With no flagship phone to show off to the assembled mass of journalists, bloggers and tech execs, Huawei took a different tack this year at MWC. To showcase the company's AI push (read: remind everyone it's really into this neural processing gig), the Huawei used its Mate 10 Pro smartphone as a lightweight autonomous car brain, inside a Porsche, right outside FC Barcelona's stadium. I was one of the lucky few to experience what it's like to be driven around by an Android phone. Let's not get ahead of ourselves: This isn't Huawei eyeing a move into the crowded, messy world of self-driving cars. As one spokesperson put it, if a phone can "drive" a car, it must be a pretty good phone.

Huawei has unveiled the 'world's first' smartphone-driven car. An incredible video shows the Mate 10 Pro handset taking control of a Porsche using its artificial intelligence chip.

Enthusiastically boarding the artificial intelligence bandwagon, Ericsson will unveil a handful of "machine intelligence" products at this week's Mobile World Congress as it tries to close the gap with Chinese rival Huawei. Forthcoming products will include a chatbot designed to support mobile network technicians as well as a "self-learning" tool that shifts network resources between basestations to suit traffic levels and user needs. The basestation technology is already in trials with Vodafone Spain, which plans to use it in commercial networks this year. Pioneered by US tech giants like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), artificial intelligence and machine learning are attracting growing interest from telecom network vendors hunting for new sales opportunities. Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. plans to launch an AI-enabled computing platform called Atlas this year and has also developed a system it calls Wireless Intelligence for the automation in 5G networks of the "beamforming" process, which focuses signals on end-user devices.

Samsung has officially unveiled its successor to last year's Galaxy S8 flagship, and it appears the Galaxy S9 has a bit of a disappointing aspect. Apparently, its Intelligent Scan feature isn't as good as Apple iPhone X's Face ID even though the South Korean giant already combined facial recognition with its iris scan technology. Two years ago, Samsung unveiled the now defunct Galaxy Note 7 that came with the company's first commercial implementation of iris scanning technology. The company's 2016 phablet may have received a lot of negative press, but the iris scanning technology was definitely a stunning feat at the time. When Samsung introduced the Galaxy S8 and Note 8 last year, it did not miss the chance to bring back the iris scanner.

We propose to optimize the activation functions of a deep neural network by adding a corresponding functional regularization to the cost function. We justify the use of a second-order total-variation criterion. This allows us to derive a general representer theorem for deep neural networks that makes a direct connection with splines and sparsity. Specifically, we show that the optimal network configuration can be achieved with activation functions that are nonuniform linear splines with adaptive knots. The bottom line is that the action of each neuron is encoded by a spline whose parameters (including the number of knots) are optimized during the training procedure. The scheme results in a computational structure that is compatible with the existing deep-ReLU and MaxOut architectures. It also suggests novel optimization challenges, while making the link with $\ell_1$ minimization and sparsity-promoting techniques explicit.

Samsung is betting that the future of smartphones lies in the camera. The firm today launched its highly-anticipated flagship'iPhone X killers', the Galaxy S9 (£739/$720) and S9 plus (£869/$839). Both feature a familiar all-screen design, but have a re-invented camera system that has been dubbed a'game-changer'. One of the biggest improvements is new dual-aperture technology. This allows the camera to automatically adjust the aperture depending on the scene that is being shot. The displays are the same as their predecessors, at 5.8-inch and 6.2-inch, respectively.

The Galaxy S9 and S9 may have the same size, shape, and screen as the Galaxy S8 and S8 they replace, but don't be fooled. Inside, Samsung has completely retooled its flagship phones where it counts: in the processor, the camera, and even its emoji. In a first for the smartphone industry, Samsung is introducing a dual-aperture camera tuned for low-light situations, and chasing Apple's Animoji, the company has introduced augmented-reality-tooled emoji of its own. You can read our first hands-on impressions of the Galaxy S9 here. We also conducted some early Galaxy S9 camera tests.

The announcement, on the eve of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, comes a year after Telefonica promised a makeover in response to U.S. tech giants like Amazon, whose interactive aide Alexa has become a big seller.

Today is the day Samsung will be unveiling its highly anticipated Galaxy S9, the company's latest flagship smartphone. As we discussed earlier this week, you can expect an improved, smarter camera on the handset, as well as an answer to Apple's Animojis, animated emojis that will use face recognition technology to make your phone more interactive when you message friends or family. We'll learn all about the Galaxy S9 in the next few hours, so stay tuned to this post to keep up with the action as it happens. The event kicks off at 12PM ET/6PM Barcelona time.

Imagine this: You're pulling out of your driveway, asking your phone to pull up navigation to your destination and just at that critical moment when you need to decide which way to turn, you look down at your phone and realize it's hanging. It can't find the destination, and it looks like it has no connection. This frustrating moment is an almost universal experience, but it's one Deutsche Telekom aims to eliminate for all of its customers in Europe and across the globe. As one of the world's top telecommunications providers, Deutsche Telekom and its subsidiaries, like T-Mobile in the United States, are using machine learning algorithms based on dynamic cloud infrastructure managed by Mesosphere DC/OS to dramatically improve the consumer experience when it comes to mobile connectivity. The Deutsche Telekom CONNECT app, now available on the Google Play and iOS App Store, launched this year to allow customers to optimize their connection based on cost or performance at any point in time.