Apple will invest $1 billion in a fund set up by Japanese telecom company SoftBank to finance new technology that could be used in the future, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. "We believe their new fund will speed the development of technologies which may be strategically important to Apple," Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet told the Journal . The SoftBank Vision Fund, which the Japanese company is hoping to launch next year, could be one of the largest global tech investment funds, with the potential size of the Fund going up to $100 billion. SoftBank itself expects to invest at least $25 billion. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund could become the leading funding partner, with its potential $45 billion investment over five years. The money will be used to finance new technology, such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, robotics, and connected devices.

At best, most consumers know Softbank as the Japanese phone carrier that owns Sprint -- but the company is much bigger than that. Softbank has its hands in robotics, smart vehicles, processors and more. It even invests in other companies, and recently set up the Softbank Vision Fund with the goal of pouring billions of dollars into promising start ups. Now that fund is getting another investor: Apple. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has pledged to invest $1 billion in Softbank's Vision Fund.

Intel doesn't want to get left behind in the next evolution of the mobile business. The chipmaking giant said on Wednesday it's launching a 5G modem chip, codenamed "Goldridge." Intel is emphasizing the modem's applications in areas outside of phones too, such as autonomous vehicles, drones and smart city sensors. "5G will enable billions of'things' to become smart through seamless connectivity, massive computing power and access to rich data and analytics stored at the edge of the cloud," wrote Aicha Evans, the head of Intel's communications and devices group, in a blog post about the 5G modem. Intel is expecting to sample the modem to customers in the second half of 2017 and go into production soon afterwards, an Intel spokeswoman said. Intel isn't the first company to announce a 5G modem.

Intel has a disastrous history with smartphones. It fumbled a chance to be in Apple's first iPhone, and then quit making its Atom smartphone chip to focus on modems. But the company is now set to ship a groundbreaking modem that will deliver data transfer rates many times faster than most wired internet connections. The chipmaker will start shipping its first 5G modem for testing in the second half this year. Beyond mobile devices, the modem could also be used in autonomous cars, servers, base stations, networking equipment, drones, robots, and other internet-of-things devices.

Intel has a disastrous history with smartphones. It fumbled a chance to be in Apple's first iPhone, and then quit making its Atom smartphone chip to focus on modems. But the company is now set to ship a groundbreaking modem that will deliver data transfer rates many times faster than most wired internet connections. The chipmaker will start shipping its first 5G modem for testing in the second half this year. Beyond mobile devices, the modem could also be used in autonomous cars, servers, base stations, networking equipment, drones, robots, and other internet-of-things devices.

CES kicks off this week from Las Vegas, and PCMag will be there, wandering the floor, throwing some elbows for prime seats at press conferences, and getting you a hands-on look at all the tech that will be making waves in 2017. Here's what we expect to see. AT&T and T-Mobile both have major press conferences at CES. AT&T's presser is usually about connected devices and the Internet of Things rather than phones, but expect some details on 5G, as well. T-Mobile says it's having an UnCarrier announcement, which usually means some big service plan improvement. On the chipset side, the big news will undoubtably be Qualcomm's Snapdragon 835, the mysterious 10-nanometer processor that will be in many flagship phones next year.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant behind Apple's iPhone and numerous other major electronics devices, aims to automate away a vast majority of its human employees, according to a report from DigiTimes. Dai Jia-peng, the general manager of Foxconn's automation committee, says the company has a three-phase plan in place to automate its Chinese factories using software and in-house robotics units, known as Foxbots. The first phase of Foxconn's automation plans involve replacing the work that is either dangerous or involves repetitious labor humans are unwilling to do. The second phase involves improving efficiency by streamlining production lines to reduce the number of excess robots in use. The third and final phase involves automating entire factories, "with only a minimal number of workers assigned for production, logistics, testing, and inspection processes," according to Jia-peng.

Taking a look back at seven days of news and headlines across the world of Android, this week's Android Circuit includes a new voice for the Galaxy S8, the return of the S-Pen, Pixel power problems, Android's battery win, the shutdown of Cyanogen, WileyFox's quick change to Nougat, a North Korean Android tablet's spyware, and Super Mario Run prepares for its Android arrival. Android Circuit is here to remind you of a few of the many things that have happened around Android in the last week (and you can find the weekly Apple news digest here). The Samsung Galaxy S8 could be picking up a new tool named Bixby, a voice-powered digital assistant along the lines of Siri and Google Assistant. Viv Labs is the company behind the technology, and Samsung recently acquired it, so it makes sense for the South Koreans to stake its claim in this space. But will that upset Google?

Statistical methods for network data often parameterize the edge-probability by attributing latent traits such as block structure to the vertices and assume exchangeability in the sense of the Aldous-Hoover representation theorem. These assumptions are however incompatible with traits found in real-world networks such as a power-law degree-distribution. Recently, Caron & Fox (2014) proposed the use of a different notion of exchangeability after Kallenberg (2005) and obtained a network model which permits edge-inhomogeneity, such as a power-law degree-distribution whilst retaining desirable statistical properties. However, this model does not capture latent vertex traits such as block-structure. In this work we re-introduce the use of block-structure for network models obeying Kallenberg’s notion of exchangeability and thereby obtain a collapsed model which both admits the inference of block-structure and edge inhomogeneity. We derive a simple expression for the likelihood and an efficient sampling method. The obtained model is not significantly more difficult to implement than existing approaches to block-modelling and performs well on real network datasets.

Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant behind Apple's iPhone and numerous other major electronics devices, aims to automate away a vast majority of its human employees, according to a report from DigiTimes. Dai Jia-peng, the general manager of Foxconn's automation committee, says the company has a three-phase plan in place to automate its Chinese factories using software and in-house robotics units, known as Foxbots. The first phase of Foxconn's automation plans involve replacing the work that is either dangerous or involves repetitious labor humans are unwilling to do. The second phase involves improving efficiency by streamlining production lines to reduce the number of excess robots in use. The third and final phase involves automating entire factories, "with only a minimal number of workers assigned for production, logistics, testing, and inspection processes," according to Jia-peng.