SUTime is a library for recognizing and normalizing time expressions. That is, it will convert next wednesday at 3pm to something like 2016-02-17T15:00 (depending on the assumed current reference time). SUTime is available as part of the Stanford CoreNLP pipeline and can be used to annotate documents with temporal information. It is a deterministic rule-based system designed for extensibility. SUTime was developed using TokensRegex, a generic framework for definining patterns over text and mapping to semantic objects.

Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, John Nash--these "beautiful" minds never fail to enchant the public, but they also remain somewhat elusive. How do some people progress from being able to perform basic arithmetic to grasping advanced mathematical concepts and thinking at levels of abstraction that baffle the rest of the population? Neuroscience has now begun to pin down whether the brain of a math wiz somehow takes conceptual thinking to another level. Specifically, scientists have long debated whether the basis of high-level mathematical thought is tied to the brain's language-processing centers--that thinking at such a level of abstraction requires linguistic representation and an understanding of syntax--or to independent regions associated with number and spatial reasoning. In a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a pair of researchers at the INSERM–CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in France reported that the brain areas involved in math are different from those engaged in equally complex nonmathematical thinking.

If 2015 was the'year of data science' then 2016 is when it's going to take over completely. In the past year, we saw many applications of data science in our everyday lives- from Uber, to Amazon, to Siri, to image recognition, to generally smarter marketing campaigns… data science made its presence felt. But to say that data science is now completely'mainstream' would still not be quite accurate. In 2016, data science plans to become more exciting and impactful. While the finance industry has been one of the earliest adopters of data science, this adoption has not been uniform across all the banking services verticals.

Google has received tons of gushy press for its bubble-shaped self-driving car, though it's still years from the showroom floor. But for years John Deere has been selling tractors that practically drive themselves for use on farms in America's heartland, where there are few pesky pedestrians or federal rules to get in the way. For a glimpse at the future, meet Jason Poole, a 34-year-old crop consultant from Kansas. After a long day of meetings earlier this month and driving five hours across the state to watch his little girl's softball game, he was still able to run his John Deere tractor until 2 a.m. The land is hilly on Poole's family farm, so he drives the first curved row manually to teach the layout to his tractor's guidance system and handles the turns himself.

At the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia unveiled the Tesla P100, the latest addition to Nvidia's Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform (TACP). The accelerator unit is being marketed as the most advanced hyperscale datacenter accelerator ever built – with a claimed 12x improvement over the previous Maxwell architecture, thanks to the new Pascal architecture. Designed to provide the equivalent performance of hundreds of general purpose CPUs in a much smaller package, and with significantly lower opex costs, Nvidia is targeting the next-gen datacenter use cases, which consist largely of artificial intelligence applications – which require very different compute resources than most current datacenters can provide. Cloud computing and the supercomputing that powers dense data analytics are very important for the progression of the Internet of Things (IoT). With the image-recognition that will power computer visions, smart grid management, smart city operations, and the massive amounts of sensor data that need to be crunched to realize more efficient business practices, systems like Nvidia's provide a very capable alternative to gigantic arrays of general purpose compute resources in datacenters.

Toyota doesn't just want its cars to drive themselves; it wants them to grab the wheel to stop you from crashing. Toyota's researchers are developing what they call a "guardian angel" system that will automatically take control of a vehicle, or subtly adjust a driver's actions, in order to avert danger. In contrast to other companies working on self-driving vehicles, the Japanese carmaker sees combining machine and human driving as a key step toward full autonomy. "In the same way that antilock braking and emergency braking work, there is a virtual driver that is trying to make sure you don't have an accident by temporarily taking control from you," explains Gill Pratt, CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, a company the carmaker created last year with 1 billion in funding to research automated driving, artificial intelligence, and robotics (see "Toyota's Billion-Dollar Bet"). Pratt announced the guardian-angel effort, as well as plans to create a new TRI facility close to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, during a speech at a conference in San Jose today.

Facebook (NasdaqGS: FB - news) extended its reach beyond online socializing by building artificial-intelligence powered "bots" into its Messenger application to allow businesses to have software engage in lifelike text exchanges. The move announced at the leading online social network's annual developers conference in San Francisco came as the number of monthly users of Messenger topped 900 million and the Silicon Valley company works to stay in tune with mobile Internet lifestyles. "We think you should be able to text message a business like you would a friend, and get a quick response," Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg said as he announced that developers can build bots that could even be better than real people at natural language text conversations. Bots are software infused with the ability to "learn" from conversations, getting better at figuring out what people are telling them and how best to respond. The bots could help Facebook over time monetize its messaging applications and get a start on what some see as a new way of interacting with the digital world, potentially shortcutting mobile applications and sidestepping search.

Intel's keynotes can be fun, with robots parading on stage and drones zigzagging around the room. Now Intel's making new hardware to help enthusiasts join the fun by building robots and drones at home. The Robotic Development Kit and Aero Kit provide the necessary hardware and software tools to build robots and drones, respectively. The kits were announced at the ongoing Intel Developer Forum in Shenzhen, China. A major element of the developer boards is the RealSense 3D camera, which will ship with the kits and help the robots and drones navigate and avoid obstacles.

One of the arguments for self-driving cars is that they will be safer than human-driven vehicles.Human error is the cause of 94% of car crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Those errors include drunk driving, speeding, distraction, and fatigue. But a new report finds that self-driving cars can't be tested enough hours to determine their safety. The report from research firm RAND Corporationsays autonomous vehicles would need to be tested "hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles" to gain enough information to compare its safety to human-driven automobiles. Such thorough testing would require "tens and sometimes hundreds of years," which would make it impractical to accomplish before clearing the vehicles for regular consumer use, the report said.

In 1950, artificial intelligence pioneer Alan Turing famously proposed what came to be known as the Turing Test: the proposition that a machine had achieved intelligence if it could carry on a conversation that was indistinguishable from a human one. In 2016, Turing's ghost has come to haunt Silicon Valley in a big way. Companies are racing to build technology that can talk with you. Last month, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Bot Framework, a set of software tools that let companies create their own conversational bots. Customers of Domino's, for instance, can order products by chatting back and forth with a robot, as if they were sending a text message.