GUESS?, Inc. ("GUESS") (NYSE: GES) has reached another major milestone in its partnership with Alibaba Group ("Alibaba") (NYSE: BABA) to bring artificial intelligence to the fashion world to provide customers with a more enriching shopping experience that combines online and offline shopping behaviors. Rounding out a comprehensive partnership that began in 2013 with the launch of GUESS in Tmall, this year, GUESS also became a global strategic partner of Alibaba's FashionAI project, an initiative to give shoppers a glimpse of what the future of fashion retail will look like powered by artificial intelligence. With the launch of the interactive concept shop driven by Alibaba AI, GUESS and Alibaba saw the implementation of the O2O (online-to-offline) project come to life, marking the maturity of the unified customer experience concept. On July 4, 2018, Alibaba launched the pilot FashionAI concept shop on the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) campus, pairing GUESS' extensive retail knowledge and latest collections with advanced Alibaba AI and other technologies on the sidelines of the 2018 Fashion and Textile Conference. Besides the FashionAI concept store's futuristic appeal, the project was aimed at providing a better retail experience for shoppers and to help brands better use analytics in ordering and maintaining inventory.

Waymo is ready for a dramatic next step after eight years of preparation, most of it as the Google Self-Driving Car project. The Alphabet Inc. unit has begun testing autonomous vehicles on public roads without human safety drivers at the wheel, and early next year will make its robotic chauffeurs available to Phoenix-area commuters. Speaking at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said on Tuesday that company technicians are already hailing its Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans in and around Phoenix via a mobile app and leaving it to the artificial intelligence operating the vehicles to figure out how to get to requested destinations. Within a few months, Waymo vans loaded with laser LiDAR, radar, cameras, computers, AI and no human safety drivers will pick up Arizonans registered in its "Early Riders" program. People will get to use our fleet of on-demand vehicles to do anything from commute to work, get home from a night out, or run errands," Krafcik said. "Getting access will be as easy as using an app; just tap a button and Waymo will come to you, and take you where you want to go." Google's push to perfect driverless cars, stretching back to 2009, ignited a tech race in the auto industry that represents the biggest change in personal transportation since horses were replaced with horseless carriages more than a century ago. But Waymo has to move fast to lock in its early-mover status as autonomous vehicle programs at dozens of companies, ranging from General Motors to BMW to Uber to Tesla to Baidu, race to catch up and commercialize their own driverless tech. The Alphabet company appears to be first to operate an autonomous fleet without safety drivers, a transition that keeps it ahead of fast-moving rivals, at least for now. "We recently surveyed 3,000 adults across the United States, asking them when they expected to see self-driving vehicles – ones without a person in the driver's seat – on their roads.

WASHINGTON--A new initiative kicks off today to evaluate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and situational awareness technologies during critical incidents. The effort is a joint partnership between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) and Canada's Department of National Defence science and technology organization, Defence Research and Development Canada Centre for Security Science (DRDC CSS) to ensure both American and Canadian next generation first responders are better connected, protected and fully aware during critical incidents. Over the next two years, the two countries will collaborate on new research and development projects, hold joint workshops and field experiments and share best practices and lessons learned to ensure the safety and effectiveness of first responders and the public. "Canadian and American responders have very similar requirements," said John Merrill, DHS S&T's Director of Next Generation First Responder Apex Program. "By jointly determining research and development priorities between the two countries, we can reach our goal faster and more efficiently, eliminating duplication of effort and optimizing funding."

Autonomous-driving company Torc Robotics may not be as well known as, say, Waymo, but that may change soon as Torc looks to expand. The company is looking to nearly double its number of employees in order to continue developing tech for self-driving cars. Torc unveiled its Asimov (named after science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov) autonomous-driving system last year, and gave public demonstrations at CES 2018. The company is headquartered in Blacksburg, Virginia, and continues to test self-driving cars there and in Las Vegas. Last year, it sent one of its modified Lexus RX SUVs on a cross-country trip. But the company's history goes back further.

The Project PAI Foundation is excited to announce the launch of the PAI Mainnet – its independent blockchain platform that allows users worldwide to create, own, and manage their own digital identity and data, allowing everyone to participate in a new globalized AI economy. This press release features multimedia. Project PAI's vision is to enable everyone in the world to create their own Personal AI (PAI), an intelligent digital avatar that looks, sounds, and behaves like them. The core technology for these intelligent avatars is powered by ObEN, a leading artificial intelligence company based in Los Angeles, CA. As an early adopter of Project PAI, ObEN uses blockchain to secure and authenticate the PAI's created by the users of its applications.

Baidu marked volume production of Apolong autonomous buses, developed with Chinese busmaker King Long and using Apollo autonomous driving software, for commercial operation in cities including Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan, the company said at its developer conference in Beijing on July 4, 2018. Intel is getting a big opportunity to show off advanced vision technology and software from its Mobileye unit by partnering with Baidu's Apollo, the Chinese tech giant's autonomous driving consortium. Working with Mobileye, Baidu will integrate the Israeli company's Responsibility Sensitive Safety software into both its open-source Apollo platform shared with partner companies and commercial Apollo Pilot programs, Intel said in a statement. Baidu will also use Mobileye's camera-based surround computer vision system for automated vehicles being developed for the Chinese market. "Our team recognizes the value and critical role that Mobileye's RSS model plays in safely deploying autonomous driving," Weihao Gu, general manager of Baidu's Intelligent Driving Unit, said in a statement.

Groupe PSA and Inria today announced the creation of an OpenLab dedicated to artificial intelligence. The studied areas will include autonomous and intelligent vehicles, mobility services, manufacturing, design development tools, the design itslelf and digital marketing as well as quality and finance. "Artificial intelligence will quickly become an efficiency factor for the group. The OpenLab will work on artificial intelligence algorithms enabling autonomous vehicles to drive in complex environments for example. It will also work on predictive maintenance, powertrain design optimisation and the modelling of complex systems such as cities, to offer mobility services adapted to people's needs" said Carla Gohin, Groupe PSA's Vice President for Research and Advanced Engineering. Inria's project teams will participate in this OpenLab bringing their high-level algorithmic expertise as part of a fruitful dialogue with Groupe PSA's experts on all the identified topics.

On the afternoon of July 4th, the AI World 2018 was held in the Press Office of Shanghai municipal government. At the press conference, Wu Qing, Deputy Mayor of Shanghai introduced the conference. AI World 2018 will be held in Shanghai from September 17 to 19 of this year by National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Internet Information Office, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the Shanghai Municipal People's Government with the approval of the State Council under the background of the historic exchange of the new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial change and the high-quality development demand in China. The conference, with the theme of "New Era of Artificial Intelligence," with the "High-end, Internationalized, Professionalized and Marketable" policy, consists of forum summit, special activities, display applications and innovation competitions, focusing on the combination of "investment in production, learning and research". With the theme of "enlightening intelligence and setting sail for the future," the competition, based on globalization, specialization and high end, aims to encourage artificial intelligence, accelerate the talents, find excellent projects, and expand the international influence of China's artificial intelligence.

Baidu today unveiled a new chip for AI, joining the ranks of Google, Nvidia, Intel, and many other tech companies making processors especially for artificial intelligence. Kunlun is made to handle AI models for edge computing on devices and in the cloud via datacenters. The Kunlun 818-300 model will be used for training AI, and the 818-100 for inference. Baidu began working with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips especially designed for deep learning in 2011, the company said. Kunlun is about 30 times faster than the first FPGA chip from Baidu and is able to achieve 260 tera-operations per second (TOPS) and 512 GB/second memory bandwidth, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., July 2, 2018 – International Data Corporation (IDC) today published an IDC Innovators report profiling five technology providers that are considered key emerging vendors in the conversational AI platforms market. The five companies named as IDC Innovators are Personetics, Kore.ai, Conversational AI platforms are used to build applications that answer questions, provide advice and/or recommendations using natural language processing and other dialog related technologies. The market for intelligent conversational assistance is growing rapidly, fueled by the use and acceptance of consumer tools like Google Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Amazon's Alexa. To date, there are dozens of supplier companies seeking to address these emerging interface opportunities with new companies emerging in the marketplace every day.