Two major car companies announced on Tuesday investments in ride-hailing apps, signaling both a growing role for on-demand cars and a new groundwork for app-enabled self-driving fleets. Toyota will be investing and partnering with Uber, and Volkswagen is putting 300m into Tel Aviv-based ride-sharing app called Gett. In January, General Motors, a longtime Toyota rival, announced that it was putting 500m into Lyft, Uber's most direct competitor. "Ride-sharing has huge potential in terms of shaping the future of mobility," said Shigeki Tomoyama, senior managing officer of Toyota Motor Corporation and president of the Connected Company, a new group within Toyota. "Through this collaboration with Uber, we would like to explore new ways of delivering secure, convenient and attractive mobility services to customers."

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robots in the technology sector are some of the emerging trends of the century, spearheading a revolution where workers may soon be replaced by robots and automated systems. Disney is already jumping into the world of robotics through projects developing at Disney Research, a global network of research labs working on a variety of innovative technologies and automated systems. One of the most recent productions is a set of robotic arms that mimic human movement. Here's a closer look at some of the latest developments in the field of robotics, and what the future may hold for both consumers and companies as AI and robots become more commonplace: Technology that Mimics Human Movement One of the most interesting projects underway at Disney Research labs is a camera-mounted robot named'Jimmy'. This particular robot is designed to stream video content to an operator that is wearing a virtual reality headset.

I'm doggedly completing these notes because in a fit of ambition I actually started posts for each of the workshop days and now I feel like I need to finish it up. Day 3 was a day of differential privacy: Adam Smith, Cynthia Dwork, and Kamalika Chaudhuri. Adam gave a tutorial on differential privacy that had a bit of a different flavor from tutorials I have seen before (and given). He started out by highlighting a taxonomy of potential attacks on released data to make a distinction between re-identification, reconstruction, membership, and correlation inferences before going into the definitions, composition theory, Bayesian interpretation, and so on. With the attacks, he focused a bit more on the reconstruction story.

The following interview is one of many included in the report. Benjamin Recht is an associate professor in the electrical engineering and computer sciences department as well as the statistics department at the University of California at Berkeley. His research focuses on scalable computational tools for large-scale data analysis, statistical signal processing, and machine learning -- exploring the intersections of convex optimization, mathematical statistics, and randomized algorithms. David Beyer: You're known for thinking about computational issues in machine learning, but you've recently begun to relate it to control theory. Can you talk about some of that work?

CHICAGO, IL--(Marketwired - May 12, 2016) - Narrative Science, the leader in Advanced Natural Language Generation (Advanced NLG) for the enterprise, has been invited to speak at EmTech Digital 2016. The annual conference, held by MIT Technology Review, focuses on emerging digital technologies and will take place at the St. Regis San Francisco on May 23 and 24, 2016. This year's conference convenes innovators, entrepreneurs and business leaders to examine artificial intelligence (AI) and the impact it will have across industry. AI already plays an active role in our day-to-day lives and the gathering will serve as a forum to discuss what's coming next in AI as it promises to be the greatest computing breakthrough of our time. Kristian Hammond, Chief Scientist of Narrative Science, will speak on May 23rd about the reemergence of AI, how the proliferation of data is fostering a new era of AI successes and the role of Advanced NLG as a communication layer between people and intelligent systems.

"Excuse me," the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. Outside Gore's New York City office, spring has certainly sprung--early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him.

Artificial Intelligence seems to have just taken a disruptive leap forward. As reported in Wired this month, over 500M US have been invested in AI-related startups, with VIV Labs making to the feature story of this month Wired. In the meantime, IBM made the headlines just a week ago by commercialising Watson as a business-friendly AI machine, and the buzz keeps going. Now, for somebody like me, who is passionate about advancing faster towards personalised medicine, somebody who has been fighting, along with colleagues to piece together clinical data, genomics data, environmental data, you name it, to start painting a stratified, personalised view of patients, diagnosis, and treatments, what will this mean? Will AI help us make a leap forward?

Congratulations are in order for the folks at Google Deepmind (https://deepmind.com) who have mastered Go (https://deepmind.com/alpha-go.html). However, some of the discussion around this seems like giddy overstatement. Wired says, "machines have conquered the last games" (http://bit.ly/200O5zG) The truth is nowhere close. For Go itself, it has been well known for a decade that Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS, http://bit.ly/1YbLm4M; that is, valuation by assuming randomized playout) is unusually effective in Go.

Professor Yale Patt, the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Centennial Chair in Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin has been named the 2016 recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science by the Franklin Institute. Patt is a renowned computer architect, whose research has resulted in transformational changes to the nature of high-performance microprocessors, including the first complex logic gate implemented on a single piece of silicon. He has received ACM's highest honors both in computer architecture (the 1996 Eckert-Mauchly Award) and in education (the 2000 Karl V. Karlstrom Award). He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Derek Chiou, an associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, conducted an extensive interview of Patt, covering his formative years to his Ph.D. in 1966, his career since then, and his views on a number of issues. Presented here are excerpts from that interview; the full interview is available via the link appearing on the last page of this interview. DEREK CHIOU: Let's start with the influences that helped shape you into who you are. I have often heard you comment on your actions as, "That's the way my mother raised me." YALE PATT: In my view my mother was the most incredible human being who ever lived. Born in Eastern Europe, with her parents' permission, at the age of 20, she came to America by herself. A poor immigrant, she met and married my father, also from a poor immigrant family, and they raised three children. We grew up in one of the poorer sections of Boston. Because of my mother's insistence, I was the first from that neighborhood to go to college. My brother was the second. My sister was the third. You have often said that as far as your professional life is concerned, she taught you three important lessons. Almost everyone in our neighborhood quit school when they turned 16 and went to work in the Converse Rubber factory, which was maybe 100 yards from our apartment. She would have none of it.

Apple is set to completely refresh its MacBook lineup in 2016 according to a well-placed analyst who says Apple's MacBook Pros will be made thinner and lighter with an OLED panel sitting above the keyboard to support the company's fingerprint sensor technology, Touch ID. The information comes from a new research note published by KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo who has deep links within Apple's Chinese supply chain and a strong record of predicting what the company will do next. The information has been backed up by sources speaking to 9to5Mac. The dramatically overhauled MacBook Pro will come in 13-inch and 15-inch models, while Apple will also introduce a new 13-inch MacBook, which will be very similar in terms of design and features to the company's current 12-inch MacBook. Apple is set to continue to sell its hugely popular MacBook Air as the entry level laptop in its range.