With plans to insert itself in the driver's seat for a slice of the self-driving car market, Qualcomm said Thursday it has agreed to acquire NXP Semiconductors for about $38 billion. Qualcomm said it would pay $110 per share for the Dutch company, which commands 14% of global automotive semiconductor sales. It expects the deal to close by the end of 2017. "With innovation and invention at our core, Qualcomm has played a critical role in driving the evolution of the mobile industry," Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said in a statement. "The NXP acquisition accelerates our strategy to extend our leading mobile technology into robust new opportunities, where we will be well positioned to lead by delivering integrated semiconductor solutions at scale."

Qualcomm said Thursday that it had agreed to acquire NXP Semiconductors for about $38 billion, expanding its presence in the increasingly lucrative market for automotive sensors and chips. Qualcomm said it would pay $110 per share for NXP and expects the deal to close by the end of 2017. The deal gives the telecommunications giant a greater foothold in the burgeoning market for technology that will power self-driving cars -- which represents a growth space compared to the saturated market for smart phones and other mobile devices. NXP also has a desirable position in the market for technology powering the so-called Internet of Things as well as security products. The acquisition also marks the latest in a series of deals for the semiconductor business, accelerating the trend of consolidation.

Black holes are an ongoing area for research and discovery. However, many mysteries of the universe can be solved with Big Data analytics. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the killer application of Big Data analytics. Logically based on machine learning and Big Data analytics, the more data available, the more intelligent it will get, resulting in more widespread applications. In future, you may own a smart robot or even a smart dog.

Soon, police officers won't need to pull you over if you're caught texting while driving. The machine vision technology company Movidius has teamed up with the Chinese security camera maker Hikvision to create smart cameras that can catch behavior such as leaving a suspicious package in a public place, driving while distracted by mobile devices, and break ins. Advanced visual analytics will also allow cameras to identify car models and detect seat belts. The partnership will debut a new line of cameras with higher accuracy than traditional computing techniques in China this week. Both search giant Google and the world's leading drone manufacturer DJI have relied on Movidius to enhance spatial awareness in virtual reality and engineer the sense and avoid features inside drones respectively.

Futurewei Technologies Inc. (DBA Huawei R&D) is a U.S. Based branch of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., the leading global information and communications technology solutions provider. Established in 1988, Huawei Technologies is a private high-tech enterprise specializing in research and development, the production and marketing of communications equipment, and providing customized network solutions for telecom carriers in fixed, mobile, and data communications networks. 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.

With the advent of Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Network Functions (NF) will no longer be tightly coupled with the hardware they are running on, which poses new challenges in network management. Noisy neighbor is a term commonly used to describe situations in NFV infrastructure where an application experiences degradation in performance due to the fact that some of the resources it needs are occupied by other applications in the same cloud node. These situations cannot be easily identified using straightforward approaches, which calls for the use of sophisticated methods for NFV infrastructure management. In this paper we demonstrate how Machine Learning (ML) techniques can be used to identify such events. Through experiments using data collected at real NFV infrastructure, we show that standard models for automated classification can detect the noisy neighbor phenomenon with an accuracy of more than 90% in a simple scenario.

Imagine a security camera that can understand and analyze the scene it's capturing. The camera can spot someone who is leaving a piece of luggage behind at an airport and issue an alert. It can identify a car being sought in connection with a crime based on its color, shape, and dented left bumper, even if the license plate has been covered up. And it can spot drivers who are texting when they should be watching the road, potentially passing on this information to law enforcement officials that can then issue a ticket. These are some of the advanced security techniques being hyped by Movidius, a chip maker specializing in artificial intelligence and computer vision.

Masayoshi Son, one of the world's most successful investors, is putting his money behind the artificial intelligence revolution. Son, the world's 82nd richest man by Forbes' reckoning, leads Softbank, a Japanese telecommunications powerhouse that also holds investments in dozens of companies. The newest in the stable is ARM Holdings, developer of the chip designs that power nearly all phones, which Softbank acquired for $32 billion this year. Those ARM chips will help spread artificial intelligence and propel the world toward the so-called singularity, Son said, speaking Tuesday at ARM's developer conference here in Santa Clara, California. The singularity is the moment futurists envision when computing progress has accelerated to the point where we no longer can predict what's next for technology or humanity.

People pass by a T-Mobile store in the Brooklyn borough of New York June 4, 2015. NEW YORK T-Mobile US Inc is the likeliest acquisition target as media companies seek a wireless partner following AT&T Inc's proposed 85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner Inc, analysts said. AT&T announced the deal late on Saturday, stoking urgency in the telecoms and media sectors, where carriers facing a saturated wireless market are looking for content to attract mobile users and producers of shows and movies are seeking digital distribution. T-Mobile took most of the wireless industry's subscriber and revenue growth in the third quarter. Its strong balance sheet and fast-growing wireless business makes it an attractive target for a pay-TV or media company, analysts said.

Hal, the Terminator and Matrix movies, Ex-Machina, and I, Robot all trade on the beloved sci-fi meme of robotized AI and the public's collective psyche when it all goes wrong: fascination and fear. After all, if machines become faster, stronger, and brighter than humanity, why wouldn't they turn on their soft, meaty, and dim creators for either enslavement or a full-on purge? Let's face it – machines are getting smarter. AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol at Go came 10 years earlier than predicted, before in fact humanity had worked out the exact number of possible legal Go positions (a number the size of 10170 was completed on January 20, 2016, if you're interested). In 2014, a chatbot glorying in the name of Eugene Goodstead passed the Turing Test by fooling 33 percent of judges into believing it was a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy.