The autonomous driving space might be seeing the marriage of two titans. Volkswagen is in talks with Huawei to acquire the latter's nascent autonomous driving unit for billions of euros, Germany's Manager Magazin reported on Thursday. Huawei said it has no immediate comment when contacted by TechCrunch. VW China said it has no comment. The potential merger will be a powerful one.

This paper addresses a problem called "conditional manifold learning", which aims to learn a low-dimensional manifold embedding of high-dimensional data, conditioning on auxiliary manifold information. This auxiliary manifold information is from controllable or measurable conditions, which are ubiquitous in many science and engineering applications. A broad class of solutions for this problem, conditional multidimensional scaling (including a conditional ISOMAP variant), is proposed. A conditional version of the SMACOF algorithm is introduced to optimize the objective function of conditional multidimensional scaling.

Driver rudeness seems associated with certain brands, and AI self-driving cars ought to consider ... [ ] this. What kind of car do you drive? I don't mean whether it is a four-door or two-door, nor whether it is red in color or blue. Specifically, what brand of car do you drive? According to various studies (cited in a moment herein), supposedly the brand of car is a telltale indicator of how rude a driver sits behind the wheel of the vehicle.

Three of China's largest car brands (Chongqing Changan, Dongfeng and FAW Group) have launched a venture that will create a ridesharing platform. T3 Mobile Travel Services will bring in partners from other fields to create the Uber-style service, and it'll unsurprisingly take advantage of the country's burgeoning self-driving car industry. It may not sound immediately relevant if you live outside of China, but the partnership could have a significant effect on the automotive world. All three of these companies have joint ventures with American and European car brands due to Chinese requirements -- outside manufacturers may not have to participate, but it may be hard to resist the allure of ridesharing in such a giant market. If nothing else, this appears to be a shot across the bow of Didi Chuxing, China's dominant ridesharing provider and one of the largest companies of its kind anywhere in the world.