Honda, SoftBank want to make cars your new best friends TOKYO -- Honda Motor and SoftBank Group announced a research collaboration Thursday on the use of artificial intelligence in cars, with a goal of creating vehicles that are more than just a machine for transporting people from point A to point B. The two Japanese companies aim to give cars the ability to read the moods and learn the preferences of drivers, not only through cameras and sensors but also by conversing with them. Honda and SoftBank envision the car as less of a tool and more like a member of the family. SoftBank Chairman Masayoshi Son invited Honda R&D President and CEO Yoshiyuki Matsumoto on stage Thursday at an event for corporate customers in a hotel here.

Futurewei Technologies Inc. (DBA Huawei R&D) is a leading global information and communications technology solutions provider. Through our dedication to customer-centric innovation and strong partnerships, we have established end-to-end advantages in telecom networks, devices and cloud computing. We are committed to creating maximum value for telecom operators, enterprises and consumers by providing competitive solutions and services. Our products and solutions have been deployed in over 170 countries, serving more than one third of the world's population. Futurewei has over 150,000 employees, approximately 70,000 of which are engaged in Research & development.

Tokyo-based SoftBank is one of Japan's biggest telecoms providers, with more than 63,590 employees, a solar power business, humanoid robots for home use, ride-booking services and financial technology. It recently set up a $25 billion private fund for technology investments, along with Saudi Arabia and other investors, that Son says could grow to $100 billion.

This work develops a generic framework, called the bag-of-paths (BoP), for link and network data analysis. The central idea is to assign a probability distribution on the set of all paths in a network. More precisely, a Gibbs-Boltzmann distribution is defined over a bag of paths in a network, that is, on a representation that considers all paths independently. We show that, under this distribution, the probability of drawing a path connecting two nodes can easily be computed in closed form by simple matrix inversion. This probability captures a notion of relatedness between nodes of the graph: two nodes are considered as highly related when they are connected by many, preferably low-cost, paths. As an application, two families of distances between nodes are derived from the BoP probabilities. Interestingly, the second distance family interpolates between the shortest path distance and the resistance distance. In addition, it extends the Bellman-Ford formula for computing the shortest path distance in order to integrate sub-optimal paths by simply replacing the minimum operator by the soft minimum operator. Experimental results on semi-supervised classification show that both of the new distance families are competitive with other state-of-the-art approaches. In addition to the distance measures studied in this paper, the bag-of-paths framework enables straightforward computation of many other relevant network measures.

Apple CEO Tim Cook responds to a question during a news conference at IBM Watson headquarters, in New York in April 2015. Days after Softbank billionaire Masayoshi Son met with Donald Trump to discuss a mega, $100 million investment fund that would funnel half itself into American companies, Apple may be getting in on the action. Apple has reportedly discussed putting some of its own money in what looks set to be history's biggest, technology-investment fund. Apple has talked to Softbank about investing up to $1 billion in the fund, according to reports in Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, which cites people familiar with the matter, and who cautioned that any investment from Apple had yet to be finalized. Such a move would bring Apple's cash, estimated to be worth some $200 billion and located mostly outside of the United States, into one of the world's biggest investment funds.

Microsoft is expanding its real-time Skype translation tool to cover calls made to mobile phones and landlines. The software giant has announced that Windows Insiders -- those who have signed up to access early builds of the Windows operating system -- can now access the new features through the Skype Preview app on Windows 10. Skype Translator was first introduced in English and Spanish back in December2014, and it has since expanded into a number of additional languages, including Mandarin, Italian, Russian, and Arabic. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques such as deep-learning to train artificial neural networks, and it should continuously improve as it listens to more conversations. Essentially, it can convert spoken chats in almost real time across nine languages in total, and more than 50 languages in text-based instant messaging.

The holding company that owns the Kansas-based Sprint Corp. has pledged to invest up to $50 billion in U.S. startup companies and acquisitions. This vow was made by Masayoshi Son, chief executive of SoftBank Group, which owns Sprint. Son made the promise following a 45-minute meeting with President-elect Donald Trump yesterday. Son (pictured above) said SoftBank will make the investment from a $100 billion technology fund that the company previously said it would raise in part using its own capital and commitments from the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. First announced in October, the SoftBank Vision Fund will create as many as 50,000 tech jobs in the U.S, according to Son.

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Huawei needs new tricks to differentiate its products from the crowd of Chinese phones permeating the US market, and it's turning to artificial intelligence to set it apart. The Mate 9 is a new Android device that offers a "Machine Learning Algorithm" that purports to learn your habits over time and optimize performance so that the device is more responsive. The Mate 9, which is expected to arrive in the US soon (although the exact timing is unknown), also has one of the largest displays on the market. We don't yet know how much it'll cost in the US, but we expect the Mate 9 to sell for about the same as it does in Europe (€699), which would make it slightly more affordable than other leading big-screen flagships too. That, along with the promised performance boost and supposedly safer battery tech, might be reason enough to consider the Mate 9 as your next large-screen smartphone.

Son (pictured above) said SoftBank will make the investment from a $100 billion technology fund that the company previously said it would raise in part using its own capital and commitments from the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund. First announced in October, the SoftBank Vision Fund will create as many as 50,000 tech jobs in the U.S, according to Son. The fund will also invest in a number of other countries around the world. The investment described by Son represents more than 30 percent of the total amount all venture capital firms had available to invest as of the middle of this year. But can an investment as large as the one Son outlined generate as many jobs as he claimed?