Robots and artificial intelligence have opened doors in the fields of manufacturing and machine learning, but now they have gone where few expected them to go: deep sea diving. Stanford University professor of computer science Oussama Khatib developed his new deep ocean avatar in response to a need to dive deeper than humans can comfortably go. The robot he created, named OceanOne, is so revolutionary that it could change the field of deep sea diving, forever. "OceanOne will be your avatar," Dr. Khatib said in a Stanford press release. "The intent here is to have a human diving virtually, to put the human out of harm's way. Having a machine that has human characteristics that can project the human diver's embodiment at depth is going to be amazing."

When Cheetah Mobile CEO Sheng Fu went to the US for the first time five years ago, he asked himself, "Why is that Chinese companies work so hard but the most important inventions and new technologies come out of America?" He concluded that the difference between China and the US is that Americans think bigger and dream bigger. The global service robotics market is set to boom, and the second half of 2015 should usher the first wave of these new helpers. Here are seven devices leading the charge. This week in Beijing, Fu announced his company is going to launch itself into AI and deep learning, create a dual headquarters in Beijing and Silicon Valley, and release robots for consumers on a global scale. No one is going to accuse Fu of not thinking big enough.

French officials have unveiled a humanoid diving robot that they hope will give a big artificial hand to the practice of underwater archaeology. Ocean One, which looks like something out of a scuba-diving sequel to "Transformers," is the work of a team of roboticists, including Oussama Khatib of Stanford University. It is intended to help researchers explore underwater archaeological sites that are too deep to be explored by human divers. It was unveiled by culture officials Thursday in the French city of Marseille after a trial sifting through the wreckage of "The Moon," a 17th century warship, where it had managed to collect a delicate ceramic pot and bring it back to the surface. According to Stanford, the concept for Ocean One was born from the need to study coral reefs deep in the Red Sea, far below the comfortable range of human divers.

Meet OceanOne, a robot avatar that lets humans explore deep under the Ocean's surface, without any of the dangers or time limits associated with diving. While a human diver is constrained by pesky things like air and pressure when doing underwater research or excavations, a robot can stay underwater for much longer, collecting samples in hostile underwater environments. OceanOne was tested at the archeological site of the shipwreck La Lune off the coast of France. La Lune, a flagship that sank in the Mediterranean in 1664. It lies under 300 feet of water, far beyond the reach of recreational SCUBA divers, who limit themselves to 130 feet.

The sea has been called the final frontier, as its unexplored depths hold mysteries that humans have not been able to reach – until now. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of feet deeper than any human ever has. And the maiden voyage of this droid proved bountiful as it pulled treasure from the'La Lune', King Louis XIV's vessel which has been sitting 328 feet below the surface since 1664. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of feet deeper than any human ever has. Dubbed'robo-mermaid', OceanOne is a humanoid outfitted with human vision, force feedback and artificial brain that can dive hundreds of miles deeper than any human ever has Louis XIV's ship La Lune was wrecked off Toulon in November 1664.

This gif shows a spinning 3D view of one person's cerebral cortex. The color of each voxel indicates its semantic selectivity, or which category of words it is selective for. For example, green voxels are mostly selective for visual and tactile concepts, while red voxels are mostly selective social concepts. White lines show the outlines of known functional brain regions. It's like Google Maps for your cerebral cortex: A new interactive atlas, developed with the help of such unlikely tools as public radio podcasts and Wikipedia, purports to show which bits of your brain help you understand which types of concepts.

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin typically write a public letter every year to reflect on the company's accomplishments and goals. This year, however, Google's new CEO Sundar Pichai penned the annual note for the first time. Pichai was made CEO of Google after a recent reorganization made the company a subsidiary of umbrella organization Alphabet. Pichai's note delves into Google's accomplishments around search, YouTube, artificial intelligence, and more. He writes that Google will continue to push heavily into the development of artificial intelligence as a means of improving and advancing its most important products.

The Ying Ao sink foundry in southern China's Guangdong province does not look like a factory of the future. The sign over the entrance is faded; inside, the floor is greasy with patches of mud, and a thick metal dust -- the by-product of the stainless-steel polishing process -- clogs the air. Guangdong is the growth engine of China's manufacturing industry, generating 615bn in exports last year -- more than a quarter of the country's total. In this part of the province, the standard wage for workers is about Rmb4,000 ( 600) per month. Ying Ao, which manufactures sinks destined for the kitchens of Europe and the US, has to pay double that, according to deputy manager Chen Conghan, because conditions in the factory are so unpleasant. So, four years ago, the company started buying machines to replace the ever more costly humans. Nine robots now do the job of 140 full-time workers.

If you were in the audience for Oussama Khatib's IROS keynote in Hamburg last year, you may remember him talking about this crazy thing: We, of course, cornered Oussama immediately afterwards, because humanoid robotic submarine what?! It turned out that OceanOne, as it was called, was involved in a top secret (or something) project in collaboration with the French, which has (now that it's over and wasn't a disaster) been un-topsecretified so we can finally, finally tell you about it. Originally, OceanOne was not an archaeological robot--it was conceptualized by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia as a way of monitoring deep coral reefs in the Red Sea. Christian Voolstra, assistant professor of marine science at KAUST's Red Sea Research Center, explained where the idea came from in an interview last year: Currently people use a so-called ROV (remote operated vehicle), which is a little submarine with two robotic arms and very limited dexterity. Using the ROV to examine delicate coral colonies proved to be troublesome.

The Chinese dissident artist, Ai Weiwei said that he will release a documentary film next year on the refugee crisis. Ai, often described as China's most high-profile artist, was speaking at a news conference in Bern to mark the opening of the "Chinese Whispers" exhibition, featuring around 150 works of contemporary Chinese artists - including Ai Weiwei artwork "Fragments"- at the Zentrum Paul Klee museum in Bern. Ai said he has spent a lot of time in refugee camps in recent months and witnessed a "very difficult situation" and decided to share his experience by making a film. "It's a documentary film, we have been shooting over 600 hours, and I've did hundred of interviews, there is all kind of people: politicians, refugees or priests or NGOs…all kind of people involved in this crisis," Weiwei told reporters. Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei looks on as he visits a migrant's makeshift camp on the Greek-Macedonian border, near the village of Idomeni, Greece, March 9, 2016.