Uber CEO Travis Kalanick announced that he would take an indefinite leave of absence on Tuesday as the embattled company released a damning report on its workplace culture that called on the company to "review and reallocate" Kalanick's responsibilities. "I need to take some time off of the day-to-day to grieve my mother, whom I buried on Friday, to reflect, to work on myself, and to focus on building out a world-class leadership team," Kalanick wrote in an email to staff that referenced the death of his mother last month in a boating accident. "If we are going to work on Uber 2.0, I also need to work on Travis 2.0 to become the leader that this company needs and that you deserve." Kalanick's leave comes at a time of considerable turmoil for the ride-hail app. On Sunday, the board of directors voted unanimously to adopt the recommendations of a workplace review led by the law firm of former US attorney general Eric Holder.

The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar. Japan's On-Art Corp's CEO Kazuya Kanemaru poses with his company's eight metre tall dinosaur-shaped mechanical suit robot'TRX03' and other robots during a demonstration in Tokyo, Japan Japan's On-Art ...

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will officially begin collaborating with Intel on a computing platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to make it easier for businesses to utilize graph analytics in big data, the pair announced on Monday. The partnership is an expansion of DARPA's Hierarchical Identify Verify & Exploit (HIVE) program. The HIVE program is working to "develop new technologies to realize 1,000x performance-per-watt gains in the ability to handle graph analytics," according to a press release. Graph analytics focus on the many-to-many relationships in data, giving insight into multi-layered, indirect relationships in those datasets, the release said. Graph analytics are also helpful in gleaning insights from large and complex datasets.

Google's latest effort to thaw relations with China involves an artificial intelligence pow-wow -- and a few games of Go. Google's latest effort to thaw relations with China involves an artificial intelligence pow-wow -- and a few games of Go. Years after Beijing locked out virtually every Alphabet Inc. service, executive chairman Eric Schmidt and a cadre of mid-level Chinese government officials kicked off a summit in the historic canal-laced town of Wuzhen Tuesday: a rare instance of the search leader working in tandem with the country's bureaucrats at a high-profile public event. Google experts and prominent local academics will exchange notes and host discussions but the centerpiece will be a contest between DeepMind's so-far undefeated AlphaGo system and Ke Jie, local champion of the 2,500-year-old strategy board game Go.

The government could push through extreme internet regulation while people are distracted by the current political situation, according to activists. Theresa May might use her wide-ranging plans for technology – which includes weakening security and increasing censorship – as a way of restoring some of "image as a tough leader", the Open Rights Group has warned. The prime minister might look to automatically censor the internet, for instance, and weaken security in a way that "could put all of us at a great risk of crime", it said. Despite failing to win a majority at the recent election, Ms May has suggested that she will keep going with her extreme plans. And she might do so specifically because the government's majority is "fragile", he said.

On May 12, the largest ransomware outbreak in history took place, targeting 300,000 machines in 150 countries, with the U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) taking the brunt of the attack. In fact, 48 hospital trusts in the U.K. were targeted by the NSA cyber weapon-powered WannaCry ransomware, in addition to an unknown number of hospitals in the United States. Further, the Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) reported that not just hospital machines were infected, but also medical devices from both Bayer and Siemens. By shutting down systems, communication channels and equipment, cybercriminals locked healthcare professionals out of their EHRs, forced them to cancel appointments and even turned away emergency patients. Unfortunately, this is just another example of the healthcare industry being targeted by increasingly sophisticated and frequent ransomware attacks.

The first real computer, the ENIAC, was built in 1946. The first computer war game appeared two years later. It was built by the Army Operations Research Office, and it was as rudimentary as you might think. Since then, the relationship between the military and world of games has gotten endlessly deeper. Veterans help develop popular games, and popular games help veterans recover.

In 1950, Alan Turing, already famous for helping to crack the German Enigma code during World War II, devised the Turing test to define intelligence in machines. Could a computer, Turing asked, fool a human into thinking he was interacting with another person, or imitate human responses so well that it would be impossible for a person to tell the difference? If the machine could, Turing proposed, it could be considered intelligent. Turing's thought experiment spawned scores of science-fiction tales, such as the 2015 hit movie Ex Machina. Now, artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous algorithms are not only passing the Turing test every day but, more importantly, are making and saving money for the businesses that deploy them.

North Korea has been accused of spying on South Korea after a suspected Pyongyang drone was spotted on the site of a U.S. missile interceptor system, Seoul's military officials said Tuesday. The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-missile system, which is designed to intercept and destroy ballistic missiles, is being deployed in Seongju in order to protect South Korea from Pyongyang's growing threats. According to Yonhap News, the small unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a Sony-made camera was found last week on a mountain near the inter-Korean border. The drone had apparently crashed close to the THAAD site. The South's military took the drone in custody and analysed the content of the 64-gigabyte memory chip.

The 119 drones underwent catapult-assisted take-offs and performed aerial formations, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Sunday. The CETC said "swarm intelligence" is regarded as the core of the artificial intelligence of unmanned systems and the future of intelligent unmanned systems. The huge scale of low cost and multi-function UAVs could be used in risky tasks such as emergency communications. CETC engineer Zhao Yanjie said since drones were invented in 1917, intelligent swarms have "changed the rules of the game." In November 2016, the CETC launched 67 drones during the China International Aviation & Aerospace Exhibition in Zhuhai, South China's Guangdong Province, breaking the previous record of 50 drones by the US Navy, CCTV reported.