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A team of Microsoft researchers announced on Wednesday they’ve created the first machine translation system that’s capable of translating news articles from Chinese to English with the same accuracy as a person. The company says it’s tested the system repeatedly on a sample of around 2,000 sentences from various online newspapers, comparing the result to […]

Dev Protocol is a new project that uses blockchain to give software developers a secure place to build their professional reputations. Created by Codementor, an online mentoring platform and on-demand marketplace for software developers, one of Dev Protocol’s goals is to make the industry a more level playing field. “You can take it from job […]

Pray.com, an interfaith social networking app for members of religious communities, has raised a $14 million Series A led by TPG Growth. Previous investors Science Inc. and Greylock Partners also returned for the round, which brings the Santa Monica-based startup’s total funding, including a seed round announced last June, to $16 million. Founded in 2016, […]

Sahar Saidi has had curly hair her whole life, and spent most of that life straightening and treating her hair to try to conform to the media’s idea of beauty. But with the rise of social media, Saidi noticed a trend. People with curly hair were becoming more and more comfortable wearing their hair naturally […]

Rocket launch startup Rocket Lab is moving from its initial testing phase into proper commercial operations with its next mission. The company’s past two launches, “It’s a Test” and “Still Testing” were (you guessed it) primarily tests of its Electron launch craft vehicle and launch process, but its next mission, dubbed “It’s Business Time” (kudos […]

Algolia had made a tiny acquisition to complement its product offering. The company is acquiring the technology behind SeaUrchin.IO — the team of two behind this product is not joining Algolia. For those not familiar with Algolia, the startup has developed an impressive search engine API. In just a few lines of codes, you can […]

YouTube is taking action on the proliferation of conspiracy videos found on its platform: YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki told an SXSW panel Tuesday that the company would be introducing so-called “information cues” sourced from relevant Wikipedia articles on videos that talk about popular conspiracy theories. These will appear as text boxes that can prevent alternative […]

It was already a complicated deal, but it now looks like Broadcom’s plans to take over Qualcomm are done. The company announced that it would respect Donald Trump’s block and drop its Qualcomm bid. “Although we are disappointed with this outcome, Broadcom will comply with the order,” Broadcom said in a statement. At one point, […]

An interesting development in Europe over how WhatsApp and Facebook will work together, which is also a victory of sorts for data protection and privacy advocates in the region. Today, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) announced that it has closed an investigation into whether WhatsApp and its owner Facebook could legally share user data […]

Oren Etzioni Contributor Share on Twitter Oren Etzioni is CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and has been a professor at the University of Washington’s Computer Science department since 1991. He has also founded or co-founded several companies, including Farecast (sold to Microsoft in 2008) and Decide (sold to eBay in 2013), and […]