SK Telecom Co. said Monday it successfully tested self-driving automobiles using fifth-generation (5G) network service for the first time. South Korea's No. 1 mobile carrier said two of its self-driving cars operated on a 2 kilometer-track earlier in the day, exchanging real-time traffic information through its ultra high-speed network. The company said the demonstration marks the first time in the world that 5G has been used in autonomous car technology. It claimed that the test will help the industry move forward so as to make it possible for full autonomous driving in the upcoming era of 5G. The cars were able to sense the outside environment and avoid obstacles, slowing down at a school zone and even stopping when a mock-up that looked like a child appeared on the road suddenly, the company said.

By Kim Han-joo SEOUL, Jan. 11 (Yonhap) -- Fierce competition is expected among technology companies from both home and abroad in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) language translations that industry officials say will soon reach human-level accuracy. Google Inc. is the leading provider of an AI-based translation platform by becoming the first to introduce its Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system last year that significantly improves translation quality and reduces errors. The new system is based on a deep learning framework that learns from millions of examples from over 100 different languages, the U.S. tech giant said. Unlike previous machine translation that was adopted 10 years ago, the new system considers an entire sentence as one unit. Previous systems independently translated words and phrases within a sentence.