In both cases the car driver mentioned they were unaware the cyclist was turning despite their hand signalling. No matter how the factors are analyzed, just shy of 40% of fatal bike accidents occur when the sun is down (in Toronto, Canada). Having a signal light both increases visibility and road confidence when it matters. Having a pocket-sized unit, which pairs with any wearable watch, allows you to keep the light close and ensure it's never lost. With funding, SIX will support many wearable devices; come with a gesture-recognition clip that sits on the seam of a jacket or shirt; and promises to notify when there's low battery, or when it falls out of range (or perhaps off of a bike).

Here's what it sounds like when artificial intelligence learns to play "Ode To Joy" in the style of EDM, Brazilian guitar, and The Beatles' "Penny Lane": The Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris was challenged to re-orchestrate the theme song of the European Union. Using the max entropy approach of machine learning, they taught a computer how to recognize the core features of different types of music. Sony's CSL believes their program could be a stepping stone to making AI that can compose original melodies we find catchy and memorable. If you think the radio sounds like music made by computers, just wait a few years for cyBerthoven.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to travel to a foreign country without having to worry about the nuisance of communicating in a different language? In a recent Wall Street Journal article, technology policy expert Alec Ross argued that, within a decade or so, we'll be able to communicate with one another via small earpieces with built-in microphones. No more trying to remember your high school French when checking into a hotel in Paris. Your earpiece will automatically translate "Good evening, I have a reservation" to Bon soir, j'ai une réservation--while immediately translating the receptionist's unintelligible babble to "I am sorry, sir, but your credit card has been declined." Ross argues that because technological progress is exponential, it's only a matter of time.

Yesterday morning I woke up, put on a pot of coffee, and checked the news. I wanted to revisit the New Hampshire primary results that had rolled in the night before. I opened Quartz's new app and was greeted with a text message: "Yep, it's really happening: Trump and Sanders won big in New Hampshire." Below it appeared side-by-side portraits of Trump's scowl and Bernie's grin. To read more, I tapped a ready-made text reply containing a donkey, an elephant, and an American flag emoji.

Tech giants are active players at the cognitive technologies scene. Alphabet and Facebook proved themselves active acquirers and investors in cognitive tech. Supercomputers, robots and drones are among themes approached by Internet giants. Microsoft, however, seems to be following a differed path: it integrates cognitive technologies into traditional products and makes them smarter. Bill Gates coined the concept of'digital nervous system (DNS)... that ... [provides] a well-integrated flow of information to the right part of the organization at the right time'.

Alphabet founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are so enamored with the guy they put in charge of Google, CEO Sundar Pichai, that they turned him into an honorary founder and let him write their annual Founder's Letter this year. The Founder's Letter is traditionally when the founders spell out their vision for the company. But Page explained that he's so "pleased with Sundar's performance" and because "the majority of our big bets are in Google" that he decided to give Pichai "the bully-pulpit here" to talk about Google. A more cynical take would be that Page also wanted to sidestep talking about the controversies plaguing the other side of Alphabet, the so-called "Other Bets" division outside of the Google unit. As Business Insider's Jillian D'Onfro reports, although Alphabet makes 99% of its revenue from Google, mostly from its gargantuan ads businesses, it has been the "Other Bets" that have attracted the most media attention in recent months.

Artificial intelligence will likely not reach the level of intelligence that allows it to think like human beings, even if technology now is able to surpass humans in specific tasks, according to a senior Microsoft executive. "Artificial intelligence currently learns in a very controlled, monitored environment, it learns through data [given to it],"Rui Yong, assistant managing director at Microsoft Research Asia, said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. "But that is not how humans learn." While artificial intelligence technology today has surpassed human ability in certain tasks, such as AlphaGo's ability to beat humans in the game of Go or Microsoft's computer vision technology that recognises objects in images more accurately than humans, these technologies are tailored to achieve specific tasks and cannot adapt quickly to new problems. "When humans encounter a new situation, we can adapt and use our imagination to find a solution. But for computers, if they have never encountered a certain problem, then they cannot solve it," he said.

DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Artificial Intelligence and the Agricultural Industry" report to their offering. The world population will grow from 7.3 billion people today to 8.2 billion by 2025, and 9.7 billion by 2050. As a society, we will need to produce 70% more food than is currently produced today. The agricultural Industry requires a revolution and artificial intelligence is that revolution. Artificial intelligence will drive five use cases that will enable the industry to balance the need to produce more food and the need to reduce environmental impact.

A new tech startup is merging deep learning with autonomous cars. Drive.ai has become the 13th company to be granted a license to test autonomous cars on public roads in California. If you haven't yet heard of them, you're not alone. Drive.ai has been in stealth mode for the past year. However, the company recently closed 12 million in Series A funding while developing deep learning technologies with their team of experts who specialize in everything from natural language processing, computer vision, and autonomous driving.

On yesterday's investor call, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked how the machine learning technology behind its recent introduction of bots to Messenger would manifest itself in the future. "So the biggest thing that we're focused on with artificial intelligence is building computer services that have better perception than people," he replied. "So the basic human senses like seeing, hearing, language, core things that we do. I think it's possible to get to the point in the next five to 10 years where we have computer systems that are better than people at each of those things." There are a couple of striking things about this statement: it imagines computer systems with abilities that are central to our existence as biological creatures, the essential skills that we rely on to understand and interact with the world.