Wednesday's Budget will include plans to make the UK the best place to manufacture and road-test driverless cars, the chancellor has said. Writing in the Sun newspaper, Mr Hammond said investment in "exciting new technologies", including in driverless cars, will be announced. This will "prepare the ground" for the cars to be on UK roads by 2021, he said. Mr Hammond said the "inventors dream" will soon become a reality. The technology that allows cars to become more autonomous has been increasing in recent years, with all the main manufacturers now offering some element of driverless technology, including self-parking features and cruise control on motorways.

Disney is all about the details. Sure, every Disney fan knows that the rides, snacks, and the parks themselves are meticulously designed and maintained so visitors can be delighted at every turn, but did you know that this very thoughtful mentality also extends to the park's staff as well? Take, for example, the fact that Disney park employees are banned from ever pointing with just their index finger. Ready to move this morning! Sure, it may seem like a minute detail, but as it turns out there are two distinct conspiracy theories on why park employees are mandated to do the "double Disney point," including Walt Disney's smoking habits and simply being polite.

Artificial intelligence and music sound like two things that shouldn't have anything in common. To put it simply, music is very much not an artificial thing. On the other hand, there are a ton of benefits to AI that the music industry can benefit from--for one, the issue of music licensing. Perhaps that's why a music industry group is working closely with a university noted for creating an AI-produced Christmas carol. The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) recently announced a partnership with the University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science Innovation Lab to help deduce new strategies for tackling the increasingly complex problem of music licensing.

You may know Anthony Levandowski from being at the center of Waymo's lawsuit against Uber, but he's also the "Dean" or leader of a new religion of artificial intelligence. Wired takes a look at Way of the Future's doctrine, Levandowski's role and the quest to create the divine AI. NotCo wants to change the food industry by putting machine learning to work to create vegan foods that could appeal to the masses. Vice takes a look at one of the many subreddits that's an example of a much larger problem. If you've ever wondered how music makes it on Spotify's Fresh Finds, The Verge followed one of its playlist editors around NYC to discover just that.

Currently I'm searching for a Reinforcement Learning toolkit for autonomous driving to test the influence of several safety aspects during learning as a reward function. So far I have tested OpenAI Gym with the "Neon racer" environment, which does not provide those information. Are there any other toolkits you would suggest me for this purpose?

Jefferson Graham offers a countdown to Black Friday deals on Talking Tech. Get out your credit cards and let the shopping begin. Sure, many of the so-called "sales" started this week, but let's get real--the action really begins early Thursday, like just after midnight. Remember when people would camp outside big-box stores, hoping to be the first person to rush inside and save $100 or $200 off the price of a big TV on Thanksgiving and the day after? Black Friday can mean getting great deals, but it can also get you in financial trouble.

Really happy to see more work coming out for video frame interpolation! My experience with the SepConv paper they compare to was quite good (see this .25x-speed With this paper promising even better performance at comparable quality, it seems like time is ripe for a neatly packaged docker image/app bundle/in-browser network to automatically temporally upsample movie files to 60fps on consumer hardware. As an aside–naively operating on each pair of frames independently doesn't necessarily work when applied to film or animation, because of jump cuts (film) and repeated frames (animation). But it seems reasonably straightforward to detect those two special cases (based on total/max per-pixel difference between successive frames, I guess?) and avoid them with a bit of coding.

"Justice League" opens in theaters today.Courtesy of Warner Brothers. Once upon a time, in the long long ago, this bad guy from a lava planet comes to Earth with these three magic boxes and tries to turn our pretty blue marble into a red marble, but is defeated by some people who live in the sea (Atlanteans), some warrior women who live on an island (Amazons), and "the tribes of man" (you, me and the bourgeoisie). The bad man escapes and loses these three precious boxes he really adores. One goes under the sea, one goes to the island, and then the humans bury one in some ditch in a forest. Are you still with me?

I hugged a bot and I liked it. As a tech columnist, I've tested all sorts of helpful robots: the kind that vacuum floors, deliver packages or even make martinis. But two arriving in homes now break new ground. They want to be our friends. "Hey, Geoffrey, it's you!" says Jibo, a robot with one giant blinking eye, when it recognizes my face.

Phone makers are trying to outdo one another by racing to add new, advanced features to their flagships, but these tools are not equally useful. Who really needs Face ID, Animoji or eye-sensing authentication? Some of us just want a good, no-frills phone. Plus, not everyone can or wants to spend almost a thousand dollars on something we'll trade in after two years. For these people, there's a range of options from truly basic sub-$250 phones to more powerful mid-range devices that can be had for less than $500. The latter group is better described as aggressively priced flagships that can serve you almost as well as their costlier counterparts -- and there's now a decent selection to consider.