Seemingly out of the blue, Ford announced today that it's investing $1 billion in Argo AI, a Pittsburgh-based company building self-driving technology. Ford is effectively buying the previously unknown startup, which was founded by engineers from Google and Uber. Argo AI will operate as an independent subsidiary and will focus on developing a software platform for Ford's self-driving car, which the company is targeting for 2021. Notably, Ford is also planning to license the technology out to other companies. While the extent of the deal is surprising, it makes sense for Ford, especially after GM acquired the self-driving car startup Cruise for over $1 billion last year.

Notice: Faculty members who are planning to apply for funding are encouraged to login to the My Research Application (MRA) on-line system well in advance of the submission deadline to ensure that there are no problems with your login credentials. The information in the on-line form will be automatically routed to the appropriate internal approvers for review and endorsement. If you encounter problems, please consult the My Research - Application User Guide for additional information or contact the RAISE help desk (416-946-5000, RAISE@utoronto.ca). The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has announced two Research Prizes ($25,000/prize) to be given to Faculty members working in the field of Fintech. The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Faculty Research Prize will support research and innovation at the University of Toronto.

Ford Motor Co. plans to invest $1 billion US over the next five years in tech startup Argo AI to help the Detroit automaker reach its goal of producing a self-driving vehicle for commercial ride sharing fleets by 2021, the companies announced on Friday. The investment in Pittsburg-based Argo AI, founded by former executives on self-driving teams at Google and Uber, will make Ford the company's largest shareholder. Ford chief executive officer Mark Fields said the investment is in line with previous announcements on planned capital expenditures. Argo AI, which focuses on artificial intelligence and robotics, will help build what Ford calls its "virtual driver system" at the heart of the fully autonomous car Ford said last year it would develop by 2021. "With Argo AI's agility and Ford's scale we're combining the benefits of a technology start up with the experience and discipline we have at Ford," Fields said at a press conference.

In America, 60 percent of digital media consumption now occurs on mobile or tablet devices instead of desktop computers. As people and technology have become increasingly mobile, so have their efforts to find love and sex. According to app analytics website AppAnnie, the dating application Tinder is one of the most popular tools to pursue modern romance and has been ranked as the most downloaded lifestyle app in America for nearly two years. As a social psychologist, I've focused my research on exploring why Tinder – as one of my interview participants put it – is so'evilly satisfying.' A researcher set out to explore why Tinder is so'evilly satisfying' and conducted a study with singles who use the app and those who do not A researcher from the University of Hawaii conducted a survey with a group of Tinder users and singles who do not use the app.

Today, we'll be following up on our recent post on the Google Cloud Natural Language API. In this post, we're going to take a second look at the service and compare it to the Stanford CoreNLP, a well-known suite for Natural Language Processing (NLP). We will walk you through how to get started using the Stanford CoreNLP, and then we'll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the two solutions. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are some of the hottest topics in IT. The major cloud platforms--Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure--are increasingly exposing a variety of these functions in a way that makes it easy for developers to integrate them into their apps.

In the last few years, more than one thousand single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) have been reproducibly associated with more than two hundred phenotypes and quantitative traits in genome-wide association studies (GWAS) [1]. These loci are usually identified by linear or logistic regression analysis which is performed separately for each SNP. The resulting p-values are then used to rank the SNPs and to select those with a p-value smaller than a pre-specified significance level which is adjusted for the large number of statistical tests. In such a scenario, comparable to analyses of other genomic data sets such as gene expression, p-values are not used in a confirmatory setting but rather as a screening tool to identify associated, i.e. important, SNPs while controlling the number of false positive findings. Nonparametric, model-free statistical learning machines provide a promising alternative to classical, model-based statistical methods for the selection of important variables in high dimensional data sets.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is so last year, according to some experts. Scientists at MIT this week claimed a breakthrough in how human intuition can be added to algorithms. And in a separate, unrelated report, Deloitte Consulting is chastising the business community for not comprehending fully that new, cognitive computing technology should be exploited. "Artificial intelligence is only the beginning," researchers write in a Deloitte University Press article about Deloitte's February study. "Advanced cognitive analytics" is just one of the "fast-evolving" technologies businesses need to get a handle on, they say.

One day, gardeners might not just hear the buzz of bees among their flowers, but the whirr of robots, too. Scientists in Japan say they've managed to turn an unassuming drone into a remote-controlled pollinator by attaching horsehairs coated with a special, sticky gel to its underbelly. The system, described in the journal Chem, is nowhere near ready to be sent to agricultural fields, but it could help pave the way to developing automated pollination techniques at a time when bee colonies are suffering precipitous declines. In flowering plants, sex often involves a threesome. Flowers looking to get the pollen from their male parts into another bloom's female parts need an envoy to carry it from one to the other.

When searching for Mr. or Ms. Right, online dating is now so widely accepted that personal safety sometimes gets overlooked. After all, most dates that start online end up in either a love connection or with the two of you going your separate ways. But it is easy to let your guard down or find yourself in an unsafe situation -- especially if Grey Goose swoops in. That's why it's important to have a few common-sense strategies that keep you safe, according to law enforcement experts and others. "Tell your friends where you're going and when you'll be home," said Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow with the famed Kinsey Institute and chief scientific advisor to Match.com.

February 9, 2017 --Roughly a third of the world's food crops require help with pollination, but more than 40 percent of the species that perform this vital service are under threat. Researchers across disciplines have been searching for solutions. Some focus on ways to protect the bees and other crucial pollinators. But others are looking outside of the natural world for ways to protect crops like fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries, and even chocolate and coffee. Perhaps an army of robotic pollinators could keep humans well-supplied in these foods, some engineers have thought. And that's just the line of thinking that led a team of researchers in Japan to design a small drone capable of pollinating flowers.