BEIJING--An auto startup backed by internet giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. TCEHY 0.52 % plans to start selling premium electric cars globally by 2020, joining other Chinese car makers in taking aim at an increasingly crowded luxury market. Four month-old Future Mobility Corp. seeks eventually to sell several hundred thousand fully electric, highly automated, China-built vehicles a year. The company is also backed by Chinese luxury-car dealer Harmony New Energy Auto and Foxconn Technology Group, 2354 1.89 % which assembles iPhones for Apple Inc. AAPL 0.31 % Apple has been working on its own autonomous electric car. Deep-pocketed tech companies have backed a wave of new auto companies in China, where a drive to cut fuel consumption and pioneer the auto industry of the future has encouraged startups. Analysts, citing increasing competition and uncertainty over a subsidy-fueled boom in electric vehicles, question how such ambitions can be turned into reality.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

AI and machine learning changes the software paradigm computers have been based on for many decades. In the traditional computing domain, providing an input, we feed it into an algorithm to produce the desired output. This is the rule-based framework the majority of the systems around us still work with. We set up our thermostat to a desire temperature (input) and a rule based programming (algorithm) will take care of reading a sensor and activating heating or AC machines to get to the room temperature we want (output). The industry has been working relentlessly for many years developing better hardware, software and apps to solve a gazillion problems and use cases around us with programmable solutions.

With the rapid pace of technological innovation, the need for greater market responsiveness, and the rising cost of labor in nearly all economies, many companies are revisiting age-old manufacturing strategies. They recognize there is a growing need to introduce innovative products faster to meet customer demands while maintaining aggressive cost and quality objectives. Traditional manufacturing approaches can no longer keep pace with this dynamic new consumer-driven age. Meeting these demands will instead require a complete reinvention to how we approach manufacturing, and this reinvention will need to unfold on a scale that amounts to a new industrial revolution. Welcome to the era of digital manufacturing, which can be defined simply as the growing application and impact of digital connectivity linking automation, workers and decision-makers.

With machine learning and AI being the hottest trend in tech, eBay is also bolstering its efforts with the acquisition of Israel-based advanced analytics startup SalesPredict. And its not just efforts-bolstering thats happening, this could well be eBay's attempt to become more like Amazon and automate processes within the company. SalesPredict is the second addition to the carousel of machine learning powered analytics startups acquired by eBay in the recent past. It follows in the footsteps of Expertmaker, another startup that specializes in providing intelligent solutions powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics. SalesPredict, in a similar manner, provides a software platform that monitors individuals' buying preferences and tries to predict consumer behavior for online shopping.

Over the past few months Google, Microsoft and Facebook have taken major decisions to make their artificial intelligence APIs openly available to all. IBM have opened their Watson API on a'freemium' basis and Elon Musk launched the OpenAI project with a star-studded list of backers; Palantir CEO Peter Thiel, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Y Combinator president Sam Altman. These hugely powerful tools, which are used, developed and backed by the world's most advanced technology companies, are now available to anyone with the skills to use them. Whilst these announcements haven't quite drawn the media attention of an iPhone launch, their significance and reach may be far greater. The point is this: using these toolkits, individually or combined, anyone can integrate transformational AI or machine learning platforms - which are as sophisticated as anything currently on the market - to their business at on a pay as you go or free basis.

Many organizations are interested in using the increasingly large amount of data they collect for social good. However, making sense of so much data and then turning those insights into actionable decisions is a difficult task. To streamline this path from data to insights to decisions, organizations in the public and private sector are beginning to use artificial intelligence (AI). AI involves the use of computers to perform complex tasks typically performed by humans. In particular, advances in machine learning--a branch of AI that focuses on designing computer programs that can automatically and iteratively build analytical models from new data without having the solution be explicitly programmed--are helping organizations analyze massive amounts of data to better understand complex problems, predict outcomes, and prescribe solutions.

DeepMind is an artificial intelligence lab in London that creates what are known as general purpose self-learning algorithms. The company, acquired by Google in 2014 for a reported 400 million, is best-known for creating software "agents" that have mastered games like Go and Space Invaders but it also wants to apply its technology to healthcare. Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind cofounder and head of DeepMind Health, gave a talk at the King's Fund in London this week where he explained how the company is working with the NHS and what kind of benefits patients can expect to see in the long run. The company operates independently of Google and creates software that can think for itself. In order to create this kind of AI software, DeepMind draws on huge data sets that can help to teach DeepMind's AI how to perform certain tasks.

To compare where the humans and machines looked, the researchers created "attention" heat maps that could be laid over one another. On a scale of 0 to 1, where 0 is no overlap at all and 1 is complete overlap, the researchers found that the attention maps from the humans lined up at a rate of 0.63. But when comparing humans to machines, this figure was just 0.26. Explaining this difference is tricky. In one question in the study, for example, the humans and neural networks where shown a picture of a bedroom, and asked: "What is covering the windows?"

Singapore is looking to tap artificial intelligence technology to enable more natural and simpler interactions with its e-government services. Led by industry regulator Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the new initiative would see the use of Microsoft's "conversations as a platform" pitch to explore opportunities in developing the country's next-generation government services based on "conversational computing". According to Singapore's Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister-in-Charge of Smart Nation Vivian Balakrishnan, IDA and Microsoft would co-develop "chatbots" to support selected public services. These intelligence software tools would assume the role of digital representatives, simulating human behaviour, and enable interactions that were more user-friendly and consistent, said the minister, who announced the new initiative at this week's World Cities Summit. New proof-of-concepts would be built to integrate conversational intelligence into public services, with efforts focused on making these more "anticipatory" and engaging for the general public.