetkov took photos of strangers on St Petersburg's metro and used a facial recognition app which trawls through profiles on VKontakte, Russia's biggest social network, to track down their online profiles. Named "Your Face is Big Data", the series of photographs shows how powerful facial recognition software has become, to the point that a complete stranger can find you at the click of a button. Tsvetkov told the Guardian the project aimed to show technology can affect privacy, particularly if you don't activate the relevant settings on your social media profiles. "Nobody noticed that I photographed them, but I used a simple camera and I didn't try to hide it," he said.