‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ sequel rumoured to start filming on May 28

The follow-up to the 2017 hit Spider-Man: Homecoming is coming back in 2019 and it seems director Jon Watts and his team will get back to work in a few months. According to unnamed sources closed to the production, filming will start on May 28, which gives this Sony-Marvel production more than a year before its expected July 5, 2019 release date. Its lead stars Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jacob Batalon are all expected to reprise their roles.

Not much is known about the film’s plot but since this’ll be the first film after Avengers: Infinity War, we can expect it to delve into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how Peter has to deal with being a junior in high school after fighting off Thanos with the rest of the Avengers. Rumour has it there will be filming taking place in London and Germany with some speculating Gwen Stacy is going to be a foreign exchange student. We’re sure to hear more in the coming months.

Source: ComicBook

Sony will reportedly launch Xperia XZ Pro at MWC 2018

Apparently Sony is not done releasing new smartphones, the Japanese company is set to release its flagship device at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month. What’s being dubbed as the Xperia XZ Pro, the phone will supposedly come with a 5.7-inch OLED screen with 4K resolution, slim bezels, and a “tall” aspect ratio (possibly an 18:9 aspect ratio). According to the rumours coming out of China, it’ll have a dual rear camera setup with an 18-megapixel shooter with 1.33μm pixel size paired with a 12-megapixel sensor with 1.38μm pixels. Its front shooter, on the other hand, will feature a 13-megapixel camera.

The phone is expected to run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 processor, 6GB of RAM, and up to 128GB of built-in storage. And like its predecessors, the Xperia XZ Pro is expected to be IP68 water and dust resistant, and will employ a 3,420mAh battery. Expected retail price in China is over CNY 6,000, which is close to CA$1,200 at current exchange rates.

Source: GSMArena

Microsoft's new A.I. can read and comprehend documents as accurately as humans

Big news from Microsoft regarding A.I. and Machine Learning. A team at Microsoft Research Asia reached the human parity milestone using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, known among researchers as SQuAD. It’s a machine reading comprehension dataset that is made up of questions about a set of Wikipedia articles.

According to the SQuAD leaderboard, on Jan. 3, Microsoft submitted a model that reached the score of 82.650 on the exact match portion. The human performance on the same set of questions and answers is 82.304. On Jan. 5, researchers with the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba submitted a score of 82.440, also about the same as a human.

The two companies are currently tied for first place on the SQuAD “leaderboard,” which lists the results of research organizations’ efforts. 

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Apple CarPlay coming to even more cars and trucks at NAIAS 2018

Apple's CarPlay infotainment and smart app integration platform is one high visibility at the North American Auto Show in Detroit. Toyota and Lexus confirmed all their new models would be CarPlay compatible. Kia has also confirmed CarPlay in its new Forte motor cars and even offers wireless charging and various trucks, which are the strongest category in North America, will be featuring the Apple CarPlay technology as well.

2019 RAM and Ford trucks will also feature CarPlay. In many cases, CarPlay integration is a major feature and not an afterthought.

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