The US will levy trade tariffs on China this week designed to target "largely high-technology products." In retaliation for the taxation, China announced it would raise duties on 128 US imports. Begun, the trade wars have. President Trump, over Easter weekend, let loose on Twitter with his usual barrage of attacks. Jeff Bezos, Amazon, and The Washington Post took a moderate amount of vitriol, as did other usual suspects like immigrants and journalists.

The National Transportation Safety Board is "unhappy" about Tesla's decision to release information from an investigation of a fatal crash involving its Autopilot system. A vehicle using the semi-autonomous system crashed into a concrete lane divider on Highway 101 in Mountain View, California, last week. The car's driver, Wei Huang, a 38-year-old software engineer for Apple, was killed. Tesla released a statement on its website that said data showed the driver did not have his hands on the wheel, as recommended, and received several warnings from the system before the crash. The company said its Autopilot feature can keep speed, change lanes and self-park but requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel, in order to be able to take control and avoid accidents.

Electric car-maker Tesla has been admonished by the US watchdog investigating a recent fatal crash involving one of its cars. The National Transportation Safety Board said it was "unhappy" the firm had made public details of the probe. The company had blogged on Friday that the Model X car involved's Autopilot self-steering system was in use at the time of the accident. Walter Huang, an Apple engineer, died after his car hit a barrier. Tesla had also revealed that logs from the vehicle's computer had indicated that the 38-year-old's hands were not on the steering wheel in the six seconds prior to the collision on California's Route 101.

But both incidents have a troubling link, autonomous-vehicle specialists say: a human was at the wheel and could have taken control. "This is what I've called the mushy middle of automation," said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina assistant professor of law and specialist on autonomous cars, referring to vehicles with some automation but still a driver at the wheel. "There will certainly be more incidents," he said. "It's dangerous when people feel safer than they actually are." Auto makers are gradually rolling out partially automated systems that pass control back and forth between vehicle and driver.

The first thing many of us think about when it comes to the future relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity is Skynet--the fictional neural net-based group mind from the "Terminator" movie franchise. But at least one security professional (with a somewhat rosier view) suggested that AI must be understood across a broader landscape, regarding how it will influence cybersecurity and how IT can use AI to plan for future security technology purchases. Earlier this year, Dudu Mimran, chief technology officer (CTO) at Telekom Innovation Laboratories in Israel, discussed the relationship between AI and cybersecurity in a speech and subsequent blog post for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Forum 2018. I caught up with Mimran at his office in Beersheba, Israel for an interview, which we continued later over email. "While the threat of cyberattacks powered by AI is increasingly likely, I am less concerned in the short- and midterm about machines making up their minds and being able to harm people," Mimran said.

Residents of Shenzhen don't dare jaywalk. Since April 2017, this city in China's Guangdong province has deployed a rather intense technique to deter jaywalking. Anyone who crosses against the light will find their face, name, and part of their government ID number displayed on a large LED screen above the intersection, thanks to facial recognition devices all over the city. If that feels invasive, you don't even know the half of it. Now, Motherboard reports that a Chinese artificial intelligence company is partnering the system with mobile carriers, so that offenders receive a text message with a fine as soon as they are caught.

There were new announcements from Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference and Google's TensorFlow Dev Summit while France announced its own national AI strategy in a report and vowed €1.5bn in public funding. TensorFlow conference - Google hosted the TensorFlow Dev Summit on Friday in Mountain View, California, and announced a range of updates for its code, which remains the most popular software framework for AI and machine learning. Here's a list of the main highlights; all these tools are now going to be rolled out to researchers: If you're a TF nerd, there are more details on the blog and the Youtube channel. Also, here is the download link to TensorFlow 1.7.0 for you to play around with over the Easter weekend. La AI stratégie de France - France's President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the importance of AI and the need to catch up to the the United States and China.

Tech honchos in Silicon Valley are deeply worried at China's rapid progress in harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that has shown encouraging results in changing the way we work and live. Measured by start-up financing deals and dollars from venture capitalists, the United States' AI start-up ecosystem currently dominates -- followed by China, says a recent Accenture analysis titled "Rewire for Growth". When it comes to India, the number of AI start-ups has increased since 2011 at a compounded annual growth rate of 86 per cent. But the size of funding till date is substantially smaller in India than in the US and China, reflecting the limited success of India's AI start-ups in achieving scale so far, the report noted. "According to our analysis, AI has the potential to add $957 billion, or 15 per cent of current gross value added, to India's economy in 2035," said Accenture.

Amazon and Google really do want to watch your every move. A series of patents filed by the firms'outline an array of possibilities' for how their smart speakers could be used to better listen in on users. They suggest their always-on Google Home and Amazon Echo devices could know everything from a user's mood to their medical condition, and target advertising based on this data. The development comes amid a growing scandal involving the handling of the private data of 50 million users by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Google has filed a patent application for a system that used its smart speakers and camera to spy on a user's mood or medical condition.

There is no life on Mars that we have been able to detect so far. But the red planet could be about to look a lot more like Earth, with a swarm of robotic bees sent to buzz through its atmosphere. Space agency NASA has funded an unusual project to create'Marsbees', which are the size of bumblebees with enormous wings, equipped to take samples from the planet. An artist's impression issued by the European Space Agency of the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in front of the red planet The inventor of the'Marsbee', Dr Chang-kwon Kang from the University of Alabama, believes they have sufficient lift to hover in the Martian atmosphere, which is around 100 times thinner than the Earth's. His report on the bees states: 'Marsbees are robotic flapping wing-flyers of a bumblebee size with cicada-sized wings.