The two companies will leverage their expertise and advantages in online and offline services to cooperate on projects in mobile Internet, AI, big data and telecom services. Baidu will help China Unicom put the services of more than 10,000 brick-and-mortar outlets and 300,000 franchised stores online. China Unicom will offer Baidu stronger telecom infrastructure support such as Internet data centers and information and communication technology. Robin Li, Baidu board chairman and CEO, said his company already cooperates closely in linking mobile search, mapping and group buying services with China Unicom's services, and Baidu is looking forward to impressive results from AI technology. Wang Xiaochu, board chairman of China Unicom, called the move an important step for cross-sector cooperation between Internet companies and telecom firms in line with the government's "Internet Plus" proposal to upgrade traditional sectors with IT technology.

Head of SK Telecom----s Corporate R&D Center Choi Jin-sung (left in the picture) and Intel Korea----s Chief Executive Officer Kwon Myung-sook [Photo provided by SK Telecom Co.] South Korea----s top wireless carrier SK Telecom Co. said it will work with the world----s biggest chipmaker Intel Corp. to develop connected car system piloted by artificial intelligence. SK Telecom last Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding with Intel to cooperate on developing Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication and deep-learning based video recognition technologies, the telecommunication company said on Monday. The V2X communication refers to wireless technology transferring information from a vehicle to everything that may affect the vehicle. The Korean telecom company will provide vehicular communications and video recognition technologies while Intel contribute its expertise in 5G networks and deep-learning, or data-based machine learning, system to develop a platform for automated connected car. The two firms aim to demonstrate the new connected car technology as early as next year.

Columnist Ed Baig reviews Pixel, which features the high-IQ Google Assistant and a competitive, high-end smartphone camera. A. When Google introduced its Pixel and Pixel XL phones in early October, it picked a hybrid distribution strategy. Instead of selling these $649-and-up smartphones only on its own site, as it had with its earlier Nexus phones, it also signed up Verizon Wireless as a distribution partner. To judge from the ads during the World Series, only the second purchase option exists. They keep touting the Pixel -- "a winner for anyone looking for an excellent phone," USA TODAY's Ed Baig wrote -- as "only on Verizon," something Verizon's own page about the phones repeats.

Before we dive into the data behind Alphabet's forward-looking strategy, we must quickly assess its most mature and most profitable (by far) business line: Google search and advertising. As a reminder, Google now consists of search, mapping, cloud & enterprise, Google-branded consumer hardware and operating systems (Chrome, Android, etc.), and YouTube. All other units, from investment vehicles (GV, Google Capital) to the X arm, are now subsidiaries reporting directly to Alphabet management. We will use the Google moniker when discussing either the company proper or historical pre-Alphabet activities under its banner. The company outperformed analyst expectations in Q2'16 with surging top- and bottom-line growth.

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.