Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, had its first female robot news anchor cover its first story on Sunday. According to the The Daily Mail, the first female robot news anchor gave its first news report Sunday in China. The robot named Xin Xiaomeng was designed by Xinhua and programmed by Sogou.com to "read texts as naturally as a professional anchor." It was designed to resemble real-life journalist Qu Meng. The robot gave a presentation on a news story about politicians appearing in Bejing for the annual legislative session in China, which is widely considered to be the biggest political event of the year in China.

In science fiction and real life alike, there are plenty of horror stories where humans trust artificial intelligence too much. They range from letting the fictional SkyNet control our nuclear weapons to letting Patriots shoot down friendly planes or letting Tesla Autopilot crash into a truck. As conflict on earth, in space, and in cyberspace becomes increasingly fast-paced and complex, the Pentagon's Third Offset initiative is counting on artificial intelligence to help commanders, combatants, and analysts chart a course through chaos -- what we've dubbed the War Algorithm (click here for the full series). But if the software itself is too complex, too opaque, or too unpredictable for its users to understand, they'll just turn it off and do things manually. At least, they'll try: What worked for Luke Skywalker against the first Death Star probably won't work in real life.

The government on Tuesday approved a bill to revise the drone regulation law to prohibit the flying of drones over U.S. military bases and Self-Defense Forces' facilities as part of its measures to prevent terrorist attacks using drones. The government plans to submit the bill to the current Diet session, but news organizations are protesting the move on the grounds it could potentially disrupt newsgathering. Under the bill, the government would also ban drones from flying over venues for this year's Rugby World Cup and the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. During those sporting events, only drones controlled by the media providing coverage would be allowed to fly over the venues. Under the existing law, Japan already prohibits drone flights over key facilities such as the Prime Minister's Office and the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.

It's watching, and knows a crime is about to take place before it happens. Vaak, a Japanese startup, has developed artificial intelligence software that hunts for potential shoplifters, using footage from security cameras for fidgeting, restlessness and other potentially suspicious body language. While AI is usually envisioned as a smart personal assistant or self-driving car, it turns out the technology is pretty good at spotting nefarious behavior. Like a scene out of the movie "Minority Report," algorithms analyze security camera footage and alert staff about potential thieves via a smartphone app. The goal is prevention: If the target is approached and asked if they need help, there's a good chance the theft never happens.

As Marcus du Sautoy greets me at the entrance to New College, Oxford, his appearance is a quiet riot of colour. His clothes rather suggest someone who ran into White Stuff or Fat Face and frantically grabbed anything he could find – in this case, a salmon zip-up top, multihued check trousers and shoes that are a headache-inducing shade of turquoise. When we settle down to talk in a nearby meeting room, he repeatedly glances at a notepad – whose pages, just to add to all the garishness, are a bold shade of yellow. They are full of what look like scrawled equations, mixed with odd-looking shapes: the raw material, he explains, of a project involving very complicated geometry. "There's an infinite symmetrical structure that I'm looking at," he says, "and I think the top bit of it will tell me everything that's going on inside it. It's almost like an infinite lake, and I should be able to know everything that's happening in it by looking at the first centimetre."

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Innoviz Technologies, an Israeli maker of laser-based lidar sensors for self-driving cars, is raising $100 million in private investment at a company valuation of $500 million, the Calcalist financial news website said on Tuesday.

This post is authored by Kristin M. Tolle, Director of Program Management for Advanced Analytics Ecosystem Development and Training at Microsoft. Cortana Intelligence, Microsoft's end-to-end platform for Advanced Analytics, offers a suite of services to solve real world customer problems. The suite has many moving parts – Data Lake, HDInsight (Hadoop), Event Hub, Machine Learning and R – just to name a few, and we realize it may be challenging for some of you to experience first-hand how all these services work together in concert. My team, which is tasked with training our partners to use these services to address their customers' needs, is keenly aware of the breadth of that knowledge surface area. In this blog post, I outline some of the best ways for you to learn about all things Big Data and Advanced Analytics from Microsoft, including many hands-on training options, and also how to stay in the loop on our future offerings.

The artificial intelligence robot named "Xin Xiaomeng" sported a short haircut and wore a pink blouse and earrings in a one-minute video presentation by Xinhua. The robotic news anchor named'Xin Xiaomeng' presents news in China's Xinhua. Singapore: China's Xinhua state news agency on Sunday used a lifelike robotic news anchor that mimics human facial expressions and mannerisms to present a story about delegates attending an annual parliament meeting arriving in Beijing. The artificial intelligence robot named "Xin Xiaomeng" sported a short haircut and wore a pink blouse and earrings in a one-minute video presentation by Xinhua. Xin Xiaomeng is modelled after real-life Xinhua news anchor Qu Meng and was developed by Xinhua and tech firm Sogou Inc. Xinhua displayed two AI news anchors dressed in men's clothes last November at the World Internet Conference in the eastern Chinese town of Wuzhen.

By 2021, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will allow the rate of innovation and employee productivity improvements in Singapore to nearly double according to business leaders in Singapore. The study from Microsoft and IDC Asia/Pacific, Future Ready Business: Assessing Asia Pacific's Growth Potential Through AI surveyed over 104 business leaders and over 102 workers in Singapore. While more than 80% of business leaders polled agreed that AI is instrumental for their organisation's competitiveness, only 59% of organisations in Singapore have embarked on their AI journeys. Those organisations that have adopted AI expect it to increase their competitiveness 1.7 times by 2021. "Today, every company is a software company, and increasingly, every interaction is digital. To be successful in this new world, organisations need to be a fast adopter of best-in-class technology; and secondly, they need to build their own unique digital capabilities," "AI is the defining technology of our time that significantly accelerates business transformation, enables innovation, boosts employee productivity, and ensures further growth. Economies and businesses that have yet to embark on their AI journey run a real risk of missing out on the competitive benefits that are enjoyed by leaders."

A wearable "third arm" for construction workers is among the latest innovations under development in Panasonic Corp.'s burgeoning collaboration with academia to make robots an increasing part of people's lives in aging Japan. Panasonic already has know-how in using robots in manufacturing but has reached out to academia on robots that can safely assist with everyday human tasks, given the wide range of technologies involved, such as image analysis, voice recognition and artificial intelligence. "Robots previously had the purpose of facilitating automation in the manufacturing sector but are now expected to expand their role to enlarging human capabilities … amid the rapid aging of society and the labor shortage," Executive Officer Tatsuo Ogawa said at the opening of the Robotics Hub, a new site in Tokyo for the company's collaboration with academia. "We lack a lot of knowledge when it comes to robots used in interaction with humans," said Ogawa, who leads Panasonic's manufacturing innovation division. "We want to work with academia to speed up the development of robots that humans can cohabitate with and to lower the barrier for their implementation."