Google announced today that it has acquired Paris-based Moodstocks, a startup that has developed machine learning technology to bolster the image recognition features on smartphones. "We continue to pursue our machine learning and research efforts," wrote Vincent Simonet, head of the research and development team for France Google, "and Moodstocks is the latest proof of our commitment to this area." Today, we're thrilled to announce that we've reached an agreement to join forces with Google in order to deploy our work at scale. We expect the acquisition to be completed in the next few weeks. Our focus will be to build great image recognition tools within Google, but rest assured that current paying Moodstocks customers will be able to use it until the end of their subscription.

The next time you order food using the delivery app Just Eat in London, don't be surprised if it's brought to your door by a small, six-wheeled robot. London-listed Just Eat Plc. will join German retail chain Metro AG, logistics company Hermes Group, and U.K. food delivery startup Pronto Technology Ltd., in trialing delivery using self-driving robots. Starship Technologies, the company that makes the droids, said Wednesday that Just Eat and Pronto will be using the robots in London, while Metro and Hermes will deploy them in Dusseldorf, Germany, and Bern, Switzerland, as well as another undisclosed German city. Created by two Skype co-founders, Starship, which is headquartered in London and has its engineering research and development office in Tallinn, Estonia, has been testing its robots in 12 countries over the past nine months. This will be the first time businesses will be using the technology to deliver real orders to paying customers.

Google announced today that it has acquired Paris-based Moodstocks, a startup that has developed machine learning technology to bolster the image recognition features on smartphones. "We continue to pursue our machine learning and research efforts," wrote Vincent Simonet, head of the research and development team for France Google, "and Moodstocks is the latest proof of our commitment to this area." "Today, we're thrilled to announce that we've reached an agreement to join forces with Google in order to deploy our work at scale. We expect the acquisition to be completed in the next few weeks. Our focus will be to build great image recognition tools within Google, but rest assured that current paying Moodstocks customers will be able to use it until the end of their subscription."

Tokyo, June 27, 2016 --- Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501; 'Hitachi') today announced the development of technology using artificial intelligence that automatically creates effective advice for raising the happiness of workers based on the behavioral data of each individual on a daily basis and the commencement of an internal trial with 600 participants from sales & marketing. More precisely, a name tag type wearable sensor collects the massive amount of individual behavioral data which is then analyzed using Hitachi AI*1Technology/H (hereafter referred to as H), and used to create and deliver personalized advice on actions automatically, such as on communication in the workplace or time allocation that will contribute to raising individual happiness. This advice is delivered daily, and individual workers can check the daily advice on their smartphone or tablet, and choose to apply the advice in their daily activity. Hitachi will integrate the results from this trial into the solution which it will provide to corporate and other organizations globally, to support increased productivity through a more active organization resulting from the increased happiness of workers. In recent years, increasing'happiness' has become one of society's most important issues.

Blackboard Inc. and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a collaborative agreement for IBM to manage Blackboard's datacenters and cloud infrastructure. The two companies will also work together to develop innovative educational solutions, taking advantage of IBM Watson's cognitive computing technology and Blackboard's broad capabilities suite. Under the agreement, IBM will manage much of Blackboard's technology infrastructure, including the company's 28 global data centers and its existing public cloud footprint. IBM will also provide support for Blackboard's expanding use of the public cloud. Blackboard will leverage IBM's expertise and software to offer customers some of the most flexible, reliable, security-rich and resilient environments available.

The Human Vaccines Project is teaming with the University of California San Diego to apply advances in machine learning to solve critical problems impeding the development of vaccines and therapeutics for a wide range of diseases. The Human Vaccines Project (Project) is a new global public-private partnership of academic research centers, industry, non-profits and government agencies designed to accelerate the development of next-generation vaccines and immunotherapies. On Friday, July 8, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) Qualcomm Institute (QI) will host an invitation-only Workshop on Human Vaccines and Machine Learning (HVML) in Atkinson Hall on the UC San Diego campus. The workshop will bring together top academic researchers and partners in the vaccine development community from the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, as well as experts from top software companies and IT research organizations. "The Human Vaccines Project has embarked on a decade-long, 1 billion mission to decode the human immune system," said Wayne C. Koff, Ph.D., President and CEO of the Human Vaccines Project.

The man killed in a crash while using the autopilot function of a Tesla Model S electric vehicle posted a YouTube video a month before the fatal crash showing the technology saving him from another collision and wrote that he was "very impressed." I have done a lot of testing with the sensors in the car and the software capabilities," Joshua Brown, 40, of Canton, Ohio, wrote on April 5 in comments posted with the 41-second video. "I have always been impressed with the car, but I had not tested the car's side collision avoidance," he said. Then on May 7, Brown, a former Navy Seal, was killed when his Tesla crashed into a tractor trailer in Williston, Fla. Federal regulators said Thursday they had opened an investigation into the fatality, thought to be the first in the auto industry involving an autonomous driving feature. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said its Office of Defects Investigation was conducting a preliminary evaluation of the autopilot function. The agency is expected to issue guidelines for autonomous vehicles this month. Automakers do not need to have autonomous driving functions approved by NHTSA but must certify their vehicles meet safety standards. Calling Brown's death "a tragic loss," Tesla said it was the first-known fatality involving its autopilot feature. The technology, which is in public beta testing and must be activated by the driver, has been used in 130 million miles of driving without a fatality, the company said. The crash took place at 3:40 p.m. May 7 on U.S. Route 27A during clear and dry conditions, according to the accident report from the Florida Highway Patrol. Brown's vehicle was headed east when a tractor trailer driven by Frank Baressi of Palm Harbor, Fla., traveling in the opposite direction, made a left turn onto a side street. The Tesla's roof hit the underside of the tractor trailer. The car skidded under the truck and off the road, plowing through two wire fences before crashing into a utility pole, the accident report said. Baressi told the Associated Press that Brown was "playing'Harry Potter' on the TV screen" in the car when the crash took place. Kim Montes, a spokeswoman for the Florida Highway Patrol, told The Times that a portable DVD player was found in the Tesla but said she did not know whether it had been in use. "At the time of the impact, we don't know what the status of that DVD player was.

Tesla announced today that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened an investigation into a recent fatal crash of a Model S with the company's Autopilot feature activated. The accident took place on May 7th in a small West Florida town called Williston. The Florida Highway Patrol is also conducting its own investigation of the accident, according to a public affairs officer there. The same officer reported that Tesla has, since the fatal accident in May, sent engineers down to Ocala, Florida to assist investigators in accessing data they needed to evaluate the causes of the crash. Tesla offered an account of the event in a blog post titled "A Tragic Loss" that went up today, detailing the crash, an "extremely rare circumstance," which occurred on a divided highway.

Sony has announced plans to develop a robot "capable of forming an emotional bond with customers." At the company's corporate strategy meeting this morning in Tokyo, CEO Kaz Hirai said that a new robot-focused organization within Sony was established in April and is working towards a business launch. "Sony will seek to propose new business models that integrate hardware and services to provide emotionally compelling experiences," the company says in notes from the presentation; no further details on the robot are available. Japanese telecoms company SoftBank makes similar "emotional" claims about its Pepper robot, while Sony arguably achieved the goal to some extent with its AIBO dogs, which some users have gone as far as to hold funerals for. Elsewhere in the presentation, Hirai highlighted VR as another future area of growth for Sony.

BOSTON, June 30, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- indico, an innovator in the machine learning and artificial intelligence space, will make a presentation on deep learning at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, which takes place in New York, July 12th. Dr. Daniel Kuster, a researcher at indico, will focus on the differences between deep learning and traditional machine learning approaches, and how the advantages of deep learning can be exploited to quickly gain new insights about what people say online, and how they say it. The presentation will take place at Fordham University's Lincoln Center Campus in New York City. Machine learning is becoming the tool of choice for analyzing text and image data. While traditional text processing solutions rely on the ability of experts to encode domain knowledge, machine learning models learn directly from the data.