Traffic police in China are to begin using facial-recognition technology to identify jaywalkers and automatically issue them fines by text. Authorities in Shenzhen already publicly name and shame people who flout the southern city's strict road rules, using CCTV cameras equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) that can recognise offenders. Their faces are then displayed on large screens at crossings and on a government website. Now, the company which provides the technology is in talks with mobile phone carriers and social media firms about developing a system that notifies jaywalkers through instant messages when they are caught by the cameras, crossing the road outside of a marked pedestrian crosswalk at an intersection. "Jaywalking has always been an issue in China and can hardly be resolved just by imposing fines or taking photos of the offenders," Wang Jun, director of marketing solutions at Shenzhen-based AI firm Intellifusion, told the South China Morning Post.

In January, Google launched its Play Store audiobook category and today, the company has released a handful of updates that will improve the user experience. Now, you'll be able to bookmark parts of your audiobook that you'd like to return to. Just tap the Bookmark icon and you can easily come back to it whenever you'd like. You'll also be able to control the speed at which your audiobook plays. Slow it down to as low as half the speed or bump it up as much as three times faster.

No other film genre boasts such an unimpeachable reputation for dreadfulness as the video game adaptation. Some, such as this year's Tomb Raider film and the zombie-themed Resident Evil efforts, almost achieve mediocrity. Others are so fascinatingly terrible that they have become Hollywood legend – for instance, the baffling interpretation of Super Mario Bros proffered by edgy British directors Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton in 1993, in which Nintendo's bright, joyful Mushroom Kingdom was reimagined as a futuristic dystopia called Dinohattan, where everyone was dressed in fishnets and black leather trenchcoats. A quarter of a century later, it is still impossible to understand why anyone thought that was a good idea. The ever-expanding Marvel cinematic universe is ample proof that films can do an excellent job of exploring geek culture and fleshing out the paper-thin characters that dominate it; Black Panther has just become the fifth highest-grossing movie ever at the US box office.

MANY TECH FIRMS' offices boast luxurious perks such as nap pods, massages and soda fountains that offer employees a choice of exotically flavoured sparkling water. Corporate bosses like to think that finding customised AI solutions is just as easy as selecting a fizzy drink with a hint of grapefruit. Buying AI takes time, can feel like hard work, and the results are often imperfect. A number of vendors are scurrying to come to would-be users' aid. The leaders are the West's biggest providers of cloud storage: Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Pandora has announced that it's launching its own personalized playlists feature to take on Spotify. Pandora will be able to build playlists that will fit with the user's moods, activities and listening habits. "Today we're announcing Pandora's personalized soundtracks -- unique playlists built just for you. We're testing them now with a small group of Pandora Premium users and look forward to bringing them to all our Premium subscribers soon," the company said on its blog. "The personalized playlists fit your moods, activities and favorite genres and are updated each week based on your individual musical tastes. We combined our human curation with personalized algorithms to automatically serve up new artists and songs anticipating the perfect balance of discovery and steady favorites."

MENTION ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, and most people will think of robots. But a more fitting image may be that of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions and endings, who has two faces looking in opposite directions. On one side are the positive changes that AI will bring, enabling people to achieve more, far more quickly, by using technology to enhance their existing skills. Recruiters will be able to pinpoint the best candidates more easily, and customer-service staff will be able to handle queries faster. Jobs that never existed before could be created.

Ofsted has said that from next term a computer algorithm will be used in deciding whether to inspect good and outstanding schools. In a methodology note published today, the inspectorate says that rather than using pre-determined thresholds on performance data, as in previous years, it will use "supervised machine learning" for the first stage of decision making from the summer term of 2018. It says that it has now created an algorithm which "has effectively produced a probability of a forthcoming inspection being less than good", which is known as the "raw risk score". "We believe [our new methodology] will improve our capacity to identify concerns about performance," the note states. The machine learning algorithm was created by looking at data on progress and attainment, school workforce data and parent view responses to see how it fitted with the known inspection outcomes.

PARIS (Reuters) – South Korean electronics giant Samsung will make France its third global research and development hub in artificial intelligence after Korea and the United States and hire about one hundred experts in Paris, the French president's office said on Wednesday.

For autonomous vehicles, the challenge is to give them the ability to make the same assumptions. Our customer Elektronische Fahrwerksysteme GmbH (EFS) is working on that problem for a major auto manufacturer.

By Cade Metz CALIFORNIA: Inside an old auto body shop here in Silicon Valley, Stefan Avalos pushed a movie camera down a dolly track. He and a small crew were making a short film about self-driving cars. They were shooting a powder-blue 1962 Austin Mini, but through special effects the rusted relic would be transformed into an autonomous vehicle that looked more like the DeLorean from "Back to the Future." Stepping back from the camera, Avalos referred wryly to the movie he was filming as "Project Unemployment." The film was a way of testing new technology from a startup called Arraiy, which is trying to automate the creation of digital effects for movies, television and games.