More than 1,000 students from 25 countries with more than 130 team will participate in the four-day contest of the region's first robot competition. The event is held to encourage global robotics research and development.

You'd need your glasses on to play this version of Pac-Man. Tiny metal robots can plot their own route around a maze modelled on the iconic video game. Similar devices could one day be used to travel around the body, delivering drugs or performing surgery. Sarthak Misra from the University of Twente, the Netherlands, and colleagues created four different types of micro-gripper robots, with the smallest being just 100 micrometres long. The biggest was still less than one millimetre.

There are few electronic devices with which you cannot order a Domino's pizza. When the craving hits, you can place an order via Twitter, Slack, Facebook Messenger, SMS, your tablet, your smartwatch, your smart TV, and even your app-enabled Ford. This year, the pizza monger added another ordering tool: If your home is one of the 20 million with a voice assistant, you can place a regular order through Alexa or Google Home. Just ask for a large extra-cheese within earshot, and voila--your pizza is in the works. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Be sure to also wrap up some extra rotors, a spare battery or two, and get drone registration through the Federal Aviation Association (FAA), because the drone registration requirements that were declared dead earlier this year were just revived by the Trump administration. A relative footnote in the National Defense Authorization Act, which was signed into law today, the new regulation requires that drone owners register their unmanned aerial vehicles before taking to the skies. You can register you new drone on the FAA's drone Unmanned Aircraft System website. But for longtime drone pilots, this requirement is nothing new. In December 2015, regulators began requiring drone registration, and the program took off, with 300,000 drone owners signing up within the first month.

Google on Monday released DeepVariant, an artificial intelligence tool that uses gene sequencing data to build a more accurate genomic model. Google on Monday released DeepVariant, an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses gene sequencing data to build a more accurate genomic model by automatically spotting small insertion and deletion mutations and single-base-pair mutations. The Google Brain team compiled millions of high-throughput reads and fully sequenced genomes from the Genome in a Bottle project, feeding the data to a deep-learning system and modifying the parameters of the model until it learned to interpret sequenced data with very high accuracy. "DeepVariant...demonstrates that in genomics, deep learning can be used to automatically train systems that perform better than complicated hand-engineered systems," says Deep Genomics CEO Brendan Frey. Frey predicts AI will ultimately transcend its ability to help sequence genomic data.

While machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have been used in supply chain applications for some time, there is an ongoing arms race to more effectively leverage both machine learning and artificial intelligence in demand planning solutions in new ways. Demand planning is one of the key applications in supply chain planning (SCP) suites. In ARC's recent global market study on this market, demand applications account for just under a third of a $2 billion plus market. And these applications are often the wedge purchase; the SCP solution that is first implemented by a company that then goes on to purchase other solutions in the suite. Machine learning works by taking the output of an application (for example, a forecast), examining that output against some measure of the truth, and then adjusting the parameters or math involved in generating the output (forecast), and seeing if the adjustments lead to more accurate outputs.

Equipment at the Custom Group in Woburn, Mass., includes automated robotic cutting tools. Equipment at the Custom Group in Woburn, Mass., includes automated robotic cutting tools. But critics say maybe it should have been named the Tax Cut and Robots Act. That's because it doesn't create new tax incentives that specifically encourage companies to hire workers and create jobs, some employers and economists say. But it does expand incentives for companies to buy robots and machines that replace workers. Republicans say that lowering taxes will boost the economy and spur job creation.

Quick quiz: what do you visualize when you hear the word robot? Or perhaps one of the massive, spiderlike machines that assemble complex products ranging from automobiles to computers?

The New Jersey bill would make operating a drone under the influence of alcohol a disorderly persons offense, which carries a sentence of up to six months in prison, a $1,000 fine or both. It also would make using a drone to hunt wildlife and endanger people or property a similar offense.

Your brain is one enigmatic hunk of meat--a wildly complex web of neurons numbering in the tens of billions. But years ago, when you were in the womb, it began as little more than a scattering of undifferentiated stem cells. A series of genetic signals transformed those blank slates into the wrinkly, three-pound mass between your ears. Scientists think the way your brain looks and functions can be traced back to those first molecular marching orders--but precisely when and where these genetic signals occur has been difficult to pin down. Today, things are looking a little less mysterious.