Baidu, China's largest search engine, is under investigation after college student with a rare form of cancer said it promoted a fraudulent treatment center. Baidu, China's largest search engine, is under investigation after college student with a rare form of cancer said it promoted a fraudulent treatment center. Chinese health and Internet authorities have launched an investigation into Baidu, the country's largest search engine, following the death of a college student who accused Baidu of misleading him to a fraudulent cancer treatment. Experts believe the scandal will damage the credibility of Baidu's search results, and its long-term economic prospects. On Monday, news of the government investigation caused Baidu's stock to tumble by nearly 8% on the NASDAQ.

People gather in the Nvidia booth at the Mobile World Congress, the world's largest mobile phone trade show, in Barcelona on Feb. 27. (Photo: Manu Fernandez, AP) Tesla, the electric car maker, (TSLA) saw it shares dip 4.1% to 243.45, down 10.43, on a day that the overall market was rising. Ask them where those technologies will have an impact, on the other hand, and the responses will likely be all over the map. Smartphones, smart cities and intelligent assistants are just a few of the many options you might hear. Ironically, the one answer you probably won't hear is the category that all of these technologies are either already in or quickly coming to: cars. Today's automobiles have some of the most advanced tech available, and over the next several model years, the amount and capabilities of that technology is going to increase dramatically. Many of these advancements are being driven by the interest in what's called ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), the technology that will eventually lead to self-driving cars.

The system leverages a high-def video of the incoming trash line, touchscreen software and robotic arms to eliminate the need for humans to touch trash directly. A human worker watches the video feed to identify various items -- newspapers, glass bottles, tin cans, old batteries, that sort of thing. Once the human spots a recyclable, he swipes the item into a segregated onscreen bin. Then, and this is really cool, a robotic arm down on the trash line interprets that action, reaches into the mess to grab the item and toss it into a separate pile. According to Jodone's lab tests, this system can enables users to pick up to eight times the amount of trash -- roughly 2,500 pieces an hour -- than they could alone, with 95 percent accuracy. "We know that robots are great at manual labor--at doing the same thing a million times in a row.

A company owned by Google has been given access to the healthcare data of up to 1.6 million patients from three hospitals run by a major London NHS trust. DeepMind, the tech giant's London-based company most famous for its innovative use of artificial intelligence, is being provided with the patient information as part of an agreement with the Royal Free NHS trust, which runs the Barnet, Chase Farm and Royal Free hospitals. It includes information about people who are HIV-positive as well as details of drug overdoses, abortions and patient data from the past five years, according to a report by the New Scientist. DeepMind announced in February that it was developing a software in partnership with NHS hospitals to alert staff to patients at risk of deterioration and death through kidney failure. The technology, which is run through a smartphone app, has the support of Lord Darzi, a surgeon and former health minister who is director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London.

Think of the gear you can't live without: The smartphone you constantly check. The camera that goes with you on every vacation. The TV that serves as a portal to binge-watching and -gaming. Each owes its influence to one model that changed the course of technology for good. Some of these, like Sony's Walkman, were the first of their kind. Others, such as the iPod, propelled an existing idea into the mainstream. Some were unsuccessful commercially, but influential nonetheless. And a few represent exciting but unproven new concepts (looking at you Oculus Rift). Rather than rank technologies--writing, electricity, and so on--we chose to rank gadgets, the devices by with consumers let the future creep into their present. The list--which is ordered by influence--was assembled and deliberated on at (extreme) length by TIME's technology and business editors, writers and reporters.

A Silicon Valley chip designer has launched a USB stick with a supercomputer onboard. Movidius, based in San Mateo, California, has essentially put a deep learning chip inside a USB drive. Deep learning involves "training" a computational model so it can decipher natural language. The "Fathom Neural Compute Stick" has been designed to connect to existing systems (running Linux) and increase the performance of deep learning tasks by 20-30 times. Movidius chips are also used to help drones to avoid obstacles and thermal cameras to spot people in a fire.

There is a lot of excitement about artificial intelligence (AI) and how to create computers capable of intelligent behavior. After years of steady but slow progress on making computers "smarter" at everyday tasks, a series of breakthroughs in the research community and industry have recently spurred momentum and investment in the development of this field. Today's AI is confined to narrow, specific tasks, and isn't anything like the general, adaptable intelligence that humans exhibit. Despite this, AI's influence on the world is growing. The rate of progress we have seen will have broad implications for fields ranging from healthcare to image- and voice-recognition.

When you study a painting, chances are that you can make several inferences about it. In addition to understanding the subject matter, for example, you may be able to classify it by period, style, and artist. Could a computer algorithm "understand" a painting well enough to perform these classification tasks as easily as a human being? We also addressed two other intriguing questions about the capabilities and limitations of AI algorithms: whether they can identify which paintings have had the greatest influence on later artists, and whether they can measure a painting's creativity using only its visual features. We wanted to develop algorithms capable of classifying large groups of paintings by style (for example, as Cubist, Impressionist, Abstract Expressionist, or Baroque), genre (for example, landscape, portrait, or still life), and artist. One requirement for this classification is the ability to recognize color, composition, texture, perspective, subject matter, and other visual features.

Google may have DeepMind, but Baidu, China's homegrown Google, has Deep Speech. Deep Speech, which debuted in December 2015, is a speech recognition system that uses an artificial neural network to translate audio input directly to transcribed output. By contrast, most speech recognition systems, including Siri, use multiple, engineer-crafted steps to make translations. The system has learned how to recognize and transcribe both English and Mandarin, and according to a Baidu paper released in February 2016, it has a recognition rate that is more accurate than most native Mandarin speakers. Baidu announced earlier in April that it will begin rolling out the deep speech technology in collaboration with Peel, a smart remote app that will be available in both English and Mandarin for Android, followed by iOS.

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