Ford CEO Mark Fields announced a $1 billion investment in a new self-driving car tech company, Argo AI. (Photo: Ethan Miller, Getty Images) SAN FRANCISCO -- Ford Motor is betting $1 billion on the world's self-driving car future. The Detroit automaker announced Friday that it would allocate that sum over five years to a new autonomous car startup called Argo AI, which is headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pa., and will have offices in Michigan and California. Ford's financial outlay is part of a continuing investment strategy anchored to transforming the car and truck seller into a mobility company with a hand in ride-hailing, ride-sharing and even bicycle rentals. Argo AI was cofounded a few months ago by Google car project veteran Bryan Salesky and Uber engineer Peter Rander, who met while working at Carnegie Mellon University's vaunted robotics and engineering school. "The reason for the investment is not only to drive the delivery of our own autonomous vehicle by 2021, but also to deliver value to our shareholders by creating a software platform that can be licensed to others," Ford CEO Mark Fields told USA TODAY.

Most US organizations have substantially used offshore service providers in IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) to drive cost reduction. But there is currently a great deal of discussion in Congress and the Trump Administration – as well as actions taken by Executive Orders in the last seven days – about changing the H-1B and L1 visas. The changes affect the offshoring services provider as well as US enterprise customers that utilize offshored services. What are the impending impacts? My company collaborates with Rod Bourgeois, head of research and consulting at DeepDive Equity Research, and together we have followed the proposed immigration and visa reform.

It's said that the Queen must think everywhere smells of paint, as a fresh coat is usually applied to spruce up places just before she visits. In which case, Tim Cook must think everyone he meets is very excitable, because there's nothing like a visit from the Apple CEO to create the feeling of A Special Event. Every person he meets is quietly fizzing with anticipation. Tim Cook has been having quite the week. On Monday and Tuesday he was whistlestopping round France and Germany, arriving in the UK on Wednesday.

The tax code is more than 74,000 pages long, and there are thousands of new changes made each year that impact a client's tax outcome. H&R Block with Watson combines the expertise of 70,000 tax pros with the powerful technology of Watson to help ensure clients get back what they deserve. It's a first in the tax prep industry, and it represents H&R Block's most personalized tax experience ever. To get there, H&R Block tax professionals and IBM development teams are training Watson on the language of taxes. They're first applying the technology to the thousands of tax-related questions and topics discussed with an H&R Block Tax Pro during the return filing process.

U.S. stocks fell as losses in energy and industrial shares offset gains in defensive industries, as investors weighed a tweet from President Donald Trump mentioning a "very major" border tax. In the fine tradition of turning lemons into lemonade or dead horses* into dog chow, an Austin firm has found a way to grind something positive from the commander in chief's more negative words for business. When President Donald Trump blasts businesses on Twitter, millions may pay attention, but the "Trump and Dump Bot" can turn a profit in under a second. Built by Texas ad agency T3, the piece of AI assesses the president's tweets for market impact from the moment they hit the web, and performs quick stock maneuvers based on those comments before they've even sunk in. As T3 presient Ben Gaddis explained for NPR, the process relies on a "sentiment analysis" that the algorithm performs with each of President Trump's statements online. If the bot detects that Trump has tweeted about a publicly traded company, it then hunts within for telling terms like "big problems" and "caused by" and calculates a sentiment rating based on its findings.

In February 1975, a group of geneticists gathered in a tiny town on the central coast of California to decide if their work would bring about the end of the world. These researchers were just beginning to explore the science of genetic engineering, manipulating DNA to create organisms that didn't exist in nature, and they were unsure how these techniques would affect the health of the planet and its people. So, they descended on a coastal retreat called Asilomar, a name that became synonymous with the guidelines they laid down at this meeting--a strict ethical framework meant to ensure that biotechnology didn't unleash the apocalypse. Forty-two years on, another group of scientists gathered at Asilomar to consider a similar problem. In January, the world's top artificial intelligence researchers walked down the same beachside paths as they discussed their rapidly accelerating field and the role it will play in the fate of humanity.

Relatedly, the relative value of human intelligence gained through questioning of any type has declined over the past 15 years. Such intelligence mattered greatly in the few years after 9/11, both for piecing together the parts of al-Qaida and its future plots, and understanding insurgent networks in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the U.S. intelligence community has undergone a renaissance in collection and analysis driven by massive improvements in surveillance technology, computing, big data analysis, and artificial intelligence. Other intelligence tools have also made big leaps forward, such as forensic intelligence collected from cellphones, pocket litter, and improvised explosive devices collected on the battlefield. Human intelligence still plays an important role, but not to the degree it did right after 9/11.

An Army drone that disappeared on a training flight in southern Arizona turned up hundreds of miles away in Colorado, stuck in a tree, and the military is trying to figure out how it got there. A hiker spotted the Shadow drone in the foothills west of Denver on Thursday, officials at Fort Huachuca in Arizona told the Colorado Springs Gazette. The $1.5 million drone was missing a wing, The Associated Press reported. "An investigation into what happened is the next step," Fort Huachuca spokeswoman Tanja Linton said. Soldiers lost contact with the drone at Fort Huachuca nine days earlier.

We want to hear how you would harness machine learning to have a truly positive effect on society. The ability to recognise patterns has been fundamental in the progression of modern civilisation: from sailors using the night sky to navigate the oceans, to scientists observing natural phenomena to construct theories of the world. With the advent of powerful computers and large datasets, these days machine learning (ML) is allowing computers to recognise patterns and learn from data like never before. You can already see this in the world around you: online retailers suggest products you might be interested in, your phone can translate spoken words to text on the screen and cars are learning to drive themselves. This year we've expanded the competition and encourage students aged 16 to apply.

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.